Free Republic

Three years ago he was a long-haired, bandana-wearing hippie walking for peace, now he’s been arrested for plotting to kill Americans for ISIS. Such is life in Obama’s America. Alexander Ciccolo at a peace walk’ in 2012 against nuclear power and weapons. Photo, ABC News from the Napanee Beaver. Another photo can be seen here. Alexander Ciccolo, “Ali Al Amriki” to his Muslim terrorist friends, was busted by the FBI on July 4 after buying firearms from a confidential source working for the FBI, reported WCVB-TV. Ciccolo also reportedly bought a pressure cooker to make an IED. He allegedly was...

(CNN) —Chattanooga shooter Mohammad Abdulazeez conducted Internet searches on martyrdom as recently as a day before his shooting rampage took the lives of five service members in Tennessee, according to a person briefed on the investigation. The FBI is seeking to interview anyone with whom Abdulazeez may have had contact in the 48 to 72 hours before Thursday's shootings, the official said. As the country mourns the deaths of the service members, investigators in both the United States and Jordan are trying to learn what prompted the attack. Abdulazeez first shot up a military recruiting center at a Chattanooga strip...

The semantic dance of whether or not to call the July mass shooting in Chattanooga a "terrorist" attack appears to be winding down. FBI Director James Comey twice called the deadly Chattanooga shooting that killed four Marines and one sailor a "terror attack" during a press conference with NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton on Wednesday. Bratton and Comey spoke after addressing the NYPD Shield Conference in New York City. "We've investigated Chattanooga as a terror attack from the beginning," Comey said. "The Chattanooga killer was inspired by a foreign terror organization. It's hard to entangle which particular source...there are lots of...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The public may never know what motivated a 24-year-old Chattanooga man to kill four Marines and a sailor in an attack on Chattanooga's U.S. Naval and Marine Reserve Center last July. Investigators have said Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was a homegrown violent extremist but have not offered more details about what motivated the attack that began at a military recruiting center and ended when Abdulazeez was shot to death by police who followed him to the reserve center. "We're still trying to make sure we understand Abdulazeez, his motivations and associations, in a really good way," FBI Director...

Police and federal officials said Sunday that the man suspected of stabbing a police officer and plowing a van into pedestrians on Saturday night is a 30-year-old refugee from Somalia, who had been interviewed by the RCMP in 2015. Police and politicians urged Canadians to be vigilant, but called for calm and unity in the wake of a terrorist attack in Edmonton that injured five and led to the arrest of a 30-year-suspect who had previously been investigated for espousing extremist views. It is the second major terrorist attack in Canada this year, following January’s shooting at a mosque in...

The Pentagon has responded to a globally-released ‘Kill List’, asking law enforcement to give extra protection for military personnel whose personal information was released,News Channel 10 reports. CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports the Pentagon spent the weekend notifying the soldiers who appeared on the list, and urged city police departments and military police to increase patrol in the neighborhoods where the targeted live. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) published the list days ago, a report that contained names, photos, and home addresses of U.S. Armed Forces personnel, causing alarm in cities potentially at high-risk....

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) confirmed via its public health agency on Sunday that at least 2,325 people have died of Ebola infections in the current outbreak in the east of the country, making it the deadliest such outbreak in the country’s history. Experts noted that the extremely high death toll is likely not a full count of the people killed by the disease, as the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) was slow to identify an outbreak in the affected area, and that only one other known Ebola outbreak – the 2014-2016 outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia...

Earlier this month, Gehad el-Haddad, a senior adviser and media spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood was sentenced to life in prison in Egpyt. The son of Morsi’s former foreign affairs adviser Essam el-Haddad, he was the main English-language spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood. He is also a former employee of the Clinton Foundation. Oops! In 2012, Gehad El Haddad divided his time between volunteering for the Muslim Brotherhood and heading the Cairo office of the Clinton Climate Initiative, but later that year began to work full time for the Muslim Brotherhood.

While his father was vice president in 2016, Hunter Biden met with a State Department official on behalf of a Romanian businessman who paid the troubled first son more than $1 million to help his corruption case, raising questions about whether the younger Biden engaged in unregistered foreign lobbying. A review of emails and documents on Hunter Biden's laptop reveal a March 2016 meeting with then-U.S. ambassador to Romania Hans Klemm on the topic of a corruption case against Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian real estate tycoon. Popoviciu made more than $1 million in wire payments to Biden from November 2015...

Eric Swalwell leveraged his past romantic relationship with Katie Miller, wife of top Trump official Stephen Miller, to keep potentially embarrassing FBI files behind lock and key, a shocking new report revealed Thursday. The news that the disgraced former Democratic Congressman from California — who resigned after several women claimed sexual assault and rape — once dated the now-wife of a top conservative leader stunned Washington. “I was an intern working on Capitol Hill,” Miller posted on X about the situation. Then Katie Waldman worked as both an intern and communications director on Capitol Hill in her 20s before moving...

