Free Republic

The Department of Defense has ordered a review of all labs following revelations that the number of labs that received live anthrax samples is larger than first reported."As of now, 24 laboratories in 11 states and two foreign countries are believed to have received suspect samples. We continue to work closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who is leading the ongoing investigation pursuit to its statutory authorities. The Department will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates to the public," Defense Department said in a statement.The Defense Department had previously reported labs in nine states...

A 29-year-old man, Joshua Jahn, with ties to North Texas and Oklahoma has been identified as the suspect in a shooting at a Dallas ICE detention center. Two people were killed in the shooting. The suspect is also deceased. The investigation is ongoing, and police have not yet released a motive for the shooting. According to FOX News and FOX 4 sources, the sniper who killed at least two people at the Dallas ICE facility early Wednesday morning was 29-year-old Joshua Jahn. A sniper died from a self-inflicted gunshot early Wednesday morning after he shot three ICE detainees at a...

After a startling upset in Sri Lanka’s presidential election, President Mahinda Rajapaksa conceded defeat on Friday morning, bringing an abrupt end to a larger-than-life, increasingly controlling presidency that he had hoped to extend into a third six-year term. Mr. Rajapaksa left his residence, Temple Trees, shortly after 6 a.m. “to allow the new president to assume his duties,” a presidential spokesman announced. Mr. Rajapaksa’s defeat is remarkable because he had an overwhelming advantage going into the election, which he decided to hold two years ahead of schedule. During nearly a decade in office, he had built close ties with China,...

There's a Mormon character in one of ABC's new fall series. And viewers will learn this when they see him wearing nothing but his temple garments. That's just one of the reasons that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may not be particularly pleased with that character in the pilot of "Quantico," which is scheduled to premiere on Sunday, Sept. 27, at 9 p.m. on ABC/Ch. 4. The series is about a bunch of new recruits who arrive at the FBI training base in Quantico, Va., for training.

New York’s most notorious revolutionary tourist — “sandalista” Lori Berenson — is back in Manhattan from Peru, where she served 15 years in prison for terrorism. Forgive us if we don’t put out a welcome mat. The LaGuardia HS grad and MIT dropout has been stuck in Peru by law until her full 20-year sentence expired. Now that it has, she’s heading home to her parents’ Kips Bay apartment. Though lionized by the left and worshiped by The New York Times, Berenson, now 46, was no naive idealist. She spent years traveling Central America with Marxist groups until she hooked...

Quillette has been under fire since it was founded by Claire Lehmann in 2015. The old guard doesn’t like a fresh face, so when Lehmann launched and was then lauded by Jordan Peterson, the media lined up to take shots. Quillette may not have been the birthplace of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, but it’s been an essential publication for the documenting of free speech concerns and heterodox ideas. It also made space for voices that had been cancelled and writers and intellectuals who had been unpersoned in their communities. Publishing both controversial ideas and controversial people made it a...

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...

The NYPD had suspected New Jersey’s Masjid Omar Mosque, where jihadist Sayfullo Saipov reportedly worshipped, of having radical ties for over 10 years, allegedly keeping all its worshippers under watch. Moreover, the FBI, which claims it had nothing to do with monitoring the mosque, interviewed Saipov as a potential Islamic terrorist in 2015, but ultimately let him go. On Tuesday, Uzbek national Saipov killed eight people and injured at least 11 in a vehicle attack on the West Side of Manhattan on Tuesday. “The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows...

A worshipper who knew terror truck driver Sayfullo Saipov and attended the same mosque says he 'totally gets what he did'. Abu Mohammad, who stopped to talk to DailyMail.com after leaving afternoon prayer service at the Omar Mosque in Paterson, New Jersey, on Wednesday, said he last saw the suspect at the mosque about two months ago and first set eyes on him there two years back. 'I didn't know him by name, but I would see him there every two to three months,' the 46-year-old Pakistani national, said. A cement mixer by trade and living in the U.S. now...

