Free Republic

Australian war hero Ben Roberts-Smith said he would not encourage potential recruits to join the armed forces because of the lack of support veterans receive. The former soldier believes the heads of the Australian Defence Force are putting themselves ahead of servicemen and not providing the assistance that veterans need. The 41-year-old told The Daily Telegraph he would not endorse young people going into the military without a major shakeup in leadership. 'My opinion is the Australian Defence Force needs good young Australians… but when you look at what is happening at the moment it gives me pause to think,...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Iran and Sweden carried out a prisoner swap Saturday that saw Tehran release a European Union diplomat and another man for an Iranian convicted in Stockholm of committing war crimes over his part in 1988 mass executions in the Islamic Republic. The arrest of Hamid Nouri by Sweden in 2019 as he traveled there as a tourist likely sparked the detentions of the two Swedes, part of a long-running strategy by Iran since its 1979 Islamic Revolution to use those with ties abroad as chip in negotiations with the West.

During a rendezvous at the United Nations General Assembly, the Iranian regime's foreign minister lodged a formal complaint with his Swedish counterpart about the trial of Hamid Noury, a former Iranian official, in Stockholm. Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told Sweden's Ann Linde that all the documents provided to the court are "fabricated." A month prior, a spokesman for the regime's Foreign Ministry had warned, "We will naturally use all our diplomatic means to obtain and enforce Hamid Noury's rights." Who is Hamid Noury, and why is the regime clearly terrified of his trial in Sweden? Hamid Noury was a low-ranking official in...

Since December 2017, deeply aggrieved Iranian citizens have publicly denounced two blatantly linked injustices perpetrated by the corrupt ayatollah regime: the clerical dictatorship's hideous corruption and Iran's acute economic deterioration. Iran's Islamic revolutionary dictatorship is a case study in repeated failure, incompetence, corruption and mass murder. I estimate that since 1990, I've written over two dozen essays examining the failed Iranian regime's murderous Islamic global revolution, the mass domestic Iranian disappointment with the regime's governance and the Iranian public's evident disgust with governmental corruption. The internet documents my claim. If your mainstream media sources didn't notice Iran's domestic discord, henceforth...

From 7/7 to Manchester 2025 – the story they refuse to tellAfter the Manchester synagogue attack, I began tracing two decades of Islamic terrorism in Britain – uncovering a disturbing pattern hidden in plain sight. This is not prejudice. It’s record-keeping – and a warning about policies putting us all at risk.ManchesterI didn’t learn about the Manchester synagogue terrorist attack until I opened my phone after Yom Kippur had ended. I had also missed messages from my cousin, who had witnessed the event and been evacuated from her home by the police.By 7:30 the following morning, I had already traced...

For the first time ever, significant light is being shed on one of the most horrendous human rights atrocities of the second half of the 20th century. In 1988, more than 30,000 political prisoners were senselessly massacred by Iranian officials. More than 30 years later, one of the people who participated in the massacre, Hamid Noury, is on trial in Sweden. The Noury trial should spark more media and public scrutiny about the 1988 massacre, and ultimately trigger a long overdue international investigation. Hamid Noury has been incarcerated in Sweden since November 2019 when he visited the country for personal...

Vienna (AFP) - The UN's nuclear watchdog said Monday that Iran's stock of heavy water for reactors has surpassed the limit set under its agreement with world powers. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that Iran's heavy water production plant was in operation and that its stock of heavy water reserves was 131.5 tonnes, above the 130-tonne limit. In Vienna, an IAEA spokesperson said: "On 17 November, the Agency verified that the Heavy Water Production Plant (HWPP) was in operation and that Iran’s stock of heavy water was 131.5 metric tonnes." Heavy water is not itself radioactive...

Army spokesman General Leon Kasonga announced the large-scale offensive on Thursday in the Beni region, an early epicentre of the more than yearlong Ebola outbreak. The offensive primarily targets Allied Democratic Forces rebels who have killed hundreds of civilians and security forces over the past few years and recruited children. Attacks have hampered Ebola containment efforts. The northeast region borders Uganda and Rwanda. The DRC's military offensive comes days after a meeting of regional military leaders on how to rid eastern DRC of rebel groups. But the DRC's army is making clear that it is carrying out this new offensive...

Jeanine Áñez was detained in the early morning in her hometown of Trinidad and was flown to the capital, La Paz. She had earlier warned that officials were searching for her, terming it “abuse and persecution” in Twitter posts. The arrest of Áñez and warrants against numerous other former officials further worsened political tensions in a South American country already torn by a cascade of perceived wrongs suffered by both sides. Those include complaints that Morales had grown more authoritarian with nearly 13 years in office, that he illegally ran for a fourth reelection and then allegedly rigged the outcome,...

