Free Republic

The commander of the Navy's Carrier Strike Group 15 based in San Diego was relieved of his duties Friday, the Navy said in a release on Saturday. Rear Adm. Rick Williams was removed from his position due to a loss of confidence in his ability to command, the release said. The Navy's Third Fleet Commander Vice Adm. Nora Tyson relieved Williams based on the results of an investigation into allegations of misuse of government computer equipment. Williams took command of Carrier Strike Group 15 in July 2015. He has been administratively reassigned, the release said, to the staff of Commander,...

FBI leadership is starting an investigation into the origins of the agency’s plan a decade ago to infiltrate the campaign of presidential candidate Donald Trump using two female undercover “honeypot” agents. The off-the-books investigation, launched in 2015 by FBI Director James B. Comey, was revealed by an agency whistleblower in a protected disclosure to the House Judiciary Committee last year and first reported exclusively by The Washington Times in October. In the intelligence community, a honeypot commonly refers to an undercover operative, usually a woman, who feigns sexual or romantic interest to obtain information from a target. The whistleblower said...

MI6 has pulled its spies out of 'hostile countries' and America's intelligence agencies are on high alert after Russia and China cracked encrypted files leaked by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden. The top-secret documents contain information that could lead to the identification of British and American spies, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services. A senior Home Office official accused Snowden - the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor responsible for the biggest confidential information leak in US history - of having 'blood on his hands' after they gained access to over one million...

On June 24, National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis asked park superintendents to work with their partners and bookstore operators to voluntarily withdraw from sale items that solely depict a Confederate flag. The National Park Service press release can be found here. "We strive to tell the complete story of America," National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis said of the agency's reputation for telling difficult parts of our history. "All sales items in parks are evaluated based on educational value and their connection to the park. Any stand-alone depictions of Confederate flags have no place in park stores."...

Nepal: HPI Note: This report is from a Christian website. Christians and Muslims in Nepal are criticizing the draft version of a new constitution that bans religious conversion. Spurred to action by the recent earthquake, Nepal's government introduced the draft for public comment on June 30, Reuters reported. The draft states that "any act which may be contrary to public health, public decency or morality or incitement to breach public peace or act to convert another person from one religion to another or any act or behavior to undermine or jeopardize the religion of each other is not allowed and...

The House Judiciary Committee is examining a whistleblower report that the FBI targeted Donald Trump soon after he announced his presidential campaign in June 2015, an off-the-books operation ordered by FBI Director James B. Comey that predated the Crossfire Hurricane operation. An FBI agent involved in the probe revealed the off-the-books criminal investigation on Tuesday in a protected disclosure sent to the committee. The whistleblower disclosure said two female FBI undercover agents infiltrated Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign at high levels and were directed to act as “honeypots” while traveling with Mr. Trump and his campaign staff on the trail. According...

So we are just finding out about this now? According to an FBI whistleblower, former Directed James Comey inserted two female agents inside the Trump campaign in 2016. The Washington Times reported that the female agents were directed to act as “honeypots” and travel with Trump and his staff. This was an “off-the-books” operation and was separate from Comey and Obama’s Crossfire Hurricane operation that that targeted Trump based on false Russian collusion lies. For years now we have not seen ANY high-level whistleblowers from the FBI during the debunked Crossfire Hurricane investigation of President Trump. The entire FBI and...

The Chinese operative, who was Rep. Eric Swalwell's (D-CA) personal companion and staffer, broke cover in an X-post of her sitting with a Global Times reporter nearly 10 years after her abrupt exit from the United States—shortly after the FBI warned Swalwell she was a foreign agent.“I had lunch with this lady today. Her name is Fang Fang, and U.S. media called her a ‘suspected Chinese spy,’ wrote Hu XiJin, along with the operative who became an omnipresent force in San Francisco Bay Democratic politics—with significant dalliances in the Midwest.Hu wrote that Fang Fang, who presented herself in the U.S....

I've been a member of Lakewood for the last 7 years (& a Christian for almost 50 years) but I wasn't there today. There were hecklers but that's all I know. If anyone knows what happened please share. Again, news only, no disparaging remarks please. Thanks.

Investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, a scourge of New York City power brokers from Rudolph Giuliani to Mike Bloomberg during a decades-long career with the Village Voice and an early and tenacious chronicler of President-elect Donald Trump, died Thursday at age 71. Barrett, who had been battling interstitial lung disease, died at NYU Langone Medical Center, his family told The Associated Press. […] Few reporters knew Trump as well as did Barrett, whose death came less than a day before Trump was to be sworn in as the country’s 45th president. He began covering the budding real-estate developer in the late...

The alleged gunman who shot Rep. Steve Scalise and others Wednesday made a negative post about the representative on his personal Facebook page in January 2015. James T. Hodgkinson, the man believed to be the gunman at a baseball field in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday morning, posted to his personal Facebook page on Jan. 8, 2015 that “here’s a Republican that should Lose His Job, but they Gave Him a Raise.”

