Free Republic

GEORGETOWN (Reuters) - Guyana’s parliament voted late on Friday in favor of a no-confidence motion in the government, triggering new elections in March in a surprise defeat for President David Granger as he seeks to develop the nation’s oil sector.

The Venezuelan Navy illegally entered the waters of Guyana this weekend and forced a ship contracted by Exxon Mobil to conduct oil research in the area to vacate, The incident, which Guyanese authorities angrily denounced and vowed to bring to the attention of the United Nations, reignites a feud Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro began with the neighboring country in 2015, claiming as much as two-thirds of Guyana itself belonged to Venezuela. Guyana has repeatedly noted that Venezuela signed an agreement in 1899 on the territory in question and no disputes remain as to who owns that land. Exxon Mobil...

BELGRADE – Weekly protest walks, taking place since 8 December 2018, have become the most serious challenge to the rule of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic so far. The protests, which are supported but not formally organised by the opposition parties, have spread to more than 20 cities and towns across the country... One of the protests took place in Kosovska Mitrovica, the largest city of the Serb-majority Northern Kosovo, which is governed by Vucic’s political allies. The protests, organised under the title “One of the five million” (a reference to the initial reaction of President Vucic, in which he said...

Preet Bharara knew about FBI leaks two years before his office denied them. No one has been punished Preet Bharara is often mentioned as a possible U.S. attorney general in a Joe Biden administration after building a reputation as a hard-charging federal prosecutor and self-proclaimed ethicist teaching law school and dispensing morality on Twitter. But one of the last cases he handled as the chief federal prosecutor in New York City cuts against the grain of his carefully manicured image, exposing widespread leaking by the FBI — and knowledge of it by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office — during the...

Dear Judge Sullivan: I am submitting my letter directly since Mike Flynn’s attorney has refused to submit it as well as letters submitted by other individuals.

A New York City police officer and U.S. Army Reserve member was arrested on federal charges for acting as a special agent for the Chinese regime. Baimadajie Angwang, a 33-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in China’s Tibet region, fed intelligence about other ethnic Tibetans in New York to the Chinese consulate in the city, according to a criminal complaint. Angwang works in Queens and lives in Nassau County, Long Island, prosecutors said. He was arrested on Sept. 19, and is due to make his initial appearance at the district court for the Eastern District of New York at 3:30 p.m....

It’s not confirmational bias – IT’S CONFIRMATION !! Today on Face The Nation Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Vice-Chairman Mark Warner describes how his committee is working with Robert Mueller; including: (a) several criminal referrals (Cohen was one); and (b) the sharing of congressional transcripts so Mueller (the team, not the person) can cross reference statements given to him with testimony given to the SSCI. Tell me again how letting SSCI Security Director, James Wolfe, off the hook for leaking classified intelligence to the media, including the Carter Page FISA application, was not to cover for SSCI members instructing...

I’ve only been around Phil Anschutz a few times. My impressions on those occasions was that he was a run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire. He was used to people courting him and he addressed them condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth. I’ve never met Ryan McKibben, who runs part of Anschutz’s media group. But stories about him have circulated around Washington over the years. The stories suggest that he is an ordinary corporate bureaucrat — with all the petty vanities and the lack of interest in ideas that go with the type. This week, Anschutz and McKibben murdered The...

**SNIP** Climate activists expressed disappointment. "Without a mandate to create a plan and a requirement that its members don't take fossil fuel money, we are deeply concerned that this committee will be just another of the many committees we've seen failing our generation our entire lives," said Varshini Prakash, the Sunrise Movement's spokeswoman. The push reflects the increasing power and visibility of liberals on Capitol Hill. Poised to be the largest of the values-based caucuses next year, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has already received a jolt of energy from members such as Ocasio-Cortez, whose political celebrity and regular posts to...

China warned Canada that it needs to be aware of the consequences of aiding the U.S. in an extradition case involving Chinese tech giant Huawei that is believed to have sparked the detentions of two Canadians in China. Foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang’s comments came after U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Both were arrested on Dec. 10 after Canada detained a Huawei executive wanted by the United States on fraud charges. […] “We hope that the Canadian side can have a clear understanding of...

Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz has asked SaraACarter.com to post her letter to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in support of her friend and colleague retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who will be sentenced on Dec. 18. In her letter to Judge Sullivan Special Agent Gritz describes an FBI culture immersed in corruption, bias and fear. Gritz is also no fan of Andrew McCabe and describes him s vindictive, power-hungry, aggressive and unethical.

The QuadrigaCX cryptocurrency exchange says it can't access some $190 million in bitcoin and other funds after its founder and CEO, Gerald Cotten, died at age 30 — without sharing the password for his encrypted laptop. Cotten was "the sole officer and director" of the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange when he died, said his widow, Jennifer Robertson, in an affidavit that is part of the company's request for court assistance as it seeks protection from its creditors. The debt filing comes weeks after Robertson announced that Cotten had died — an event she described as "a shock to all of us."...

A trove of documents on the Clinton Foundation alleging possible pay for play and tax evasion have been turned over to the FBI and IRS by several investigative whistleblowers, who will be testifying in an open hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Thursday, according to the committee and lawmakers. Roughly 6,000 documents that are expected to reveal the nearly two year investigation by the whistleblowers with a private firm called MDA Analytics LLC, which allegedly turned over the documents more than a year and half ago to the IRS, according to John Solomon, who first published the...

TEHRAN, Iran – The website of Iran's Revolutionary Guard is reporting that a general who fought in Syria and Iraq has allegedly accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun. Gen. Ghodratollah Mansouri allegedly shot himself in the head by accident while cleaning his pistol, according to the Sunday report. The report added that Mansouri was veteran of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and a "defender of the shrine," a reference to Iranians who fight against the extremist Islamic State (ISIS) group in Syria and Iraq. Since 2014, Mansouri was a regional commander of the Guard's ground forces in the northeastern city...

A huge fireball exploded in the Earth's atmosphere in December, according to Nasa. The blast was the second largest of its kind in 30 years, and the biggest since the fireball over Chelyabinsk in Russia six years ago. But it went largely unnoticed until now because it blew up over the Bering Sea, off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. The space rock exploded with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer at Nasa, told BBC News a fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every 100 years. At about noon...

This is getting very very interesting. Now surfaces an Intel gem from Julian Assange’s Wikileaks alleging that the lawyer for Adam Schiff’s anti-Trump and Ukraine whistleblower was called out by Wikileaks and Assange for selling out a legal client to the CIA. And the client ended up in prison, according to Wikileaks. Wikileaks previouly hurled a brutal and damning Tweet at attorney Mark Zaid accusing him of selling out a client and working with the CIA to get that client locked up. Sounds familiar. Mark S. Zaid ✔ @MarkSZaidEsq · Nov 23, 2018 Replying to @NaomiPitcairn and 6 others Lol,...

According to one Western intelligence official, Western spy agencies have long been aware of Huawei’s intelligence-gathering function, and have exploited their knowledge to feed the Chinese with misleading information in a classic “Concordski” ploy. The name refers to the Soviet Union’s programme in the 1960s and 1970s to develop a rival to the Anglo-French supersonic Concorde airliner. The legend in intelligence circles is that the Soviet spies approached a British aeronautical engineer in an attempt to obtain detailed plans of Concorde. Alerted to the attempt, the British fed the Soviets with doctored plans. The Russian plane crashed on its international...

On Saturday night, billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on charges that he recruited dozens of underage girls into a sex-trafficking ring in Florida and New York between 2002 and 2005. The details of his indictment became public on Monday morning when federal prosecutors unsealed the sex-trafficking charges against him. Though Epstein is the only person named, many powerful people with ties to the 66-year-old are likely feeling a little nervous about the consequences of the billionaire’s arrest — including Ghislaine Maxwell, a confidante of Epstein’s who has been connected to him for more than two...

For my followers: my recent tweets are less for you than they are fir my pursuers. They are shots across the bow .. https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/1137799476507217921

While special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, some of the key people in creating the Russia-collusion narrative themselves have ties to a foreign nation. Both the Democratic National Committee as well as Fusion GPS—the company hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to research the Trump campaign—were using Ukrainian sources in their efforts to discredit Trump. Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, was a common thread involved in Democratic opposition research efforts into former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Leshchenko, along with Artem Sytnyk, the...