Impeachment Star Witness Was Aware of Burisma Corruption Ex-Con Hired by D.C. as ‘Violence Interrupter’ Charged with Murder Judicial Watch Confronts the Election Crisis President Trump Echoes Judicial Watch Concerns about Dirty Voter Rolls Turns out that one of the Democrats’ star witnesses in their sham impeachment of President Trump – former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch – seemed to have been shading the truth. Are you at all surprised? We just received 210 pages of records from the State Department showing that Yovanovitch had specifically warned in 2017 about corruption allegations against Burisma Holdings. However, during...

Bolivia Files Charges for Crimes Against Humanity Against Evo Morales at The Hague The International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague received a petition Tuesday to open a case against socialist former president of Bolivia Evo Morales and several of his senior cabinet members for “crimes against humanity” committed in the aftermath of his resignation in November. The government of Bolivia filed the charges citing evidence of a “campaign of terrorism” against the Bolivian people intended to ensure Morales returned to power. Morales resigned on November 10 willingly in the aftermath of the publication of an Organization of American States...

A federal judge on Wednesday agreed with Gov. Andrew Cuomo's statement that pro-lifers “have no place” in New York.The judge then moved to make that recommendation a legal reality.The Washington Examiner reported that a federal judge struck down a Trump administration rule that would have allowed for healthcare workers to refuse to provide or refer to sterilizations, abortions, and medically assisted suicide if doing so violated their faith.

William D. Ruckelshaus, who resigned as deputy attorney general rather than carry out President Richard M. Nixon’s illegal order to fire the independent special Watergate prosecutor in the constitutional crisis of 1973 known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” died on Wednesday at his home in Seattle. He was 87.

NEW YORK, October 18 (C-Fam) The pro-abortion UN Population Fund (UNFPA) does not want pro-life critics in attendance when the agency convenes a conference in Nairobi in mid-November. UNFPA and the government of Kenya are co-hosting the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25: Accelerating the Promise to mark the 25th anniversary of the original and very controversial Cairo Conference on Population and Development. UNFPA’s website claims the conference “will offer an inclusive platform, bringing together governments, civil society, private sector organizations, women’s’ groups and youth networks to discuss and agree on actions to accelerate implementation” of the Cairo Program of Action. Pro-life...

The Chinese Communist Party has ramped up its propaganda efforts to control the narrative surrounding the novel coronavirus—by rejecting criticism and painting a picture that Beijing is effectively handling the outbreak. The regime’s propaganda has gone through several phases: first ignoring the severity of the outbreak, then creating positive coverage, and now, blaming the United States. Internal government documents obtained by The Epoch Times have highlighted how the regime bungled its data tracking and censored discussions of the outbreak, fueling the virus’s spread. High-ranking communist authorities have pushed a handful of talking points to deflect blame, including that the origin...

A Maryland man accused of kidnapping and killing a Bethel Park woman after leaving her tied to a signpost in the Nevada desert has been charged federally with kidnapping resulting in death. John Matthew Chapman, 39, was named in an FBI complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court and will appear before a judge next month. Chapman is accused of kidnapping and murdering Jaime Feden, 33, with whom he had a tumultuous relationship. After the killing, the FBI said, he lived at her house and posed as her on Facebook Messenger to thwart attempts by her friends and relatives to...

The trial in Sweden of Hamid Noury, an agent of the Iranian regime, ended on May 5th. The prosecutor told the court that there was plenty of evidence to show that Hamid Noury committed the crimes he had been charged with and she asked for him to be sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict is expected later. The court case in Stockholm has been a direct embarrassment to Iran’s executioner president, Ebrahim Raisi, dubbed ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ for his hands-on role in the killing of thousands of political prisoners, including teenagers and even pregnant women, during a notorious massacre...

Ohio detected and thwarted an election-related cyber attack earlier this month, the state’s elections chief said. Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose said the “relatively unsophisticated” hacking attempt on Nov. 5, which was Election Day, originated in Panama but was traced to a Russian-owned company. LaRose told The Columbus Dispatch Tuesday that the would-be attackers were looking around for vulnerabilities in his office’s website. “They are poking around for soft spots,” LaRose said. The ultimate goal of such attacks is disrupting and undermining the credibility of elections, but LaRose said Ohio’s election results are safe because neither the election machines...

Ultimately, all coronavirus deaths are connected to Wuhan, but that’s not what UCSF microbiologist Dr. Charles Chiu means. He’s talking about different strains of the virus which can be detected with gene sequencing. So, for instance, the original Wuhan strain of the virus can be differentiated from the strain that formed the first U.S. hotspot in Washington state by looking for specific mutations.Dr. Chiu, who has been studying the outbreak in the Bay Area hasn’t been able to test samples from the three early victims of the disease which Santa Clara officials announced yesterday, so consider this informed speculation:...

HONG KONG—For months now, I’ve been told that Hong Kong’s protests would end soon. They’ll end when school starts, I heard during the summer. School did start, but the protests wore on, only now I saw high-school students in crisp school uniforms joining the protesters’ ranks. Next, the mask ban of early October was supposed to slow protesters down, but the very first day after that ban, I watched streams of protesters in masks and helmets make their way to their usual haunts on Hong Kong Island. The government shut down many of the subway lines that day, a practice...