Free Republic

New details of Moscow's intelligence work in Cuba were disclosed by Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992. ...Russian KGB officer Nikolai Leonov became "firm friends," with Mr. Castro's younger brother Raul in Prague in 1953 and then worked together with Fidel from 1956 and after he took power in 1959. The book, the second volume of what is known as the Mitrokhin archive, also reveals how Moscow sought to indirectly defeat the United States during the Cold War through large-scale "disinformation" and influence operations in the developing world. "The KGB really believed they could...

Harvard University said on Monday that it had rejected policy changes requested by the Trump administration, becoming the first university to directly refuse to comply with its demands and setting up a showdown between the federal government and the nation’s wealthiest university. Other universities have pushed back against the administration’s interference in higher education. But Harvard’s response, which called the Trump administration’s demands illegal, marked a major shift in tone for the nation’s most influential school, which has been criticized in recent weeks for capitulating to Trump administration pressure. A letter the Trump administration sent to Harvard on Friday demanded...

Global scandals now labeled Russiagate, Spygate, and what President Trump calls “Obamagate” shook the political world, but hit me closer to home. I’m the reason the so-called FBI “spy” at the center of Spygate, Stefan Halper, met Carter Page, the alleged “Russian Asset” in Russiagate’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. On May 19, 2018, this realization blindsided me in London as I was about to fly out for my wedding. The New York Times, NBC News and other sources had outed my PhD supervisor, Stefan Halper, as a spy known to the UK’s MI6 intelligence service as “The Walrus.” It didn’t seem...

Newly declassified documents show informant Stefan Halper was motivated in part by "monetary compensation" and was paid nearly $1.2 million from FBI over three decades. ********************************************************************** Akey FBI informant in the widely-debunked Russia collusion case was paid nearly $1.2 million over three decades, was motivated in part by "monetary compensation," and continued snitching even after agents concluded he told them an inaccurate story about future Trump National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, newly declassified documents show. The nearly 700 pages of once-secret documents, obtained by Just the News, were recently turned over by FBI Director Kash Patel to House Judiciary Committee...

In 2019, scholars at Cambridge University Library discovered an extremely rare 750-year-old text on the legends of King Arthur hiding in plain sight. A fragment of the fragile manuscript had been repurposed in the binding of a 16th-century property record, making it almost impossible to study the medieval text without dismantling and certainly damaging the record’s cover. Almost impossible—but not completely. An interdisciplinary team of scholars from the University of Cambridge used various advanced imaging techniques to create a virtual copy of the binding, allowing them to digitally unfold the rare text without having to damage it or the property...

A group of high-profile johns who frequented posh brothels in Massachusetts were finally named in court Friday during a hearing that laid out sordid details, including that at least one of the men paid to have unprotected sex. Mark Zhu, 28, was one of the johns to be identified during the hearing in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, courtroom where it was revealed he allegedly paid $840 for two hours of unsafe sex with a prostitute – in a service referred to as “bb,” the Daily Mail reported. Also revealed were the identities of other alleged johns including, Kerry Wu, John J....

SAN DIEGO – Russell Thurston, a former executive vice president at Cambridge International Systems, Inc., a defense contractor headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, pleaded guilty in federal court today, admitting that he participated in a bribery scheme with other Cambridge employees and former Naval Information Warfare Center employee James Soriano.According to Thurston’s plea agreement, Cambridge – acting through Thurston and multiple other Cambridge employees – gave various things of value to Soriano, including expensive meals at restaurants in San Diego; a ticket to the 2018 Major League Baseball All Star Game held at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.; and a job...

Harvard University-affiliated astronomers announced the discovery of a new asteroid zooming precariously close to Earth — only to learn it was actually a Tesla sports car launched by Elon Musk as a publicity stunt seven years ago, scientists said Friday. The Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., officially registered the new space rock Jan. 2, saying it was spotted hurling through the final frontier roughly 150,000 miles from Earth, according to Astronomy magazine. Its distance was closer to the planet than the moon— prompting the scientists to declare the asteroid had the potential to some day slam into Earth. The...

The art in espionage is the ability to hide in plain sight and the greatest of spies are the ones you never learn about. This statement rings true in the case of Anthony Blunt. His life seemed predestined for greatness. A Cambridge graduate with familial ties to the Royal Family, he was the very picture of establishment respectability. His brilliance as a polymath, fluency in multiple languages, and renown as a world-class art historian made him virtually untouchable, and he knew it. Beneath this veneer of aristocratic refinement lurked a secret that would shake Britain to its very foundations. For...

