Free Republic

Russia's most wanted man, the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, issued a statement yesterday in which he claimed full responsibility for the recent assassination of Chechnya's Moscow-backed president and appeared to suggest that Vladimir Putin might be next. In a text repeatedly referring to jihad, Allah and the Koran, Basayev, 39, seemed to suggest that his separatist fighters were preparing to assassinate President Putin or his Prime Minister, Mikhail Fradkov. The announcement, posted on a Chechen rebels' website called Kavkaz Center, included a sinister reference to Mr Putin's two teenage daughters, Ekaterina and Maria. Basayev described the murder of Akhmad Kadyrov...

Masha and the Bear This is a great cartoon series for adults and kids It is from the Russian Fary Tale.. Masha and the Bear – Game Over.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZoW6ORKVuQ 16,244,450 views Masha and The Bear - One-Hit Wonder 🥁(Episode 29) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHDzQ0_-JOE

While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC). The focus on AntAC — whose youthful street activists famously wore “Ukraine F*&k Corruption” T-shirts — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted. The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy...

Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told lawmakers behind closed doors Friday that she was recalled earlier this year after “unfounded and false claims” against her, as well as continued pressure from President Trump on the State Department to remove her -- as she denied being “disloyal” to the president. “Although I understand that I served at the pleasure of the President, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives,” she said in a scathing...

Three Palestinian Arab towns in western Samaria that are surrounded by Jewish communities and seemingly “cut off” from the rest of the the Palestinian Authority (PA) are actually doing quite well for themselves, according to a report by the PA-based Safa news agency cited by blogger Elder of Ziyon. The towns—Mas-ha, Qarawat Bani Hassan and Biddya—are bordered by Elkana on the west and Barkan on the east, and as the blogger notes, they form “islands of Arab brown among a sea of Jewish blue areas,” in a map provided by the pro-Palestinian B’tselem. While PA propaganda portrays Jewish settlements as...