Free Republic

May 20, 2004 -- The Big Story on Action News is word of suspicious activity along train tracks in our area, and the discovery of a wireless transmitter that seemed to be carefully hidden in the gravel under some tracks in Philadelphia. Needless to say, this has attracted some peoples' attention. While authorities do not want to unnecessarily scare commuters, they say that after terrorist train attacks in Madrid Spain, they are taking all suspicious activity on rail lines seriously. Of most concern is the discovery of that wireless transmitter on a SEPTA rail line. Action News has learned that...

<p>In recent days, Taliban representatives began telling gatherings of villagers in the southern province of Kandahar, one of the country’s main opium-producing regions, that the crop—a crucial part of the local economy—would now be banned.</p><p>This followed a statement by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid at an Aug. 18 news conference in Kabul that the country’s new rulers won’t permit the drug trade. Mr. Mujahid at the time didn’t offer details of how the Islamist group intends to enforce the ban.</p>

An American contractor held hostage in Afghanistan for more than two years has been released in exchange for a convicted Taliban drug lord jailed in the United States, the White House said Monday, announcing a rare success in U.S.-Taliban talks since the militant group took power a little more than a year ago Mark Frerichs, a Navy veteran who had spent more than a decade in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor, was abducted in January 2020 and is believed to have been held since then by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network. He was traded for Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban associate convicted...

Biden’s catastrophically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan was bad enough in itself, diminishing America’s standing in the world and projecting an image of weakness that has encouraged and emboldened enemies of our nation worldwide. The fallout from it, however, could be incalculably worse. A Defense Department (DoD) whistleblower has revealed that 324 of the Afghans whom U.S. forces brought to the United States as the disaster in Afghanistan was unfolding appeared on the department’s Biometrically Enabled Watchlist (BEWL), which includes terrorists, and yet were admitted into the country without being vetted. No one who has been watching the spreading dumpster...

President Biden accused Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister of lying when he contradicted the president’s claim that had raised the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and bristled when asked about the fist bump with the royal. Returning early Sunday morning to the White House after his four-day trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia, Biden was asked whether A​del al-Jubier was telling the truth when he said he didn’t hear the president bring up Khashoggi with the prince, commonly referred to as MBS. “No,” Biden responded bluntly, according to a White House pool report. The president,...

JERUSALEM -- Egypt is now on the front lines of the battle against ISIS, and some of its leaders are making new accusations about the Obama administration's war on terror. They accuse the United States of playing a double game, fighting terrorists abroad while meeting with them at home. A recent White House meeting between President Barack Obama and Muslim leaders sent shockwaves through the Middle East, specifically in Israel and Egypt. The cause of the uproar: the group included leaders with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. "We just don't understand because we know the history of the Muslim Brothers,"...

SEBRING, Florida (CNN) -- A couple of hours up the road from where some September 11 hijackers learned to fly, the new head of Aryan Nation is praising them -- and trying to create an unholy alliance between his white supremacist group and al Qaeda. "You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah."

President Biden has signed an order authorizing the military to once again deploy hundreds of Special Operations forces inside Somalia — largely reversing the decision by President Donald J. Trump to withdraw nearly all 700 ground troops who had been stationed there, according to four officials familiar with the matter. In addition, Mr. Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda, three of the officials said. Since Mr. Biden took office, airstrikes have largely been limited to those meant...

Sinn Féin will be the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time, pushing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) into second place. Sinn Féin has 27 seats, compared to the DUP's 25. The result means Michelle O'Neill will be entitled to become first minister - unprecedented for a nationalist. Earlier, Ms O'Neill said it had been an election of "real change" and a "defining moment for our politics and for our people". "Today ushers in a new era which I believe presents us all with an opportunity to reimagine relationships in this society on the basis of...

The purpose of the visit is to discuss the situation in Jerusalem On Tuesday night, a delegation of Hamas leaders arrived in Moscow to hold “important” talks with Russian officials, according to the pro-Fatah website Ma'an News. Among the delegation were Hamas’ Deputy Chairman Mousa Mohammad Abu Marzook, and two other leaders, Fathi Hammad and Hussam Badran. The purpose of the visit is to discuss the situation in Jerusalem, as clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian worshippers erupted on the Temple Mount during the holy month of Ramadan, Jerusalem Post reported.

