Free Republic

When Uruguay announced last year that it would be taking in five families fleeing Syria's devastating civil war, residents of this small town pulled together and lobbied to host one. Then in November, locals welcomed a newly arrived Merhi Alshebli, his wife and their 15 children with food and seeds to plant vegetables. People in Juan Lacaze, a coastal city of fishermen and paper factory workers in southwestern Uruguay, wanted to do their part to help a country where more than 200,000 have been killed in the fighting.

This year, several Russian lawmakers called for an investigation against Mr. Gorbachev, charging him with having caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. To accuse someone of having brought about the end of a state responsible for the murder of millions, the imprisonment of tens of millions and the oppression of hundreds of millions is a bit like accusing someone of having brought down Nazism. But the people who run post-Soviet Russia don’t see it that way. Mr. Putin saw a regime – the regime he served – unwilling to maintain power by force. Unlike the Chinese communists, who in...

EXCLUSIVE: Can J.D. Vance Help Save the Catholic Church?One Catholic vice president has all but destroyed the Church, now it’s time for another Catholic vice president to save it.A little over 10 years ago, Vice President Joe Biden became the point man to solve the crisis of thousands upon thousands of parentless children illegally entering America along its Southern Border. Over the spring and summer of 2014, over 60,000 unaccompanied minors—some as young as four—came across the Mexican border. Most of them were boys, 13 to 17. There were girls too. It was the cartels who brought them. The crimes...

Last October, a well-known Portland antifa militant was killed under mysterious circumstances after leaving a pub popular with far-left extremists. Sean Daniel Kealiher, 23, was killed near the Cider Riot pub after being hit by a car that had been fired upon with live rounds. His friends dragged his body away and did not call the police. Kealiher’s death immediately rippled throughout Portland and beyond, leading both the far-left and even establishment Democrat leaders to mourn publicly. A GoFundMe for his funeral raised thousands. And while he was lionized in the press as a murdered “anti-fascist activist” and even called...

On November 30, four teens jumped a man in south St. Louis, using hammers to beat him to death. According to the St. Louis Bosnian, the victim was 32-year-old Zemir Begic. He was sitting in his car around 1 a.m. when the teens began banging on it. He stepped out of the car, and the teens attacked him until he was unconscious then left him for dead. Begic died, and surveillance video led to the capture of two of the suspects. One of them is 15 and the other is 16 years of age. This senseless beating death—which came on...

Sometimes I watch (well, mostly listen to) obscure movies that have been ripped onto YouTube. I do this in the hope of finding some overlooked "gem." As you can imagine, such a gem is rare indeed; in fact, so far, I've not found a single one. But earlier today, I did find something that might actually be called interesting. It was in a movie called The Omega Code, which was released in October 1999, obviously timed to coincide with the coming of the new millennium. It is a very bad movie. It's like an end-of-days, "Antichrist Comes In The 21st...

Reid Hoffman previously gave nearly $700K to Biden's reelection effort ... The Democrat tech billionaire who helped rehab Jeffrey Epstein's image and visited his island has poured thousands in donations into several vulnerable Senate races across the country. ... News of the donations come after the Wall Street Journal reported in May that Hoffman visited Epstein’s private Caribbean island, called Little St. James, part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, ... Hoffman and the now-deceased convicted pedophile were planning to return to the island in November 2014, and then travel to Boston, the report said. It's unclear what the intent was...

Newly-unearthed emails reveal that Joe Biden used several personal emails, all bearing false names, during his vice presidency to discuss foreign business with his son Hunter. As reported by Just The News, one such email was ...

The moving goodbye letter a murdered ISIS hostage wrote to his parents has been read at the trial of the terror suspect accused of masterminding his abduction. Peter Kassig wrote the final letter to his parents Ed and Paula five months before he was beheaded by Jihadi John in November 2014, and revealed that he did not believe his captors' claims that his family had given up on him. It was read at the trial of El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, Wednesday by Peter's retired teacher dad Edward Kassig, who struggled to hold back tears, as Kassig's mom Paula, a former...

“Remarking on the soaring tensions between Ukraine and Russia, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodriguez Parrilla voiced support for Moscow and echoed his voice against NATO’s expansion eastward.” (This was way back on Feb. 20, by the way.) Most of us recall the Obama administration's lies and treachery regarding Benghazi. But how many of you know about the Obama administration's lies and treachery against the American families of the Americans ambushed and murdered on the orders of Raul Castro this week in 1996?....... Thought so...Well, please read on: You see, amigos: This week 26 years ago three U.S. citizens and...