A confrontation described as heated but non-violent thwarted a planned burning of the Confederate flag by demonstrators Saturday in Brooksville. A few hundred counter-protesters — many carrying Confederate and American flags — showed up at the steps of the Hernando County courthouse to cut short a rally in which organizers denounced “rampant white racist violence.” Organizers of the protest included the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, a St. Petersburg group of white people under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, which seeks reparations for black Americans. As about a dozen people protested, they became greatly outnumbered by a pro-Confederate flag...

On Feb. 3, long-time Trump associate Felix Sater filed a cross-complaint in a New York federal court. The complaint alleges that Russian and Kazakhstan-connected individuals and entities conducted “a shadow intelligence operation of Sater and Trump for the purpose of manufacturing information to harm Donald Trump politically,” including by providing Christopher Steele a PowerPoint presentation riddled with lies Steele later fed to the FBI. Sater’s cross suit comes nearly three years after the City of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and BTA Bank filed suit against Sater, two of the companies he owned, a former business associate, and that associate’s LLCs, in City...

AMERICA RUNNING OUT OF TIME. SUPPORT TEAMS URGED. Albany, NY. June 24, 2015 Founder and Director of Oath Keepers Stewart Rhodes urges all Oath Keeper chapters across the country to hold an Emergency Summit by state, in order to prepare for an economic collapse. 'Assume the worst' and formulate support teams. Food storage the most crucial.

Zuckerberg’s recent donation of $400 million has been thrown into greater controversy with the revelation that his foundation’s lead in policy and advocacy formerly worked as the campaign manager and senior advisor to former President Obama. David Plouffe was hired in 2017 to lead policy and advocacy work at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a charity founded in 2015 by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan “to accelerate progress in Education, Justice & Opportunity and Science.” Plouffe’s background includes extensive involvement as a policy leader in the Obama campaigns and organizations like Uber, CZI, and most recently...

Earlier this spring, the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky was testing an advanced antivirus software on one of its computers when it stumbled on something big: As the Moscow-based company puts it, it was "one of the most skilled, mysterious and powerful" spy viruses in the world. The piece of software was so sophisticated that it left few traces. It didn't leave files on the disk drive, and to stay hidden, it burrowed inside a computer's kernel memory, which is the place where a computer's most basic software is kept.Kaspersky says it assigned a team to watch its movements, and the team...

The super-sophisticated malware that infiltrated Kaspersky Labs is more crafty than first imagined. We're told that the Duqu 2.0 software nasty was signed using legit digital certificates issued to Foxconn – a world-leading Chinese electronics manufacturer, whose customers include Microsoft, Dell, Google, BlackBerry, Amazon, Apple, and Sony. The code-signing was uncovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, who are studying their Duqu 2.0 infection. Windows trusts Foxconn-signed code because the Chinese goliath's certificate was issued by VeriSign, which is a trusted certificate root. Thus, the operating system will happily load and run the Foxconn-signed Duqu 2.0's 64-bit kernel-level driver without setting...

Sean Brian Townsend is an independent researcher in the field of information and computer security, a member and the spokesman of the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance. He explains how Kaspersky Lab and the FSB hacked and leaked the secret NSA tools under the guise of The Shadow Brokers hacker group. These leaks became the origin of WannaCry, NotPetya, and BadRabbit ransomware attacks. The editors of InformNapalm may not share the opinions of the authors in the [opinion] section, and does not alter the original style of the articles. Antivirus software – myths and reality The activities of antivirus (AV) companies are...

SCENE LAST NIGHT: Less than a mile or so from Chabad Lubavitch's HQ at 770 Eastern Parkway, around 80 Hillary for America supporters gathered at the home of former White House Jewish Liaison Jarrod Bernstein and Hildy Kuryk, currently communications director at Vogue, to hear from the Clinton campaign's senior advisors including manager Robby Mook, vice chairwoman Huma Abedin and finance director Dennis Chang. SPOTTED: Recent Chairman of the Conference of Presidents Bob Sugarman, Obama mega-bundler Sarah Kovner, Tusk Ventures' Seth London, Anya Hoerburger of Intermedia Partners, Samantha Maltzman, Jill Strauss, Samantha Vinograd of Goldman Sachs and formerly at office...

A very high profile anti-Capitalist from Canada named Naomi Klein has been invited by Pope Francis to join forces with Climate Change activist and senior aide to the Pope, Cardinal Peter Turkson. Together they will lead a prominent conference on the environment with churchmen, scientists, and activists. The conference will exclude climate change doubters and moderates. The Pope had walked back some of his comments on the economy which were anti-Capitalist but Klein says he got it right the first time – we need to overturn Capitalism. Klein spoke at Occupy Wall Street, is, according to the guardian, is a...