Free Republic

In an ideal world, maybe we could ignore what's happening in Ukraine but we have to see the world as it is, not how we want it to be: Russia is calling and wants its Ukraine back. I generally appreciate Tucker Carlson, but every time he discusses Ukraine and Russia, I bristle — especially when he contends that America has no interest in Ukraine. I know some of you might agree with Carlson, but you can be a solid conservative who is just as war-weary as the next guy and still see a security interest in Ukraine without being a...

A driver shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he ploughed into groups of people in the eastern French city of Dijon on Sunday evening, AFP reports. 11 people were injured, two of them seriously, in the attack, a source close to the investigation said. "The man, born in 1974, is apparently imbalanced and had been in a psychiatric hospital," the source told AFP, adding that "for now his motives are still unclear". The driver was arrested by police after targeting passersby at five different places in the city on Sunday evening, a police source said. "Nine people were lightly injured and two...

But don’t be concerned: Governor Cuomo says there is no “ongoing threat.” In lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, a Muslim named Sayfullo Saipov, screaming “Allah akbar,” drove a rented truck along a bicycle path, killing at least eight people and injuring numerous others. According to Al Arabiya, “New York state governor Andrew Cuomo told media that there is no evidence to suggest wider plot or wider scheme.” And Time.com reported that Cuomo said that there was no “evidence of an ongoing threat or any additional threat.” No evidence to suggest a wider plot or an ongoing threat? Really, Governor? Here’s...

Responsibility for the attack? Sayfullo Saipov, the 29-year-old Uzbekistan-born ISIS operative who killed eight people after driving a truck down a crowded bicycle path in New York City, worshipped at a mosque around the corner from his and his family’s Paterson, New Jersey residence, Masjid Omar bin al-Khattab. The mosque has been associated with a website that advocates committing violence against others. Because of this fact, the mosque itself should be considered a party to Saipov’s horrific crime. On October 31st, Halloween, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, an Uber driver with known residences in Tampa, Florida and Paterson, New Jersey, drove a...

Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive politics. What progressives need to defeat Trump is outreach, but all they have is outrage. On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable. Instead of milling around Washington, organizers have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in The Guardian on...

1.It Was Not a “Lone Wolf” Attack In addition to a potential accomplice that has since been arrested, an image of an ISIS flag on a cellphone near the location of the terrorist attack in NY surfaced two months ago. According to the police complaint against Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, the 29-year-old began planning the attack close to a year ago. The complaint asserts that Saipov watched and was inspired by ISIS videos. One of the two cellphones that were found in the truck had close to 90 violent ISIS propaganda videos on it, some with information on how to make...

Back in 2014 the New York Police Department dropped a program that monitored potential suspects of Islamic extremism. Created in 2005, the program was pretty cut and dry: plain clothed detectives were sent out to mosques and gathering places for Muslims to see if anyone was pushing extremist rhetoric on the community. While it might seem a bit intrusive, this happened in a city of 8.5 million people with as many as 800,000 Muslim residents in the greater metro area, many of whom are foreign born nationals. It's also the same geographic location as the biggest Islamic terror attack in...

University of Pennsylvania, which hosted the Penn Biden Center where classified documents were found in November, received $47.7 million from China in the three years when Biden was affiliated with it. ... The University of Pennsylvania, the Ivy League institution which collected tens of millions of dollars from China while paying Joe Biden and hosting his foreign policy think tank, successfully pressured the Biden Justice Department to end an FBI counterespionage program targeting Beijing's increasing influence within U.S. academia. Attorney General Merrick Garland shut down the FBI's so-called China initiative in February 2022 shortly after more than 160 members of...

Honduras still has a long way to go to dismantle the “narco-state” that grew under ex-president Juan Orlando Hernandez, jailed this week for smuggling a deluge of cocaine into the United States, experts said. Hernandez, 55, spent years in positions of power cozying up to kingpins from some of Latin America’s most notorious cartels, which placed proxies in state institutions while he pocketed millions of dollars in drug money. Extradited to the United States upon leaving office in 2022, Hernandez was sentenced this week to 45 years in jail for his crimes after prosecutors said he had turned his country...

A prominent Ukrainian politician and former parliament speaker has been shot dead in western Ukraine, officials said, as a search was under way to find the attacker. Andriy Parubiy, who also previously served as secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, was killed in the city of Lviv on Saturday.The Prosecutor General’s office said a gunman had fired several shots at Parubiy, killing him “on the spot”. The attacker fled, and a manhunt was launched, it said.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the killing as a “horrendous murder” and offered his condolences to Parubiy’s family and loved ones.“All necessary forces...