A National Pulse review of White House Visitor Logs from November 2014 reveals a meeting in the White House Situation Room, chaired by then-Ebola Czar Ron Klain. The meeting appears to have been coordinated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and included several high-level U.S. government agency heads. (snip) These details may go some way to helping uncover the truth behind the National Institute for Health (NIH) and its alleged funding of gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The information puts Klain and Obama at the head of the table for the decision to green-light what Fauci has been ferociously...

While many in the nation, from Oakland to New York, rally in protest over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, I keep wondering: What about the good cops? As with our military personnel, we are often quick to hang the allegedly corrupt but slow to honor those who serve honestly to protect. According to the nonprofit National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, there are more than 900,000 of them who are serving in the United States; about 12 percent are women. The FBI reported that there were 404 incidents of "justifiable homicide" by American police in 2011. That...

Few Americans could fathom the notion that the United States is so indebted to China that one of Beijing’s spies could get away with espionage – especially with an White House in love with espionage prosecutions. But that might be the only reasonable explanation for the Obama administration’s decision to pass on prosecuting a State Department contractor who was allegedly paid thousands of dollars to someone believed to be a Chinese agent seeking information on Americans. According to Fox News, a November 2014 FBI affidavit that was filed in U.S. district court in Maryland indicates that the FBI launched a...

He is Dmitry Firtash, a former fireman and soldier. In little more than a decade, the Ukrainian went from obscurity to wealth and renown, largely by buying gas from Russia and selling it in his home country. His success was built on remarkable sweetheart deals brokered by associates of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, at immense cost to Russian taxpayers, a Reuters investigation shows. Russian government records reviewed for this article reveal for the first time the terms of recent deals between Firtash and Russia's Gazprom, a giant gas company majority owned by the state. According to Russian customs documents detailing...

White House: No diplomatic outreach in Clapper’s visit to North Korea By Kyle Balluck - 11/09/14 06:30 AM EST Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went to North Korea with the “sole purpose” of obtaining the release of Americans Kenneth Bae and Matthew Todd Miller, according to a senior administration official. The official spoke to reporters traveling with President Obama early Sunday morning before Air Force One took off for the president’s Asia trip. “It was not to pursue any diplomatic opening,” the official said, according to a pool reporter, adding that Clapper was selected for the secret mission because...

Peter Wehner made Mark Levin the target of his work at Commentary lately, as an extension of his zeal to cast G. W. Bush as more of a conservative than Reagan was, and  label numerous prominent conservatives as “purists” in desperate need of moderating their tone. Levin, rejecting the notion of being lectured to by a Bush grandee responded, correcting Wehner and calling attention to his aptitude for cherry-picking facts so that he can knock down prominent conservatives, and conservative causes.Peter Wehner arrived in Washington D.C. in 1983, and never left.  He was hired by Bill Bennett as a speechwriter...

The commander of US Navy SEALs has issued a stinging rebuke to troops who have broken the elite force's hallowed tradition of secrecy and humility by publishing memoirs and speaking to the media. Days after the Fox News network announced it would broadcast a documentary with a commando who claims to have shot Osama bin Laden, Rear Admiral Brian Losey, the head of Naval Special Warfare Command, wrote to his troops denouncing anyone who seeks fame or fortune by revealing details of secret missions. "A critical tenet of our Ethos is 'I do not advertise the nature of my work,...

The Justice Department acknowledged that it misled a federal Appeals Court during oral arguments last month in a case reviewing whether the government should be able to secretly conduct electronic surveillance of Americans without a warrant. In a newly unsealed letter, a Justice Department lawyer told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that it spoke erroneously when describing the disclosure restrictions placed upon the FBI's use of so-called national security letters. NSLs, as they are often referred, can compel companies to hand over communications data or financial records of certain users to authorities conducting a national security...

What, exactly, does an Ebola czar do? Well, one thing he doesn’t do is testify in Congress, our colleague Joel Achenbach said. Ron Klain, appointed Ebola czar last month by President Obama during a particularly rocky period when Ebola seemed to be spreading in the United States, was conspicuously missing from the lineup of administration officials in the Senate Appropriations committee hearing on Ebola on Wednesday.

Josh Campbell wrote quit the FBI this week. Then he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times where he complained about people exposing the corruption and criminal acts by agency leaders. Maybe the FBI wasn’t a good fit for Josh? The New York Times thinks we should all stop picking on the FBI and let them continue their coup. The liberal media is especially upset with President Trump for questioning the agency and the DOJ over their special counsel witch hunt.Try to read this and not laugh out loud.Axios reported: Josh Campbell, a special agent at the FBI, resigned...