Free Republic

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Honduras extradited former President Juan Orlando Hernández to the United States on Thursday to face drug trafficking and weapons charges in a dramatic reversal for a leader once touted by U.S. authorities as a key ally in the war on the drugs.Just three months after leaving office, a handcuffed Hernández boarded an airplane with agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration bound for the United States, where he faces charges in the Southern District of New York. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Hernandez "abused his position as President of Honduras from 2014 through 2022 to operate...

A Russian satellite believed to be part of Moscow’s nuclear anti-satellite weapon program appears to be malfunctioning, with erratic movements suggesting it may no longer be operational. The development could be a major blow to Russia’s military space ambitions, US analysts said. Cosmos 2553 was launched just weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Over the past year, it has shown signs of uncontrolled tumbling, according to radar data from LeoLabs and optical tracking shared by Slingshot Aerospace with Reuters. The satellite is believed to serve as both a radar tool for intelligence gathering and a platform for radiation testing....

Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked his wartime minister of defence and replaced him with a trusted political ally who took part in failed peace talks last year with Russia.The dismissal of Oleksii Reznikov, who has headed Ukraine’s defence ministry since Russia invaded in February 2022, needs to be approved by the Ukrainian parliament.“I believe that the Ministry needs new approaches and other formats of interaction with both the military and society at large,” Mr Zelensky said.The 57-year-old Mr Reznikov became one of the most high-profile Ukrainians of the war, representing Ukraine at Nato meetings and dozens of bilateral talks to secure...

Russian-American ballerina Ksenia Karelina was released from Kremlin custody in a prisoner swap with the United States on Thursday morning. Karelina was freed in exchange for German-Russian Arthur Petrov at a swap in Abu Dhabi, the Wall Street Journal reported. “American Ksenia Karelina is on a plane back home to the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. “She was wrongfully detained by Russia for over a year and President Trump secured her release. @POTUS will continue to work for the release of ALL Americans,” he added. The dual-citizen spa worker was accused of treason against the Russian government...

Code name Artic Frost has been out for at least 2 days. I was waiting for someone else to start a thread, but I guess I am it Much more to follow, this is the code name that has been released by multiple sources that was used to “get Trump“

WASHINGTON — Former chief information security officer (CISO) for acquisition and sustainment at the Department of Defense is headed back to the Pentagon — this time as DoD’s CISO — following her previous suspension from the department for allegedly disclosing classified data.Katie Arrington served as a state lawmaker for South Carolina and had an unsuccessful bid for Congress before taking her post in 2019 as the chief information officer for A&S during President Donald Trump’s first administration. She played an active role in standing up the department’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program before she was put on administrative leave...

Hillary Clinton revealed she and her husband Bill Clinton once accidentally left their daughter at the Kremlin during a state visit to Russia years ago. The former First Lady appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, alongside her daughter Chelsea Clinton, 42, on Tuesday night. As part of the interview, the pair took part in a Mother Daughter Challenge, where they had to answer a series of questions asked by Fallon. At one point during the segment, Clinton, 74, was asked about her “craziest family vacation memory.” Taking a second to think, the mom-of-one remembered the time she and...

Ukraine's president has demanded the US share intelligence which suggests Russia is planning to invade his country on Wednesday after America claimed an assault was imminent. reported by German newspaper Der Spiegel, are said to detail specific routes that might be taken by individual Russian units in an imminent invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a live broadcast on Saturday told the US: 'If you have 100 percent-certain information about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, please share it with us'. Early on Saturday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a call with Russian diplomat Sergey Lavrov to discuss the crisis,...

Russia's military setbacks in Ukraine pose a new set of security challenges in Europe and beyond. When Russian forces began to roll towards the Ukrainian border on the evening of Defender of the Fatherland Day, 23 February, Moscow was anticipating the capture of Kyiv within three days. Many outside observers – including the authors of this report – feared the destruction of the conventional Ukrainian military, even if they expected the fighting to last longer than Moscow had hoped. Moscow’s plan was for repressive measures to have stabilised control of Ukraine by Victory Day on 9 May. Instead, the...

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine on February 24th, it caused a lot of problems for voices on the right and the left. Putin has a lot of fans in both corners, and these fans had spent years portraying him as a tactical genius, bamboozling us all with his four-dimensional chess moves. Right up until February 23rd, these Putin stans had been assuring us that Putin would never do something as dumb as launch a full-scale invasion of a sovereign democracy. Ever since then, the right have been able to change gears on Putin fairly seamlessly. This is WAR, and...