Highland Park shooter Bobby Crimo III was left in a hot car by his mom for 27 minutes as a toddler - with his mother later convicted over the incident. The disturbing 2002 incident was one of multiple brushes with the law Crimo's mom Denise Pesina and dad Bob Crimo Jr had with cops prior to Monday's massacre in Chicago that killed seven. It is unclear if the hot car incident left Crimo, now 21, with any physical or mental injuries that may have ultimately led to the horrific shootout. Police were also called to his family's home 10 times,...

KYIV, Ukraine — For Ukraine’s counteroffensive to progress faster, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the top officer in Ukraine’s armed forces, says he needs more — of every weapon. And he is telling anyone who will listen, including his American counterpart Gen. Mark A. Milley as recently as Wednesday, that he needs those resources now....So it “pisses me off,” Zaluzhny said, when he hears that Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive in the country’s east and south has started slower than expected......“Without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all,” he added. “But they are being carried out. Yes, maybe not as fast...

VIENNA, March 15 (Reuters) - U.N. nuclear watchdog inspectors have found that roughly 2.5 tons of natural uranium have gone missing from a Libyan site that is not under government control, the watchdog told member states in a statement on Wednesday seen by Reuters. The finding is the result of an inspection originally planned for last year that "had to be postponed because of the security situation in the region" and was finally carried out on Tuesday, according to the confidential statement by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi. IAEA inspectors "found that 10 drums containing approximately 2.5 tons...

One week ago today, Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in the government’s criminal case against former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. That motion, in requesting the court obtain Sussmann’s waiver of any conflicts of interest held by his lawyers on the record, provided in excruciating detail the factual basis for the purported conflicts. In doing so, it revealed that “enemies of Donald Trump surveilled the internet traffic at Trump Tower, at his New York City apartment building, and later at the executive office of the president of the United States, then fed disinformation about that traffic to...

A member of the U.S. Army Band said he was forced out of the U.S. Army for having anti-Obama bumper stickers on his personal car, serving Chick-fil-A sandwiches at a party and reading books written by conservative authors like Sean Hannity, a federal lawsuit alleges. Master Sergeant Nathan Sommers, a 25-year veteran of the military and a decorated soloist in the U.S. Army Band Chorus, claims he was forcibly retired from the Army due to his religious and conservative political beliefs. I first told you about Sommers last year in a series of exclusive Fox News reports. Join Todd on...

Since last summer, Bob Dudley, the CEO of the British oil giant BP, has been cautioning that he expects oil prices to stay “lower for longer.” Now he believes he’s determined how much longer those prices may decline, and when they may start rising again. “A low point could be in the first quarter [of 2016],” Dudley said in an interview broadcast Saturday by the BBC. “But 2016’s third and fourth quarters could witness a more natural balance between supply and demand, after which stock levels could start to wear off.”

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan is coming to Washington, DC, on May 16 loaded for bear.  He has an ambitious agenda and apparently feels he can achieve it all because he holds “trump” cards against the President of the United States. Erdogan and his proxies have publicly said they want to convince the United States to jettison its budding alliance with the Syrian Democratic Union (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Kurdish group that has become the tip of the spear in the fight against ISIS in Syria. On this point, they will encounter resistance...

Former President Bill Clinton has expressed remorse over his role in negotiating a 1994 deal that resulted in Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal, suggesting that Russia never would have invaded its smaller neighbor if it still had nukes. “I feel a personal stake because I got them [Ukraine] to agree to give up their nuclear weapons. And none of them believe that Russia would have pulled this stunt if Ukraine still had their weapons,” Clinton told Irish broadcaster RTE in an interview that aired Tuesday. The 42nd president was referencing a landmark post-Cold War deal in which then-Ukrainian President...

Former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, addressing thousands of people at the cradle of the uprising against Ukraine's Moscow-backed leader, accused Russia on Sunday of being complicit in police violence against protesters. To chants of "Russia, rise up", Khodorkovsky, who was jailed for a decade under President Vladimir Putin, told the crowd the Kremlin was lying to its own people by portraying the protesters as "neo-fascists" bent on violence. Wearing a simple dark anorak and jeans, he addressed the crowd from a stage in Kiev's Independence Square, occupied by protesters since November despite police trying to oust them with force which resulted...

December 2015 was a pivotal month in many respects. During the first week of December 2015, Donald Trump began to establish a substantial lead over his Republican primary opponents. Vice President Joseph Biden traveled to Ukraine to announce, on December 7th, a $190 million program to “fight corruption in law enforcement and reform the justice sector,” but behind the scenes explicitly linked a $1 billion loan guarantee to the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating the energy company Burisma, which employed Biden’s son Hunter. On December 9, 2015, the reported whistleblower Eric Ciaramella held a meeting...