Free Republic

In 2022 Norway’s third richest man, Kjell Inge Røkke, announced in an open letter to shareholders he was moving to Lugano, Switzerland. “My capital will continue working in Norway,” wrote the fishing magnate turned industrialist who launched his empire four decades ago with a 69-foot trawler he bought while saving money working on ships off the coast of Alaska. Røkke, who Forbes estimates has a fortune of $5.1 billion, will cost the Norwegian government an estimated 175,000,000 kroner annually (roughly $16 million) with his departure. That might not sound like a lot of money, but Røkke is not the only...

Two people were injured and one person arrested at a suspected terror attack at a Swiss department store on Tuesday. Swiss police said a stabbing in a shopping area on Tuesday afternoon in the Italian-speaking city of Lugano is being investigated as a potential terrorist attack, and that the prime suspect arrested at the scene had a background of jihadist extremism. A 28-year-old woman, reported to be a Swiss citizen living locally, attacked two women at the Lugano department store on Tuesday. Swiss media RTS reports she grabbed one around the neck, and stabbed the other with the knife.

Many of the issues identified as problematic are still in play, according to informed sources who spoke with the Register. VATICAN CITY — By October 2016, two years into his term as prefect of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy, Cardinal George Pell had become aware of a Vatican dicastery handling large amounts of unregistered cash in offshore accounts. But nearly three years later the questions raised by Cardinal Pell about the management of Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA), the dicastery which handles the Vatican’s real estate and financial assets, have seemingly gone unanswered. Pell had...

The most striking proof that the Arab anti-Israel cause is a common meeting ground for both Nazis and Communists --and that the Arabs welcomed supporters of both ilks-- lies in the friendship of Carlos, the notorious master terrorist who served the PLO, with Fran*ois Genoud, an old Nazi, one of the leading Nazis in pre-War Switzerland, later a financier who provided funds for Habash's faction of the PLO. "Carlos" (his nom de guerre) was what is called a "red diaper baby." His fabulously rich father, a Venezuelan lawyer and owner of estates, gave "Carlos" the name Ilich, Lenin's patronymic, as...

George Clooney headlined a fund-raiser Monday that took in more than a half-million dollars for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Organizers said they took in at least $625,000 from U.S. donors for Obama’s campaign, including many who flew in to Geneva, Switzerland, from around the world for the one-night event.

George Clooney has signed on for another special guest appearance as the Barack Obama re-election campaign takes its summer fundraising tour across the Atlantic in pursuit of Euro-cash. The Obama campaign posted an invitation on its website Friday revealing that the presidential pal-in-chief will appear at a pair of Americans Abroad for Obama events Aug. 27 in Geneva, Switzerland. Clooney, who usually spends summers at his villa on Italy’s Lake Como, made a similar appearance across the Swiss border on behalf of then-candidate Obama during the run-up to the 2008 general election. Charles Adams, co-president of the campaign’s European outreach...

Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) Infiltration and Influence in America  "Allah is our goal; the Messenger is our model; the Koran is our constitution; jihad is our means; and martyrdom in the way of Allah is our aspiration."  "It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet." --Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood What the Muslim Brotherhood means for the US: Memo lays bare group's plans to destroy U.S. from within By Ron Dreher, Dallas Morning News   "Our strategy...

Five years after being barred from the U.S. for making charitable contributions to a group that sent those contributions to the jihad terror group Hamas, internationally renowned Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, often dubbed “the Muslim Martin Luther,” will make his first public appearance in America this April after being permitted to enter the country. The turnabout comes not because Ramadan has been cleared of these charges, but because Secretary of State Clinton has, in the words of State spokesman Darby Holladay, “chosen to exercise her exemption authority for the benefit of Tariq Ramadan.” Holladay disingenuously suggested that the Bush Administration...

(ANSA) - Milan, December 2 - Two Moroccans arrested on Tuesday were planning terrorist attacks on targets in northern Italy after failing to make the ``necessary contacts`` to be sent abroad as jihad fighters, police said. Rachid Ilhami, 31, and Gafir Abdelkader, 42, are alleged to have been planning attacks on an immigration office and a police barracks in Milan as well as police stations, a supermarket and a night club carpark in smaller towns in the Lombardy region. Milan anti-terrorist unit chief Bruno Megale stressed that the pair were not ``an organic part of any organisation`` despite wiretapped conversations...

The Islamic organization poised to build the largest mosque in the Northeast on a site in Roxbury has long-standing ties to an Egyptian cleric who praises suicide bombings and a Muslim activist indicted last week in a terrorism financing probe. The Islamic Society of Boston, which has city approval to build a sprawling $22 million Islamic cultural center and mosque on Malcolm X Boulevard, has had a long association with Dr. Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi, whose vocal support of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas prompted the State Department to bar him from entering the U.S. four years ago. The local religious...

NEW YORK — The scandal engulfing the United Nations Procurement Department () now appears to be bottomless. It also shows signs of growing more sinister, especially where it involves a mysterious private company called IHC Services (), which did big business with the procurement department until it was removed from U.N. rosters in June. New details of how dark the scandal could prove to be have emerged from the private sale of IHC on June 3, 2005, just as the procurement scandal was about to break. It now appears that while doing business with the U.N., IHC had links both to Saddam...

Arsonists have attacked a synagogue in Lugano, marking the first time in living memory that a Jewish house of worship in Switzerland has been set on fire.A fabric shop owned by a Jewish family in the southern Swiss city was also set alight. Police say both blazes are connected. The president of Lugano’s Jewish community described the attacks as "anti-Semitic", but police declined to comment on a possible motive. No one was hurt in either incident. The synagogue lost its entire library in the fire, which took hold after petrol bombs were reportedly hurled at the building. Less than a...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) Prosecutors said on Tuesday they will charge a Dutch chemicals dealer as an accomplice to genocide for supplying Saddam Hussein with lethal chemicals used in the 1988 chemical attack on a Kurdish town that killed an estimated 5,000 civilians. Wim de Bruin of the national prosecutor's office said the suspect, who was arrested in Amsterdam on Monday, will face charges ''for violating the laws of war and involvement in genocide.'' Prosecutors said Frans van Anraat, a 62-year-old chemicals dealer, had been a suspect since 1989, when he was arrested in Milan, Italy, at the request of the...

Did Saddam Hussein use any of his ill-gotten billions filched from the United Nations oil-for-food program to help fund Al Qaeda? Investigations have shown that the former Iraqi dictator grafted and smuggled more than $10 billion from the program that for seven years prior to Saddam’s overthrow was meant to bring humanitarian aid to ordinary Iraqis. And the Sept. 11 Commission has shown a tracery of contacts between Saddam and Al Qaeda that continued after billions of oil-for-food dollars began pouring into Saddam’s coffers and Usama bin Laden declared his famous war on the U.S. Now, buried in some of...