Free Republic

Russia's Communist Party and European leftist parliamentary groups have denounced the ousting of the Ukrainian Communist party from the country's parliament as a breach of free speech. Leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov, called the ban, set to go into effect on Thursday, the latest attempt to "massacre" the party of his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Symonenko. "Attempts to muzzle them and do away with them are evidence of the cowardice and hideousness of those who are doing this," Zyuganov told state-run Rossiya 24 television channel on Wednesday. Ukrainian parliament voted to oust the party after Symonenko on Wednesday...

"The symbol of the murderous Islamic State is waving in The Hague. ‘Death to the Jews,’ shout the demonstrators. Yet the Dutch government authorized the protests. “Death to the Jews” chanted the crowd waving the black flags of the Islamic State, or ISIS as it used to be known." Proving yet again what I have been saying for months, years --Europe once again is embracing madness and evil as its central unifying characteristic – only this time it’s under “Palestinianism,” not Nazis

A US government laboratory mistakenly mixed a common flu strain with a dangerous and deadly type of bird flu and shipped it to another lab, authorities said Friday. The latest news followed admissions of mishandled anthrax and forgotten smallpox vials at separate US government labs, and raised new concerns about the safety of dangerous agents which could be used as bioterror weapons. No one was endangered by the mixed flu strain, said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden, who nevertheless said he was "astonished" that protocols could have been violated in that way. "Everything we have looked...

Many of us cheered in January of this year when Marilyn Tavenner, the woman who headed the disastrous rollout of the healthcare.gov website, announced she’d be stepping down from her position as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). At the time, we weren’t too focused on who would be replacing her. Waiting in the wings was Andrew M. Slavitt, now Acting Medicare Chief, who had been biding his time as CMS’ deputy administrator since July 2014. Even though he’s been accused of possible cronyism and conflicts of interest, Andy Slavitt has a special brand of insurance...

Andrew Slavitt, a former executive at the technology company tasked with saving HealthCare.gov and current second-in-command at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was granted an ethics waiver by the Department of Health and Human Services to begin working with his former company immediately.The waiver was granted despite Republican lawmakers’ concerns about Slavitt’s potential conflict of interest. The Daily Signal revealed those concerns in a story yesterday.Slavitt, a former OptumInsight/QSSI group vice president, left the company last month to work as the principal deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs Obamacare and HealthCare.gov. His...

The Ukrainian government needs to find a “fine line” that would allow it to both protect free speech and fight Kremlin propaganda, a top official of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe said in an interview with the Kyiv Post. There has been a debate in Ukraine on whether pro-Kremlin media, which are inciting Russia’s war against Ukraine and fabricating lies, should be banned. While some argue that they are a threat to national security, others condemn such measures as an attack on free speech. “The Ukrainian government needs to find a very fine line with the help...

WASHINGTON Russia is looking to expand its military presence and has its eye on Cuba and other Latin American countries. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia has come up with a list of countries where it’s considering opening military bases. They include Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Vietnam, according to Russia’s state-owned RIA Novosti news agency. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and first lady Rosario Murillo (center and right) walk with Russia's President Vladimir Putin (left) upon his arrival at the international airport in Managua, Nicaragua on July 11, 2014. Cesar Perez AP “The talks are under way,” Shoigu told reporters in...

Amsterdam — The people who shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014 had probably been hoping to hit a Ukrainian military jet, a Dutch court hear on Monday as the prosecution began reading the charges against those on trial. Three Russians and a Ukrainian are accused of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines Boeing in July 2014 with a Russian-made Buk anti-aircraft missile, killing all 298 people on board. The defendants are being tried in absentia, as Russia has refused to extradite them. The prosecution intends to conclude its presentation of evidence on Wednesday. A verdict is not...

Provo police have confirmed that one person was shot during a protest Monday night near the police department. The victim, a 60-year-old Provo resident, remained hospitalized Tuesday but was “stable,” according to police. The man was not part of the protest or counter-protest that had been going on, but was just driving in the area, said Provo Police Sgt. Nisha King.

