Free Republic

A Chinese court has sentenced to death 11 members of a notorious family that ran scam centres in Myanmar, according to Chinese state media. Dozens of members of the Ming family were found guilty of conducting criminal activities, with many receiving lengthy jail sentences. The Ming family worked for one of the four clans that ran Myanmar's sleepy backwater town of Laukkai, close to the border with China, and turned it into a hub for gambling, drugs and scam centres. Myanmar eventually cracked down, arresting many members of these families in 2023 and handing them over to Chinese authorities. A...

A police officer shot a 16-year-old boy when he refused to drop the broomstick he was holding in Salt Lake City last night. The officer was responding to an unrelated call in the Utah capital at 8.15pm when his team spotted two teenagers arguing with a man, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Surrounding them, police allegedly told the boy to drop what he was holding - part of a broomstick. When he did not, 'shots were fired'. The boy was hit in the chest and the stomach.

It's not every day that an American labor union gets investigated for possible ties to two of the world's most lethal terrorist organizations. But Chicago's Service Employees International Union Local 73 isn't an everyday union. Last September 24, FBI agents raided residences in Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan of more than a dozen radical activists in an effort to connect them to the Hamas (Gaza and the West Bank) and FARC (Colombia) guerrilla movements. Two of the occupants were SEIU Local 73 chief steward and executive board member Joe Iosbaker and former local board member-steward Tom Burke. Neither they nor anyone else has...

Trump’s critics charge him with violating both domestic and international law by using the U.S. military to target drug cartels and drug runners, claiming that his actions are unprecedented. But as far back as the Reagan administration in 1986, U.S. Army infantry and aviation assets operated with Bolivian forces against drug producers in that country. And in 1993, President Bill Clinton issued a Presidential Decision Directive on Counternarcotics in the Western Hemisphere, assigning a substantial role in drug interdiction to the military.The National Defense Authorization Act of 1995 authorized use of military assets in drug interdiction: 14 USC Section 526...

WASHINGTON – Ryan Wedding, a former Canadian Olympic snowboarder who was among the FBI’s top fugitives and faces charges related to multinational drug trafficking and the killing of a federal witness, has been arrested in Mexico, top Justice Department officials said Friday. Wedding, 44, is accused of running a drug trafficking operation, and officials say he orchestrated several killings to further the drug crimes. He was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, and authorities had offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel...

President Donald Trump has granted clemency to James Phillip Womack, the son of Arkansas Republican Rep. Steve Womack, commuting the remainder of his federal prison sentence for drug distribution. The commutation was issued under an executive grant of clemency signed by Trump and released by the Justice Department. USA Today reported that James Womack was sentenced in federal court in May 2024 to eight years in prison and fined $1,900 for distributing more than five grams of methamphetamine.The sentence stemmed from a federal indictment filed April 26, 2023, charging James Womack with distributing methamphetamine and being a felon in possession...

The Rocky Mountain West remains in the grip of fentanyl and methamphetamine addiction, with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reporting record drug seizures throughout the region in 2025, Wyoming included. Last year, the DEA seized 8,729,000 fentanyl pills and nearly 3,100 pounds of methamphetamine across the four-state mountain region that includes Colorado, Utah, Montana and Wyoming, with fentanyl seizures in Wyoming up by 264% in 2025, according to DEA figures. Statewide law enforcement continues to grapple with drugs infiltrating Wyoming communities as traces of carfentanil, an extremely potent synthetic opioid used to tranquilize large animals, was discovered in small doses...

President Trump has made lowering prescription drug prices a clear priority, repeatedly arguing that Americans should not be forced to pay more for medicine than patients in other developed countries. Drugmakers have publicly welcomed that message. But their actions tell a more complicated story.First reported by Reuters this week, pharmaceutical companies are raising list prices on more than 350 drugs for 2026. Many of the increases were small, but others were not, including sharp hikes on certain hospital-administered and specialty medicines that patients and providers rely on every day.Among the steepest increases were those for Demerol, a painkiller used in...

"An insanely powerful and addictive opioid responsible for the deaths of half a million Americans" and "good news" hardly go hand in hand. And yet some good news about fentanyl is exactly what I have for you today. No, I'm not here to tell you that prices are down and availability is up — not even my sense of humor runs quite that grim. Besides, I wouldn't know. Fentanyl pricing and availability aren't exactly the kind of neighborhood news I look for on Nextdoor, and my only "dealer" is the clerk behind the cash register at my corner liquor store....

➡️ Hezbollah established a presence in Colombia by leveraging the large Lebanese diaspora and the country's civil conflict, initially for recruitment and fundraising before expanding into a vast transnational criminal network. ➡️ The group's operations are primarily financed by cocaine trafficking, forging a key transactional alliance with FARC and FARC dissident groups in exchange for arms, training, and money laundering facilities. ➡️ Hezbollah's deep criminal nexus in Colombia, bolstered by Iranian ties and a weak security apparatus, increases its capacity to conduct hybrid warfare and carry out asymmetric attacks against U.S. and Israeli interests. Lebanon’s brutal civil war triggered waves...

