Free Republic

Twitter said Friday morning that a tweet from President Trump in which he threatened shooting in response to civil unrest in Minneapolis violated the company's rules. The company said it was leaving the tweet up in the public interest. Why it matters: The move exacerbates tensions between Twitter and Trump over the company's authority to label or limit his speech and, conversely, the president's authority to dictate rules for a private company.

Rudy Giuliani questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci's involvement in grants from the United States to a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that has been tied to the coronavirus pandemic. According to a report, the U.S. Intelligence Community has growing confidence that the current coronavirus strain may have accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than from a wildlife market, as the Chinese Communist Party first claimed. During a Sunday interview on The Cats Roundtable, Giuliani questioned why the U.S. gave money to the lab. "Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving money to any laboratory, including...

The speed of the news cycle and the media obsession with the presidential horseraces have crowded out a crucial development in the war on ISIS and related Islamic jihadist groups. House Speaker Paul Ryan has been sounding out colleagues for a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The current AUMF, which was written in 2001 and targeted groups connected to 9/11, has not been renewed. Believe it or not. Bravo for Paul Ryan's statesmanship. But a new AUMF must be accompanied by a clear U.S. declaration of war against ISIS. We will never destroy them without a full-blown...

Israel wants the Obama administration and Lockheed-Martin Company to set up a US-run logistics and maintenance center for the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet in the Negev, reports "Defense News", quoting US and Israeli government and industry sources. Lockheed-Martin is the chief contractor for the F-35, which is due to become the next-generation mainstay of the Israel Air Force. Defense News" says that Israeli officials consider construction of a large logistics center to be a critical factor for independent operational capabilities, especially since airports and seaports are liable to be targets of rocket and missile attacks in a war. Ministry...

I have just finished reading William R. Forstchen's new novel One Second After. Briefly, it is about the instantaneous breakdown of American way of life as the result of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which disables the nation's electrical grid as well as all sophisticated electrical components in cars (they stop), planes (they crash), telecomunications of every sort, etc. leaving the population in a world similar to that of the Eighteenth Century. Shortages of every variety create societal strains, chaos, death and destruction in a matter of weeks and months. Forstchen's book (with a forward written by Newt Gingrich), while fiction,...

North Korea’s armed forces are capable of carrying out 13 kinds of viral and bacterial attack, the South Korean Government said yesterday in one of the most detailed assessments of the dictatorship’s biological weapons arsenal. In a submission to the South Korean National Assembly, the Defence Minister also said that the North had 5,000 tonnes of chemical weapons, believed to include mustard gas, phosgene and sarin. Among its biological agents are cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, typhoid fever and dysentery. Despite the alarming assessment, Kim Tae Young also said that his country’s armed forces had the capacity pre-emptively to destroy...

North Korea is increasingly focused on cyber warfare, improvised explosives and missile technology as the regime fears it would be defeated in a direct confrontation with US and South Korean forces, a US commander said on Tuesday. The emphasis on unconventional methods comes amid signs North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il appears to be firmly "in charge" and in decent health, General Walter Sharp, commander of US forces in Korea, told reporters on Tuesday. "I think the North Koreans probably realized they could not win in a normal conventional all-out attack," Sharp said. Given the strength of South Korean and US...

The history of warfare and the history of disease are unquestionably interwoven. Throughout the history of warfare, disease and non-battle injury have accounted for more deaths and loss of combat capability than from actual battle in war itself. The most striking example is the great influenza pandemic during World War I that killed 20 million people or more worldwide in 1918.1 Although this was a naturally occurring event, what if a country could create a biological agent that could yield the same catastrophic loss of life on the enemy? That, in essence, is the potential effect of applying genetic engineering2...

June 22, 2008: A new battlefield for the war on terror has developed in Venezuela. There, leftist president Hugo Chavez has not only established close diplomatic relations with Iran (and Cuba, North Korea and radical groups throughout the region), but has allowed Iran to set up operations in South America. Regular commercial flights from Iran to Venezuela (via Syria, to accommodate Hizbollah) carry people, cash and whatever else Iran wants to move. No questions asked, no visas required. Several U.S. counter-terrorism operations have gone to work, trying to find out what Iran is up to, and how to block any...

The Bush administration took action Wednesday against a Venezuelan official and others accused of providing financial support to the Hizbullah terror group. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. [file] Photo: AP , AP Slideshow: Pictures of the week The Treasury Department's action covers Ghazi Nasr al Din, whom the United States identified as a Venezuelan diplomat. The order also targets Fawzi Kan'an and two Venezuelan-based travel agencies - Biblos and Hilal - that he allegedly owns or controls. Kan'an denied the Treasury Department's accusations. "That's pure lies," he told The Associated Press. "What do I have...

A Venezuelan journalist is reporting that Hugo Chavez’s government is recruiting young men to train with Hezbollah for the purpose of asymmetrical warfare against the US. Fausta has the translation. Hugo Chavez pretends to cut back on his support of the FARC, when his “dangerous” associations go well beyond the Colombian guerrilla. See the original article and read the whole translation.

LONDON [MENL] -- Iran has created a women's insurgency force meant to help annex Iraq. Iranian opposition sources said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has established a female unit for operations in Iraq. The sources said IRGC's Quds Force has been training women for the Bader Brigade in Iraq to infiltrate the Baghdad government. Membership in the women's unit has been limited to Shi'ites, who would conduct special operations in Iraq, the sources said. They said IRGC sought to establish Shi'ite women sleeper cells within the Iraqi government and security forces. "The unit would work toward the ultimate goal of...

Fifty years ago, China invaded Tibet. What was the first task of the 'Liberation's Army'? 'To defend the western borders', Mao stated. On the ground, it meant building new roads leading to India (including the Aksai Chin road on Indian territory). The same roads were used 12 years later to invade India. The Chinese always plan years in advance. The 'beyond Taiwan policy' [mentioned in the first part of this article] brings to my mind the railway line scheduled to reach Lhasa, the Tibetan capital in July 2006. In February 2001, the 1,118-kilometer railway stretch from Golmud (the current terminus...