Free Republic

WikiLeaks is in the process of publishing more than 500,000 Saudi diplomatic documents to the Internet, the transparency website said Friday, a move that echoes its famous release of U.S. State Department cables in 2010. WikiLeaks said in a statement that it has already posted roughly 60,000 files. Most of them appear to be in Arabic. There was no immediate way to verify the authenticity of the documents, although WikiLeaks has a long track record of hosting large-scale leaks of government material. Many of the documents carried green letterhead marked "Kingdom of Saudi Arabia" or "Ministry of Foreign Affairs." Some...

POLITICO's Maggie Haberman emails that she's solved a lingering mystery from the now-nearly-forgotten summer storm around a planned Islamic center in Lower Manhattan. Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of the giant hedge fund manager Renaissance Technologies, appears to have financed the ad campaign entirely himself, through a $1 million contribution on July 26 to the New York State Conservative Party, according to a filing today by the party's housekeeping account. Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long confirmed to Haberman that Mercer was the source of the ad money. Mercer had maxed out to the account of Rick Lazio, but the Conservative Party's...

WASHINGTON – The Taliban are in much stronger financial shape than al-Qaida and rely on a wide range of criminal activities to pay for attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, a senior Treasury Department official said Monday. David Cohen, the department's assistant secretary for terrorist financing, said the extremist group extorts money from poppy farmers and heroin traffickers involved in Afghanistan's booming drug trade. The Taliban also demand protection payments from legitimate Afghan businesses, he said during a speech at a conference on money laundering enforcement. ... According to Cohen, al-Qaida is a cash-strapped organization that is losing...

SAO PAULO, Brazil - A vote buying scandal in Brazil's Congress was financed by state and private companies, a Brazilian lawmaker alleged in an interview published Saturday. Rep. Roberto Jefferson said the money was collected from the private and public companies by a man who works with Delubio Soares, the Workers Party treasurer accused of making the reported payoffs. Last week Jefferson claimed that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's Workers Party made monthly payments of about $12,000 to lawmakers in exchange for votes. In the exclusive interview with the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper, Jefferson did not name the...

<p>This is from the front page of the Aug 24, 2003 sunday Pittsburgh Tribune Review. IT concerns the horrible state of affairs of the Pittsburgh Government that has overburdened the taxpayers with excessivbe taxes and swamped the city into a morass of corruption. This is a small scale version of what is currently involved in California with the recall effort. The Liberal Democrats have taken a once beautiful city and have transformed it into a third world slum.</p>