Across the United States, designated “Welcoming Communities” have begun receiving — or soon will be recipients of — Syrian “refugees” chosen by the United Nations and supposedly vetted by U.S. agencies. But only months ago top officials of these same agencies stated it would be impossible to vet the enormous pool of refugee applicants for terrorist and criminal backgrounds, or even to prove that they are from Syria, considering the chaos in the Middle East and lack of documentation among the migrant. Nevertheless, while in Germany last September, Secretary of State John Kerry promised the United States would take “a...

Congress should give serious consideration to mandating a different registration system that reduces, if not eliminates, UNHCR’s role in the intake process The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is where would-be asylum seekers are first registered and vetted for possible referral to a destination host country for resettlement. UNHCR is the prime international advocate for self-identified “refugees” seeking asylum. While the agency gives lip service to security concerns and the need to weed out terrorists, it operates on the premise that such asylum seekers, wherever they come from including the Middle East, should be given the benefit of...

The Houthi militia in Yemen said on Saturday that it had attacked Saudi Arabia’s capital and oil facilities with a barrage of missiles and drones, a significant escalation in the renewed war between the kingdom and the Iranian-backed group. The Saudis intercepted a Houthi missile launched toward Riyadh, the capital, according to Maj. Gen. Turki Al-Maliki, the spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen. He added in a statement that air defenses had fended off assaults on “civilians and civilian infrastructure” in several other cities in the kingdom, including coastal Yanbu, where the Houthis said they attacked oil facilities....

Rep. Yvette Clarke’s deputy chief of staff came into the office on a Saturday in December 2015 and caught the New York Democrat’s part-time IT aide, Abid Awan, rummaging through the congresswoman’s work area with new iPods and other equipment strewn around the room, according to a House document and interviews with Hill staff. Wendy Anderson told Abid to get out of the office, the document said. She told Capitol Hill investigators that she soon suspected Clarke’s chief of staff, Shelley Davis, was working with Abid on a theft scheme, multiple House staffers with knowledge of the situation told The...

The man who authorities believe to be responsible for the New York terror attack that left eight deaths and many more injured was apparently in the US because he “won” one of 50,000 places in the American “Diversity Lottery Visa” program. Not only is this system insulting to all Americans, but it clearly does not leave America safer. Until this morning, many people in the US may have been unaware of the Diversity Lottery that is carried out every year and which brings in up to 50,000 extra people from overseas who have no particular skill set other than the...

Political hothead and Russian colonel Vladimir Zhirinovsky called for president Vladimir Putin to wipe out Turkish capital Istanbul, killing nine million people. Turkey's decision to down a SU-24 fighter jet after it entered their aerospace was branded "stupid" by Zhirinovsky. "A nuclear attack can destroy Istanbul very easily. Just one nuclear bomb in the Istanbul Strait will wash the city away," he told Moscow Speaking Radio.

Aaron Rich, who had reportedly been blocking his family’s private investigator from looking into whether or not his brother Seth was a WikiLeaks source, works for an influential defense contractor that provides cyber security. According to a source close to the Rich family, Aaron works for Northrup Grumman, which was named as the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world in 2015. The source did not provide what his specific role is at the company. “It’s not just hacking and defending, there’s a lot more to it,” a cyber software engineer at Northrup Grumman says in a video on the company’s...

The United Nations has decided that Britain has not grovelled enough. After years of toppled statues, boarded-up war memorials and official lectures about “colonialism,” a UN human-rights committee now wants the country that ended the Atlantic slave trade to fill its public squares with statues of “people of African descent,” The globalist body also suggests Britain should rewrite what children are taught, and treat historic slavery as a live brief for migration policy and hate-speech enforcement. This comes in the form of formal “reparatory justice” guidance from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, published six months after...

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvanians have voted to retain three Democratic state Supreme Court justices, granting them additional terms on the bench after an unusually contentious, multimillion-dollar election. Republicans and their allies had hoped to defeat the justices and put their seats on the 2027 ballot, opening a path to flip the court. The Democratic majority has handed down critical rulings over the past decade, upholding mail voting and throwing out a congressional map that it found unfairly benefited the GOP. Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht were on the ballot Tuesday. They were first elected in 2015 in a...

Judges who obtained their positions by fraud, according to an indictment, have denied the Trump campaign's ballot-watchers access, providing crucial unsupervised time to Democrat vote counters. PHILADELPHIA, Penn. — Most Americans might not know the name Ozzie Myers, although a part of his tale was told in the hit 2013 movie “American Hustle” about the FBI sting that sent four congressmen to prison in the 1970s. If you’re from Philadelphia, though, you know his name, and knew it well before 2013. He’s important to the country now because he’s currently under indictment for bribing a state elections judge to stuff...