As I write this, a few facts are starting to trickle out about Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, the man who committed the terrorist attack in Manhattan using a rented Home Depot truck on October 31, killing eight and injuring nearly a dozen more innocent people. (See, for instance, here and here.) First, we are told that he is Uzbek, having arrived in the United States from Uzbekistan "legally" in 2010. Second, some outlets have suggested that he may be married with two children, but I haven't seen any multiple verifications of that. Third, he appears to have been a Uber driver...

A tape apparently recorded by murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko a year before he was poisoned has revealed he was digging up links between Vladimir Putin and one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. A Telegraph investigation uncovered the audio recording, in which the dissident claims from beyond the grave that Russia’s president had a “good relationship” with Semion Mogilevich - a Ukrainian crime boss who was on the FBI's most wanted list and whom Mr Litvinenko believed was selling weapons to al-Qaeda. The apparent recording of Mr Litvinenko is published for the first time ahead of a public inquiry...

Russell Bentley, a self-described “Donbass Cowboy,” joined Russian forces soon after they created a proxy state in eastern Ukraine in 2014. He quickly became one of Russian propaganda’s favorite Americans, receiving a Russian passport and a gig with state-run Sputnik TV. On April 8, the 64-year-old Austin native better known under his call sign “Texas” was detained by Russian soldiers in the city of Donetsk, occupied by Russia for the past decade, according to his wife. Eleven days later, he turned up dead. He is the latest in a string of figures involved in Russia’s 2014 takeover of parts of...

What happens when the face of a country’s anti-corruption movement suddenly is investigated for the sort of bribery he once condemned? Ukraine, a U.S. ally and neighboring foe of Russia, is soon to find out. And it’s a case with implications in the United States, where the fallout from the unproven Trump-Russia collusion scandal has engulfed several Ukrainians. The country’s chief corruption prosecutor on Thursday opened an investigation into “suspicions” that Serhiy Leshchenko, a crusading anti-corruption member of Ukraine’s parliament and former investigative journalist, accepted bribes in 2016 from a Russian source that enabled him to buy a luxury condo...

NEW ORLEANS — As oil gushed from BP’s ruptured well five years ago and public outrage built by the day, the Obama administration issued a six-month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. When the well was finally capped after nearly three months, political and industry pressure mounted on the White House to lift the ban, which it did about a month earlier than planned. Since then, oil and gas drilling Gulf has bounced back strongly and the number of deep-water drilling rigs has actually increased from 35 to about 48. Drillers are pushing into even deeper water and...

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.”

The U.K. government wants BP to still stand for “British Petroleum.” The Financial Times reported that Downing Street would do all it could to block a takeover of BP. Weakened and shrunken down due to the massive, and still rising, toll stemming from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP could become a takeover target from one of the larger oil majors out there. Rumors have been swirling in recent weeks that perhaps ExxonMobil or Chevron could be eyeing the British oil giant, so much so that BP’s CEO Bob Dudley had to publicly dispel any notion that his company is for...

The State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli parliamentary elections, a congressional investigation concluded Tuesday.

Both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama have assured the Israeli and American public that Netanyahu's planned address to Congress will not harm the "unbreakable" US-Israel relationship - but a far-left NGO's new campaign Tuesday seeks to reignite sentiment against Netanyahu. The campaign, entitled, "I am a Jew, and Bibi does NOT [sic] speak for me," calls on American Jews to sign a petition against Netanyahu's Washington visit to Israel's Ambassador in the US, Ron Dermer. The language throughout the campaign is unabashedly hostile. "Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would be representing all Jews...

The gold appears to have been released as part of a sanctions relief package that will have awarded Iran nearly $12 billion in unfrozen cash assets by the time negotiations wrap up next week. The State Department calculates that Iran will have received a total of $11.9 billion in cash assets. The governor of Iran’s Central Bank announced to the country’s state-controlled media that the South Africans have finally returned the 13 tons of gold. “A sum of 13 tons of gold that had been purchased before and was deposited in South Africa in the past two years and could...

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...