There are always reasons to doubt Russia is playing it straight. For years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has bundled U-turns and lies together, making it hard to distinguish between evasion and fiction, and weaponizing the toxic mix to blackmail, divide and bewilder his foes. In recent days, Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal, then gone back into it, and issued bloodcurdling threats of nuclear attack before reversing course to endorse the language of non-proliferation. This week, Putin ordered his forces to retreat from Kherson only weeks after declaring that the city would-be part of Russia “forever.”...

This stockpile of cruise and ballistic missiles was likely used to deliver massive air strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in recent months. “They apparently have a withhold for a notional NATO attack, which we would regard as absurd, but they regard it as a real possibility,” Cancian said.“So they’re holding back some part of their inventory for that.”The report further suggests that Russia has built up a stockpile of microchips and other technological components for domestic missile production before invading Ukraine on Feb. 24. In October, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin announced a set of measures to ramp up output of...

The FBI’s investigation into Trump, dubbed “Arctic Frost,” was spearheaded by a known anti-Trump agent.WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) are releasing legally protected whistleblower disclosures that prove the genesis of the federal election interference case brought against President Trump began at the hands of a prolific anti-Trump FBI agent who acted outside of established protocol for opening cases.Internal FBI emails and predicating documents provided to Grassley and released jointly by the two senators show Timothy Thibault, a former FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) who was...

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would likely impose sanctions on Russia if its president, Vladimir Putin, refuses to negotiate about ending the war in Ukraine. Trump gave no details on possible additional sanctions. The United States has already sanctioned Russia heavily for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Trump said his administration was also looking at the issue of sending weapons to Ukraine, adding his view that the European Union should be doing more to support Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be preparing to launch an invasion of Ukraine, with more than 100,000 troops positioned around the country. Certainly, the U.S. believes that’s the case and President Joe Biden has warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that an attack could come in February. But Russia denies it’s preparing to invade and Putin’s intentions remain a mystery.

Last Thursday was the second anniversary of the killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani; while the date passed virtually unnoticed in the United States, it was a major event in the Islamic Republic of Iran, featuring numerous threats of revenge from enraged Iranian leaders. One of these stood out from the others: Soleimani’s successor as Quds Force commander declared that the revenge would come from inside the United States. Iran’s state-controlled Tasnim News Agency reported that Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani was “delivering a speech to a ceremony in Mashhad” for the anniversary...

“Remarking on the soaring tensions between Ukraine and Russia, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodriguez Parrilla voiced support for Moscow and echoed his voice against NATO’s expansion eastward.” (This was way back on Feb. 20, by the way.) Most of us recall the Obama administration's lies and treachery regarding Benghazi. But how many of you know about the Obama administration's lies and treachery against the American families of the Americans ambushed and murdered on the orders of Raul Castro this week in 1996?....... Thought so...Well, please read on: You see, amigos: This week 26 years ago three U.S. citizens and...

President Joe Biden’s unlimited resettlement of Afghans has brought “dozens of suspected bomb-makers and terrorists” to the United States, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) says. As Breitbart News reported, a Department of Defense Inspector General report reveals that Biden’s agencies failed to properly vet Afghans arriving in the U.S. As of November 2021, the report states 50 Afghans already in the U.S. have been flagged for “significant security concerns.” Most of the unvetted Afghans flagged for possible terrorism ties, the report states, have since disappeared into the nation’s interior. In one instance, the report noted that only three of 31 Afghans...

Health authorities in Mozambique declared an outbreak of wild poliovirus on May 18, 2022 after confirming that a child in the north-eastern Tete province had contracted the disease. This marks the second imported case of wild poliovirus in southern Africa this year, following an outbreak in Malawi in mid-February 2022, the World Health Organization's (WHO) Regional Office for Africa said in a press release. The lone case so far, is the country's first since 1992. Genomic sequencing analysis indicates that the newly confirmed case is linked to a strain that was circulating in Pakistan in 2019, similar to the case...

The Manhattan apartment and Southampton mansion of a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin were raided by federal agents on Thursday, according to the FBI and a report. An FBI spokesperson confirmed agents “conducted law enforcement activity” at the Upper East Side high-rise and Long Island estate linked to billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, but declined to comment further. FBI officials and Homeland Security Investigation agents were seen carrying boxes out of Vekselberg’s 515 Park Ave. apartment building and his Southampton mansion at 19 Duck Pond Lane, according to NBC New York, which first reported the searches. The US...