Free Republic

BY THE OREGONIAN/OREGONLIVE (Compiled from news accounts, court records, public notices) Last week's arrest of a long-sought accused eco-saboteur pushed the spotlight back on a tight-knit cell of radical environmentalists responsible for a $48 million run of firebombings and other crimes across the West in the 1990s and early 2000s. Six men and five women prosecuted in Oregon received sentences ranging from three years to 13 years. They were arrested starting in 2005 in what the FBI called "Operation Backfire," a task force that tracked down the suspects with the help of an informant deep within the underground group....

California lawmakers and former top cops say Kamala Harris’s new campaign ads presenting her as ‘tough’ on drug trafficking don’t match with her record as a prosecutor – when she advocated not charging dealers until their third arrest. Harris proposed a policy in 2005 when she was San Francisco District Attorney to only prosecute drug dealers the third time they were caught selling narcotics, DailyMail.com has learned. The plan sparked a scandal and was only halted when the city’s police chief Heather Fong pushed back to prevent it. So when the Harris presidential campaign released an ad on August 7...

Acknowledging Americans might not “be ready for it,” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump called for the death penalty for drug dealers to help combat the effects of becoming a “drug-infested nation.” Trump made the comments during a speech at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, carried live by Newsmax on Friday, a key battleground in the upcoming election. Trump said a drug dealer in the U.S. kills 500 people, on average, over the course of dealing fentanyl and other dangerous drugs. “So a drug dealer kills 500 people. And the only thing they would understand would be the death penalty. If...

Maria Ramos, 33 and a mother of eight, was shot and killed in the city after she challenged some teenage drug dealers who reportedly sold weed to her children.. A mother of eight children was brutally executed after she confronted drug dealers in Oakland, California who were reportedly selling weed to her kids. Maria Ramos, 33, was shot and killed in the city after she confronted the teenage drug dealers. Maria Ramos was visiting her mother, Blanca Velasco, with her children on Aug. 7 when the dealers sold pot pipes to two of Ramos’ children, the Daily Mail reports. Ramos...

Baby Winter had 15 times the lethal amount of fentanyl in her blood when she died.The Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office charged two more people in the fentanyl-overdose death of an 18-month-old that occurred in San Jose back in August of 2023. The district attorney's office claims that Phillip Ortega, 31, of Gilroy, and Paige Vitale, 32, of San Jose, provided Winter Doe's parents with a "steady supply of drugs." They all took drugs while the baby girl was wandering inside the "drug-littered" residence. "Evidence shows that the babysitting dealers left opioids and dirty drug paraphernalia in the...

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' case against former President Donald Trump in Georgia may have been dealt a blow after the judge presiding over the matter agreed to hear pretrial motions and an appeal against Willis' ability to bring charges against one of the defendants. In August, Trump and 18 other defendants were indicted as part of Willis' probe into alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. On March 28, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee is expected to hear arguments from Trump's lawyers that the Georgia election interference case is intended to criminalize political speech....

Murders in Maravatio raise concerns about drug gangs trying to sway local races.. Two candidates for mayor in the Mexican city of Maravatio have been gunned down within hours of each other, raising worries that drug gangs are trying to influence the June 2 election. Campaigning doesn't formally begin until Friday. State prosecutors said Tuesday that Armando Pérez was found shot to death in his car just before midnight, per the AP. He was the candidate for the conservative National Action Party. Hours earlier, officials with the ruling Morena party confirmed their candidate, Miguel Ángel Zavala, was found shot to...

A gun violence prevention advocate has been arrested in a major drug and guns bust after being snared in a two-year investigation dubbed 'Operation in Plain Sight'. Michael Rodriguez, 49, was arrested in his home in Yonkers, New York on July 26 after cops seized a cache of illegal contraband including over a kilo of cocaine, three pistols and a shotgun. The activist was also found with $165,000 in cash and $50,000 in jewelry, and is accused of orchestrating a major trafficking ring all while acting as executive director of Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence. Rodriguez was among 15 people...

Hunter Biden claims Russian drug dealers stole another one of his laptops for blackmail while he was drugged out in a Vegas hotel room in 2018 Video obtained by DailyMail.com shows Hunter with a naked hooker in 2019 after filming a sex tape and explaining how he believed his laptop was stolen Hunter left the camera rolling as he recounted a Las Vegas bender in which he spent '18 days going round from penthouse suite to penthouse suite' The incident would mean Hunter lost a total of three computers, each likely to hold sensitive information on President Joe Biden The...

Overdoses continue to skyrocket in B.C. seven years after the province declared the drug epidemic a public health emergency. Seven years after the province of British Columbia declared the drug epidemic a public health emergency, and just one month after the decriminalization of all drugs, overdoses continue to skyrocket. According to the Canadian Press, B.C. tragically set three new overdose records this March, just the second month after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s federal government allowed the province to decriminalize all drugs starting February 1, 2023... In March, B.C. saw the most overdose calls ever recorded in one day (205), the...