Kathy Boudin, who spent decades in prison for her part in the deadly 1981 Brink’s armored truck heist as a member of the radical militant group Weather Underground, died of cancer at the age of 78 in New York on Sunday. In October, 1981, Boudin and members of the group teamed up with the Black Liberation Army for the robbery to help fund their anti-government campaigns. They targeted a Brink’s armored truck, which they held up in Rockland County, making out with $1.6 million. During the robbery, gunmen killed Brink’s security guard Peter Paige before transferring the money to a...

The "Tech Executive-1" in John Durham's indictment of a Democratic cybersecurity lawyer testified in a lawsuit that he had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when asked to testify by the special counsel. Rodney Joffe, former senior vice president at Neustar, coordinated in 2016 with Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was indicted last year for allegedly concealing his clients, including Hillary Clinton's campaign and Joffe, from the FBI in September 2016 when he pushed debunked claims of a secret back channel between the Trump Organization and Russia's Alfa Bank. Alfa Bank filed a "John Doe" lawsuit and deposed Joffe in...

(CNN)Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was criticized by two Republican senators on Tuesday at a confirmation hearing over language they claimed she had used in the past while challenging the indefinite detention of clients who were being held without charges at the Guantanamo Bay military prison.

Saudi Arabia on Saturday executed 81 people convicted of crimes ranging from killings to belonging to militant groups, the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history. The number of executed surpassed even the toll of a January 1980 mass execution for the 63 militants convicted of seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, the worst-ever militant attack to target the kingdom and Islam's holiest site. It wasn't clear why the kingdom choose Saturday for the executions, though they came as much of the world's attention remained focused on Russia's war on Ukraine —...

Some 12 missiles were fired from Iranian territory and fell near the US consulate in Erbil in northwestern Iraq on Saturday night. The Kurdistan Counter-Terrorism Service announced that 12 ballistic missiles were fired from "outside the borders of Iraq and the Kurdistan region, specifically from the east," according to the Iraqi News Agency (INA). Independent open-source intelligence (OSINT) accounts shared videos reportedly shared by Iranian civilians showing missiles being fired from Iran at the time of the attack, with at least one of the videos being geolocated to a site in Khasabad in the East Azerbaijan province of Iran.

The Biden administration could sign in Vienna as early as Monday a new deal with the ayatollahs that would include a staggering hostage ransom sum totaling as much as 25 percent of Tehran’s entire annual budget.

Russia has called on the United States to punish those responsible for the use of “inquisition-style” interrogation methods in the “global war on terror”, as revealed in the US Senate report on torture this week. Konstantin Dolgov, the human rights ombudsman of Russia’s foreign ministry, said the results of the “shocking” report were “the latest confirmation of gross, systemic human rights violations by the American authorities”. .... The Senate report showed that “prisoners in secret torture chambers were subjected to inhuman, humiliating treatment” including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and threats against suspects’ families in order to “beat confessions out of often...

Federal authorities in Seattle on Monday charged two women with a terrorist attack on train tracks, suggesting they were working with an anarchist community to stand in solidarity with a Native American tribe to oppose the construction of a natural gas pipeline across the Canadian province of British Columbia by trying to derail trains in Washington state.Samantha Frances Brooks, 27, and Ellen Brennan Reiche, 23, were arrested Saturday night in Bellingham, located in Whatcom County, which borders Canada, as they allegedly placed “shunts” on Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks, according to a complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in...

The U.S. military mission to evacuate American citizens and foreign allies from Afghanistan was hampered by continuous appeals for help from an array of advocates including White House officials, members of Congress, veterans of the war, media outlets and even the Vatican, according to the operation’s senior commander.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. “I took a pack of Tarot cards. I had found out that they were very superstitious. On arrival at a commune I would ask for their astrological birth signs and tell them mine,” Jillian Becker described her process of investigating the Marxist terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang. Officially, the Red Army Faction, but popularly known for its two leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the leftist terrorist group had carried out a string of attacks, including the killings...