Free Republic

"Gunman who took hostages at Louisiana bank posted chilling Facebook messages" SNIPPET: "The gunman who took three hostages at a Louisiana bank Tuesday -- killing one of them before being shot and killed by police -- recently posted chilling messages on Facebook, including a cartoon strip about hostages.   In a post on Sunday, 20-year-old Fuaed Abdo Ahmed displays a cartoon strip that focuses on an apparent hostage situation." SNIPPET: "Ahmed's final post, made Tuesday just hours before the hostage standoff began, is of a photo of a man with a sword attacking a tank.Under the photo is a quote...

Weeks after Maryland State Police and federal agents seized reporting files from a former Washington Times journalist’s home, a Homeland Security agent checked the materials out of the police evidence room for an hour, according to logs that shine new light on a case that has raised First Amendment concerns. The custody logs don’t state why the reporting materials were removed from evidence Sept. 3, about a month after they were seized from reporter Audrey Hudson’s home during a search in an unrelated investigation of her husband. But they do show that the Homeland Security agent checked out files and...

In an exclusive interview, Chuck Hagel said the Obama administration micromanaged the Pentagon, stabbed him in the back on the way out -- and still has no strategy for fixing Syria. Jet-lagged from a long overseas trip, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had just sat down with his wife for a quiet dinner at an upscale Italian restaurant in northern Virginia when his phone rang. It was the White House on the line. President Barack Obama wanted to speak with him. It was Aug. 30, 2013, and the U.S. military was poised for war. Obama had publicly warned Syrian strongman...

It started innocently enough: Andreas H. Koertel, 46, was pulled over in a traffic stop. Then things got hairy in hurry. Turns out Koertel, a German national, was in possession of meth and illegal weapons, according to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office, so he was booked into jail on multiple charges, KXTV-TV reports.

Two people were killed and four were wounded in a shooting at a town supervisor's meeting in eastern Pennsylvania, a county official reported Monday. The shooting broke out shortly after 7:30 p.m. ET at the Ross Township building in Saylorsburg, about 75 miles north of Philadelphia, Monroe County Emergency Management Director Guy Miller told CNN. A suspected gunman was in custody, and the wounded were being taken to various hospitals nearby, he said.

Turkey | An aging but popular exile in the United States, Fethullah Gulen is considered by many behind moves to Islamicize his native land After weeks of demonstrations in 76 cities, police forces in Turkey made one final sweep through Istanbul’s Taksim Square, arresting the remaining protesters and wiping out their tent city. That appeared to be the end of nationwide protests that injured 4,000 and left at least four dead—until a local performing artist arrived on the night of June 17 and peacefully planted himself in the square. With his hands in his pockets, the “standing man” stared solemnly...

The AP review of Clinton's calendar — her after-the-fact, official chronology of the events of her four-year term — identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were either not recorded or listed with identifying details scrubbed. The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page document with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show...

A Sanford judge today ruled that Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi does not have to answer defense attorneys' questions under oath in a mammoth Internet casino gambling case pending in Seminole County. Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. made that ruling this morning.The case involves more than 50 defendants, accused of violating the state's gambling, racketeering and money laundering laws by operating Internet cafes that prosecutors say served as storefront gambling parlors. Each had ties to the non-profit Allied Veterans of the World, a group that provided charity to military veterans but, according to authorities, donated just two percent of its...

Jet-lagged from a long overseas trip, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had just sat down with his wife for a quiet dinner at an upscale Italian restaurant in northern Virginia when his phone rang. It was the White House on the line. President Barack Obama wanted to speak with him. It was Aug. 30, 2013, and the U.S. military was poised for war. Obama had publicly warned Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad that his regime would face consequences if it crossed a “red line” by employing chemical weapons against its own people. Assad did it anyway, and Hagel had spent the day...

Many questioned Barack Obama’s judgment when he backed away from his own “red line” in Syria, but Chuck Hagel tells Foreign Policy in an exclusive interview that it was actually worse than that. Obama lost his nerve, Hagel alleges, calling off promised strikes on Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Hagel also says that Obama’s team then stabbed him in the back as he was heading for the exits, and tried to “destroy me”: Jet-lagged from a long overseas trip, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had just sat down with his wife for a quiet dinner at an...

(Reuters) - United Nations inspectors should be given time to determine whether forces have used chemical weapons in Syria's civil war, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in The Hague on Wednesday.

In recent days, pro-al Qaeda jihadists claimed to confirm a recent news report saying that several senior al Qaeda leaders have been released from Iranian custody. Sky News reported earlier this week that five veteran jihadists were released in exchange for an Iranian diplomat who had been kidnapped in Yemen. Several jihadists on Twitter who are connected to al Qaeda have said the report is accurate. One of them is known as “Al Siyasi al Mutaqa’id,” who has relayed accurate information on al Qaeda in the past. The five jihadists who were reportedly freed are: Saif al Adel, Abu Mohammed...

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, Who Talks To Netanyahu ‘A Lot,’ Says His Country Is In Danger of Collapse By Lally Weymouth March 12 Since the army took power from Mohamed Morsi in 2013 with popular support, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi says he’s been fighting to keep the forces of anarchy at bay. On the eve of a large investment conference this weekend, he invited The Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth to the massive white presidential palace for a conversation about Egypt’s problematic relationship with Washington, how to defeat the Islamic State, and his fears and hopes for his country....

Egyptian security services arrested on Wednesday a retired U.S. officer and 12 jihadis in Sheikh Zuwayed, North Sinai, German news agency DPA quoted a security source as saying. The U.S. national possessed documents, some including information on Sinai. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. officer is being interrogated by authorities in Arish without giving further details on the documents or circumstances of the arrest. The American national arrested on Tuesday was referred to a military prosecutor in Ismailia to be interrogated, said a security source. A 55-year old American called James Henry was previously arrested, and...

A man was arrested in New York City's international airport with uranium destined for Iran hidden in the soles of his shoes, the US Justice Department said. Patrick Campbell, 33, who was arrested Wednesday as he arrived at the John F Kennedy airport from Paris, is accused of trying to act as an intermediary to sell Iran 1,000 tons of purified uranium, in violation of US law. The Sierra Leone-based Campbell had been under surveillance since May 2012, when he responded to an ad on the site Alibaba.com by someone looking to buy uranium 308, or yellow cake. The buyer...

A U.S. citizen detained in Egypt for violating curfew in August was found dead Sunday in his jail cell, the second foreigner to die in detention in recent weeks. ... Security officials identified the man as James Henry, 66, a retired U.S. Army officer who arrived in Cairo from the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain on Aug. 25. Henry was detained by army troops in the turbulent region of northern Sinai three days later while making his way to the border crossing with Gaza in the town of Rafah

Maryland state police and federal agents used a search warrant in an unrelated criminal investigation to seize the private reporting files of an award-winning former investigative journalist for The Washington Times who had exposed problems in the Homeland Security Department’s Federal Air Marshal Service. Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland’s Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6. The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times...

A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed. In an interview with The Daily Caller, journalist Audrey Hudson revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and Maryland State Police were involved in a predawn raid of her Shady Side, Md. home on Aug. 6. Hudson is a former Washington Times reporter and current freelance reporter. A search warrant obtained by TheDC indicates...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...