A screenshot taken from a television broadcast showed one Chavista operative sending all the latest news about Tren de Aragua's mayhem in the U.S. to Maduro himself. Venezuela's democratic forces are a pretty observant lot, having spotted evidence of fraud in some background pictures of the regime's vote-counting houses as employees took selfies. Now, one of them has spotted something interesting on dictator Nicolas Maduro's cell phone as he made a televised speech, in a whatsapp message from one of his closest lieutenants: 𝐄𝐫𝐢𝐤 𝐒𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐳 Φ @eriksuarezn Image taken during a Maduro speech on National TV (Venezuela 🇻🇪) The Whatsapp...

London -- A team of scientists from the world’s leading universities have developed a new all-in-one vaccine that they hope can protect humans against a broad range of coronaviruses, including ones that are yet to emerge. The research published in ‘Nature Nanotechnology’ on Monday is based on a new approach to vaccine development called “proactive vaccinology”, where scientists build a vaccine before the disease-causing pathogen even emerges, which has shown promising results in mice. The study by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK and Caltech in the US says the vaccine works by training the body’s immune...

When you observe renowned landscape artist John Constable’s bucolic painting “Hampstead Heath” above, what feelings does it inspire? Calm? Nostalgia? Spiritual uplift? A surge of white supremacist pride and jingoistic fervor?For some reason – my guess is a toxic mix of colonialist guilt, multiculturalist self-loathing, and pressure from neo-Marxist donors and administrators determined to “deconstruct” Western civilization – England’s Fitzwilliam Museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, recently overhauled its collections with new signage warning sensitive visitors that landscape paintings of the British countryside can evoke dark “nationalist feelings.”Paintings at the Fitzwilliam have been reshuffled into new categories that are...

IMAGE: Alex Tabarrok/X Imply ‘only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong’ A British museum owned by the University of Cambridge recently “overhauled” its displays with “new signage,” one of which states paintings of the British countryside can conjure up sinister “nationalist feelings.” According to The Telegraph, the Fitzwilliam Museum underwent a “refurbishment” over the last half-decade with “an emphasis on reflecting the ‘evolution of its collection.’” The museum reopened last week with galleries based on themes rather than chronology. A sign for the new “Nature” gallery reads Landscape paintings were also always entangled...

Palestinian protester destroys a painting of Lord Balfour at the University of Cambridge

In a video that has since gone viral online, a protester spray-painted and slashed a portrait of Lord Balfour at Trinity College, University of Cambridge in England. Lord Balfour was the architect of the Balfour Declaration and was a prominent advocate for a Jewish home in Palestine. In a letter from Nov. 2 1917, Lord Balfour told Lord Rothschild that the British government looked favorably upon "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done...

Evidence suggests our intelligence agencies launched the Russia-collusion hoax months before the Clinton campaign joined in full force.Tuesday’s explosive news — that long before the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community had asked foreign intel agencies to surveil 26 people connected to Donald Trump — raises the question of whether our intelligence community colluded with the Clinton campaign in these efforts. After all, it was then-Biden campaign adviser and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who “set in motion the events that led to” 51 former intel officials issuing the public statement that falsely framed...

A Cambridge state representative says the migrant crisis has reached a “real boiling point” and is blaming the secretary of state for refusing to consider shifting an overflow shelter at an old courthouse into a 24/7 operation. Rep. Mike Connolly, a Democrat whose district encompasses the old courthouse in East Cambridge, told the Herald on Saturday that he, city officials, and the rest of the city’s state delegation, have been “begging” Secretary William Galvin for weeks to run the shelter around the clock, but Galvin hasn’t budged. The conflict has reached a point where the Cambridge City Council, Public Schools,...

A philosophy student has been found guilty of murdering her boyfriend when she “lost her temper” and drunkenly ran over him with her car, dragging him underneath. Alice Wood, 23, used her Ford Fiesta as a weapon when she hit partner, Ryan Watson, 24, near the home they shared in Rode Heath, Cheshire, at about 11.30pm on 6 May 2022. Wood, who had just received a scholarship for a master’s at Cambridge, denied murder and an alternative count of manslaughter as she claimed her boyfriend’s death was a “tragic accident”. She told her trial at Chester crown court she did...

After more than 2,500 Cambridge residents made their voices heard during the participatory budget vote in 2021, more than 70 new street signs in East Cambridge will include translations into the native Massachusett language. Sage Carbone, a Cambridge resident, proposed the participatory budget item to add traditional Native translations to city signs, along with commemorating Native American sites in Cambridge with markers. “Any representation is missing,” she said. Carbone is a member of the Northern Narragansett Indian Tribe of Rhode Island with Nipmuc, Massachusett ancestry.

A network of "sophisticated" high-end brothels in greater Boston and eastern Virginia provided sex for pay to "elected officials, high tech and pharmaceutical executives, doctors, military officers, government contractors that possess security clearances, professors," and others, federal prosecutors said Wednesday...Charged in the case were Han "Hana" Lee, 41, Junmyung Lee, 30, and 68-year-old James Lee.