The United States and Venezuela announced Friday they are pursuing the possibility of reestablishing diplomatic relations, coming a week after a U.S. military operation that captured former leader Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and extradited him to face drug-trafficking charges in New York.A U.S. delegation, including diplomats and security personnel, visited Venezuela to evaluate the potential reopening of the American Embassy in Caracas, the State Department said in a statement sent to media outlets. The department did not immediately return a request for comment.The embassy has been shuttered since 2019, when ties were severed during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term...

Not even a month in the hospital on a feeding tube was enough to make Sydni Collins quit pot. Collins had reached for her weed pen most days since she turned 16, even as waves of extreme nausea and vomiting overtook her. One particularly brutal episode left her vomiting nonstop during a flight in the spring break of her senior year. “There were some days when it lasted until noon and I would not go to school because of how bad it was,” Collins, 23, told The Post. “I would be puking all morning. I would let out yells or...

President Donald Trump announced in an interview aired Jan. 8 that the United States will begin launching strikes on the cartels in Mexico. “We knocked out 97 percent of the drugs coming in by water, and we are going to start now hitting land with regard with the cartels,” Trump told Fox News. “The cartels are running Mexico,” Trump said. “It’s very sad to watch and see what’s happened to that country.” The announcement comes just five days after Trump ordered an operation to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to the United States to face criminal charges, including narco-terrorism. This...

Geneva, N.Y. — A member of the Geneva City Council is facing charges in connection to a multi-agency narcotics drug trafficking probe. Ahmad Whitfield, 45, was arrested Wednesday after selling cocaine/fentanyl to another person, according to New York State Police. It came during an investigation in the Geneva area conducted by the NYSP Violent Gangs and Narcotics Enforcement Team, the Geneva Police Department, the Ontario County Sheriff's Office and the Seneca County Sheriff's Office. Whitfield was charged with criminal sale of a controlled substance and two counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance, state police said. He was taken...

Seattle drug addicts have praised the city's new mayor for allegedly telling cops not to arrest people doing illegal substances on the crime-ridden city's streets. One 36-year-old local, who gave his name as Brandon, told the Daily Mail on Wednesday that Mayor Katie Wilson is 'cool' after her office and Seattle's progressive city attorney Erika Evans reportedly plotted to avoid prosecuting most public drugs use cases. Brandon, who lives on the streets because he prefers them to his taxpayer-funded apartment, said of Wilson's new plans: 'They tried to do that already during Covid. We went buck wild! I'm not gonna...

Alex Berenson, author of Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, pointed out that the New York Times had curiously removed from an article about the Uvalde school shooter a former coworker’s recollection that he complained about his grandmother not letting him smoke weed. The Times didn’t append a correction to the story as it might be expected to do when fixing a factual inaccuracy... Assuming the elided detail was accurate, it would fit a pattern. Mass shooters at Rep. Gabby Giffords’s constituent meeting in Tucson, Ariz. (2011), a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. (2012), the...

A dangerous combination of bromazolam and fentanyl is fueling a sharp rise in overdose deaths across Oahu.The drug, often called fake Xanax or designer Xanax, is being mixed with other substances, mostly fentanyl, to make counterfeit prescription pills. Experts feel people experimenting, especially teens, will fall victim to the lethal combination. Bromazolam-related deaths have hit seven fatalities on Oahu so far this year. By comparison, in all of 2024, there were zero on the island with one in Hawaii County. “A lot of abusers and people in general take it for depression and anxiety,” said Gary Yabuta, director of the...

Sergio "El Shaka" Vega, a Mexican musician famous for his songs about drug barons, was murdered Saturday night while driving in his red Cadillac to a concert in Sinaloa state in northwest Mexico. Only hours before the attack, the 40-year-old Mexican singer had publicly denied rumors that he had been murdered, reports the BBC. "It's happened to me for years now, someone tells a radio station or a newspaper I've been killed, or suffered an accident," Mr Vega told entertainment website La Oreja according to the BBC. ...the musician was gunned down by unknown men who were following him while...

The article does push gun control but is eye opening none the less. Large numbers of Barrett .50 Cal rifles are being legally purchased in the US and shipped to Mexico to be used by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Additionally, recent allegation against the Jalisco New Generation Cartel indicate that 4 US Special Forces Soldiers, 1 Green Beret/Delta Force Operator, 2 US Navy Seals and a Ranger from 75th Ranger Regiment. The point that is interesting to me is this one particular cartel has professional military people running their operations who have all received special forces training in the...

Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey accused senior members of the Trump administration of misleading lawmakers and not getting proper approval from Congress before the attacks. “Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress,” Kim said on X. New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed the purpose of the strike was for oil and regime change, not law enforcement. “It’s not about drugs,” she said. “If it was, Trump wouldn’t have pardoned one...