The 24-year-old Muslim man who carried out the July 16 terrorist attack in Chattanooga was radicalized for at least a year before he opened fire on two military sites and killed five U.S. service members, an FBI agent told the Times Free Press today. The FBI believes people who knew Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez knew he was becoming radicalized before the attack, but failed to report Abdulazeez to authorities, Special Agent Ed Reinhold said. Abdulazeez was radicalized online before he took a July 2014 trip to the Middle East to visit family and discussed committing jihad before he carried out the...

ow badly have US-Israel relations deteriorated in recent weeks? If Israeli media reports are any indication, tensions boiled over to the point where a phone call between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ended due to "communications problems" earlier this week. Both men have not spoken since, according to the State Department. Kerry's spokesperson, Jen Psaki, told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that the two men have not spoken since a brief phone call over the situation in Gaza ended because of "communications problems."

At this point, our readers should be intimately familiar with the timeline leading up to the "Oh Sh!t" moment when the Platte River Networks employee, Paul Combetta, deleted Hillary's emails despite later admitting to the FBI that he "was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's e-mail data on the PRN server" (if not, see "The "Oh Sh!t" Moment: Hillary Wiped Her Server With BleachBit Despite Subpoena"). Once Combetta was summoned to testify in front of Congress, we also learned that the FBI had granted Combetta an immunity...

As the families of U.S. hostages currently held in Iran have struggled for years to rally the determination to bring their loved ones home, newly released emails from the former secretary of State reveal the infuriating truth that those with connections get their case raised to the top. In 2009, Iason Athanasiadis was covering the protests of the disputed election win of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over Mir-Hossein Mousavi for the Washington Times. The Greek citizen was detained by Iranian authorities on June 17, 2009, as he tried to fly out of the country. Athanasiadis was thrown in Evin prison and released...

DOJ Colluded Directly with Clinton Email Witnesses to Limit Discovery (Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch announced today that it submitted a court-ordered discovery plan for the depositions of several top former government officials involved in the Clinton email scandal, including Obama administration senior officials Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Jacob Sullivan, and FBI official E.W. Priestap. Judicial Watch “intends to update the Court regarding the depositions of Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills at the conclusion of the 16-week discovery period, unless the Court believes such notice is not necessary.” The plan for discovery is the latest development in Judicial Watch’s July...

When the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the online accounts of legally targeted foreigners over a four-year period it also collected the conversations of nine times as many ordinary Internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, according to a probe by The Washington Post. Nearly half of those surveillance files contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents, the Post reported in a story posted on its website Saturday night. […] At the same time, the intercepted messages contained material of considerable intelligence value, the Post reported, such as information about...

WASHINGTON - A jailed Russian who says he hacked into the Democratic National Committee computers on the Kremlin’s orders to steal emails released during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign now claims he left behind a data signature to prove his assertion. In an interview with Russia’s RAIN television channel made public Wednesday, Konstantin Kozlovsky provided further details about what he said was a hacking operation led by the Russian intelligence agency known by its initials FSB. Among them, Kozlovsky said he worked with the FSB to develop computer viruses that were first tested on large, unsuspecting Russian companies, such...

ATLANTA (AP) — A government scientist cleaning out an old storage room at a research center near Washington made a startling discovery last week — decades-old vials of smallpox packed away and forgotten in a cardboard box. The six glass vials of freeze-dried virus were intact and sealed with melted glass, and the virus MIGHT have been dead, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

An official timeline of the Office of Personnel Management breach obtained by FCW pinpoints the hackers' calibrated extraction of data and the government's step-by-step response. It illuminates a sequence of events that lawmakers have struggled to pin down in public hearings with Obama administration officials. The timeline makes clear that the heist of data on 22 million current and former federal employees was one sustained assault rather than two separate intrusions to steal background investigation data and personnel records. The document, which bears the seals of OPM and the Department of Homeland Security, is dated July 14 and was prepared...

An army of reddit users believes it has found evidence that former Hillary Clinton computer specialist Paul Combetta solicited free advice regarding Clinton's private email server from users of the popular web forum. A collaborative investigation showed a reddit user with the username stonetear requested help in relation to retaining and purging email messages after 60 days, and requested advice on how to remove a "VERY VIP" individual's email address from archived content. The requests match neatly with publicly known dates related to Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. Stonetear has deleted the posts, but...

Just one day after the horrific tragedy that left 298 people dead, Russia's Channel One ran a package telling its audience that the entire incident was orchestrated by the United States, specifically by the CIA. A document was broadcast purportedly showing that the U.S. was planning to do the same thing during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Viewers learned that the "U.S. orchestrated this because Ukrainian government is not sophisticated enough to orchestrate this," according to the broadcast, which was translated from the original Russian by CNBC. According to Channel One, Russia's swift economic growth has inspired the United States...