The ever-escalating fentanyl crisis in U.S. cities has been particularly acute in the Bay Area. It’s made for some interesting headlines as well, from reports that the head of San Jose’s police union ran an international fentanyl-dealing operation out of her home for years to Elon Musk calling for legalization. Among supporters of harm reduction, who point to the abysmal failure of the War on Drugs to do much beyond swell the U.S. prison population, the term “drug worker” is a suggested replacement for the term “drug dealer.” A Canadian drug-policy expert’s Twitter thread went viral among certain segments of...

A decade ago, most people thought of Tylenol (acetaminophen) as a medicine for fever, malaise and minor aches and pains. Nobody imagined that it would become the go-to drug for treating moderate, let alone severe, postoperative pain. But this is just what has happened. Thanks to pressure from lawmakers, government agencies and policymakers who inserted themselves into the patient-doctor relationship, patients became the victims of the never-ending war on drugs. Now, doctors frequently offer only acetaminophen to treat painful conditions despite the drug’s inability to remedy them. Policymakers’ exaggerated fear of opioids has pressured hospitals, doctors and dentists to switch...

A pair of drug dealers threatened to shoot up the set of the Apple TV+ show Lady in the Lake if production didn't pay them $50,000The incident took place on the 200 block of Park Avenue in Downtown Baltimore Baltimore, and the set was ultimately moved to a new location after a delay The show stars Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyong’o who clash during an investigation into a murder in 1960s Baltimore A pair of Baltimore drug dealers threatened to shoot up the set of a new Natalie Portman show if they didn't stop filming on their block, but told...

A man was randomly stabbed on the Upper East Side in New York City Thursday, and law enforcement is still looking for the suspect. In a video shared by the New York City Police Department (NYPD), the suspect, clad in black and wearing a balaclava mask, hopped off a bicycle before approaching the stranger while carrying a knife, the New York Post reported Sunday.

Anonymous alleged “U.S. and congressional officials” told the Wall Street Journal this week President Joe Biden is planning to remove the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a nearly 60-year-old terrorist organization responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, from America’s list of designated foreign terrorist groups. The FARC, a communist group, has been responsible for a wide variety of human rights atrocities in Colombia since its founding in 1964 that include mass killings, kidnappings, child rape, forced abortions, the use of child soldiers, and one of the world’s most lucrative drug trafficking operations. The government of then-President Juan Manuel...

Hunter Biden released his 'tell-all' memoir Beautiful Things on Tuesday, but left out shocking details DailyMail.com can reveal those secrets after contents of his abandoned laptop - including a cache of 103,000 text messages, 154,000 emails, more than 2,000 photos - were verified by top forensics experts Hunter left his MacBook Pro laptop at a Wilmington, Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never returned for it In texts from 2019, Hunter begged his father to run for president to salvage Hunter's own reputation Hunter repeatedly dodged police action against him, despite constantly dealing with drug dealers and prostitutes...

The boy's mother remains hospitalized with serious injuries, while both dogs have been euthanized, officials saidA 3-year-old boy was attacked and killed, and a mother badly injured, by two dogs in their New Jersey neighborhood, law enforcement officials said Tuesday. The attack in Carteret occurred in the backyard of a home around 4:30 p.m., according to Middlesex County Prosecutor Yolanda Ciccone and town police chief Dennis McFadden. First responders quickly arrived at the scene and airlifted the young boy to the hospital. The child died at the hospital. The mother, who was said to have suffered severe injuries, remained hospitalized...

Minnesota’s Muslim African-American Attorney General Keith Ellison did not charge Officer Derek Chauvin with a hate crime or even with intentionally murdering Floyd. So far, the most interesting aspect of the trial of police officer Derek Chauvin are the crimes for which he has not been charged. Chauvin has been vilified for his role in the arrest-related-death of a man resisting arrest. Despite almost a year of riots, ranting and raving by cable news, and even condemnations by supposedly law-and-order radio talk show hosts, Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin is not being charged with the intentional murder of George...

In the last few months, I have received half a dozen e-mails inviting me to become a "friend" on Facebook. Some of these are from my beloved children, some from colleagues and former students, and others from people I barely know. In every case, I have politely declined, explaining that I detest the idea of Facebook and refuse to be emotionally blackmailed into joining it solely to avoid offending them. My first reason for opposing Facebook is the sheer phoniness of it. "Friends" are collected and displayed, like a stud's panty collection in a frat house. The very indiscriminateness of...

Vote selling concerned some a century ago. Many voted for Prohibition to stop taverns from trading beer for ballots. Vote selling hasn't been practical in this century because would be sellers cannot prove how they voted. New mail in voting procedures will make it easier for Americans to sell their votes because the seller could show the buyer the completed ballot or give the buyer the blank ballot and envelope. Drug dealers would be the first ballot buyers because they can trade drugs for ballots and their organizations want to affect some races. Their customers might know other vote sellers....