Free Republic

Roughly 700 people are expected to attend the “Justice for J6” rally on Saturday, according to an official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Pro-Trump protesters have plans to travel to Washington, D.C., this weekend to attend the rally, which is being held in support of people who were charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to NBC News. DHS expects that a number of demonstrators connected to the groups that stormed the Capitol will return for Saturday’s event.

Rosendo “Ross” Prieto, who previously served as a municipal official in Florida and once told Champlain Towers South board members that their building was in “very good shape,” has left his new job. A Doral spokesman confirmed Prieto is presently on a leave of absence from a contracting business position that offers services to the city. Prieto assured Champlain Towers South board members in 2018 that their property was solid, a claim which followed an engineering company’s warning that it possessed structural deficiencies. The firm said sizeable repairs were needed to fix the building’s various issues.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Lebanon's information minister on Saturday criticized the arrest of a businessman in New York on charges of providing satellite broadcasts of Hezbollah's Al-Manar television to New York-area customers. Javed Iqbal, a 24-year-old businessman originally from Pakistan, was arrested Wednesday in New York on conspiracy charges of enabling broadcasts of Al-Manar — designated by the U.S. government as a global terrorist entity. "As a Lebanese citizen first, and as an official in the Lebanese government and information minister of Lebanon, I find this to be unacceptable," Ghazi Aridi told reporters in Beirut. U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said Iqbal...

WASHINGTON - Iran is closing in on production of nuclear weapons and even U.N. sanctions may not deter the aggressive government in Tehran, a top State Department official said Friday. Describing the Iranian government as "very aggressive, very determined to develop nuclear weapons," Robert Joseph, undersecretary for arms control and international security, dismissed Iran's contention that it seeks only civilian nuclear power. "We know this is not the case," Joseph said at the University of Virginia's Miller Center in Charlottesville. Iran has methodically taken all but one last step to turn out nuclear weapons, he said. "Once they begin to...

SACRAMENTO - Top deputies to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley enlisted government aides and used state resources to work on his political campaigns in possible violation of state law, according to interviews and documents obtained by the Mercury News. While Shelley was an assemblyman running to be California's top elections official and after the San Francisco Democrat took office last year, aides drove his campaign manager to pick up donations, used state mail to ferry campaign checks to Sacramento and used a government fax machine to transmit political fundraising material, records and interviews show. One regional director cited her political...