Free Republic

Washington (AFP) – US authorities announced the arrests Monday of the co-founder of the notorious Atomwaffen neo-Nazi group and a woman he met online in the latest extremist plot to attack public electricity facilities.The FBI said Brandon Russell, who helped found Atomwaffen in 2015, was arrested in Florida, after spending four years in prison for possessing bomb-making materials.The woman, Sarah Beth Clendaniel, was arrested in Maryland where she had also spent time in prison for armed robbery.Guided by Russell, Clendaniel had planned to acquire a gun and to attack five electrical substations around Baltimore, Maryland, the FBI said.SNIPIn February 2022,...

Rolling blackouts during the recent cold wave has raised concern about the reliability of our electricity grid, but the growing possibility of deliberate sabotage may be a bigger threat. The first sign America’s electricity grid might have become a target occurred in 2013, when a marksman disabled an electricity substation south of San Jose with more than a hundred long-range shots reportedly from a .50-caliber rifle. This was no casual prank or random act of vandalism. It was clearly planned, and the damage required nearly a month to repair. At the time the FBI downplayed the incident, saying publicly that...

A string of attacks on power facilities in Oregon and Washington has caused alarm and highlighted the vulnerabilities of the US electric grid. The attacks in the Pacific north-west come just days after a similar assault on North Carolina power stations that cut electricity to 40,000 people. As first reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting and KUOW Public Radio, there have been at least six attacks, some of which involved firearms and caused residents to lose power. Two of the attacks shared similarities with the incident in Moore county, North Carolina, where two stations were hit by gunfire. Authorities have not...

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday that Russian strikes had destroyed about 30 per cent of his country's power stations in one week, speaking hours after a fresh barrage cut electricity to cities across Ukraine.

Russia attacked power stations and other infrastructure Sunday, causing widespread outages across Ukraine as Kyiv’s forces pressed a swift counteroffensive that has driven Moscow's troops from swaths of territory it had occupied in the northeast. The bombardment ignited a massive fire at a power station on Kharkiv's western outskirts and killed at least one person. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denounced the “deliberate and cynical missile strikes” against civilian targets as acts of terrorism. Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv appeared to be without power Sunday night. Cars drove through darkened streets, and the few pedestrians used flashlights or mobile phones to light...

“MI5 hiring Asian teenagers to fight cyber terror” London, September 21, 2009 First Published: 00:09 IST(21/9/2009) Last Updated: 02:44 IST(21/9/2009) SNIPPET: “MI5 head Jonathan Evans has told his staff that the recruits were essential to combat cyber terrorism which has been traced to China, Russia and Pakistan — the hackers have also intercepted messages from terrorists in Belmarsh maximum security prison, the newspaper said. In a report to Lord West, the Security Minister, Evans has revealed that during the summer over 1,000 hits were made on computers in Whitehall. Other targets have been air traffic control, power stations and the...

A man was charged Monday with storing deadly powdered cyanide in an underground passage that is part of the city's mass transit system. Joseph Konopka allegedly took over a Chicago Transit Authority storage room under the downtown district and stored sodium cyanide and potassium cyanide there. University of Illinois-Chicago police arrested Konopka and a juvenile Saturday night for allegedly trespassing, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court. They were found in a steam tunnel under the university's education building, according to the FBI. The FBI said Konopka was wanted on charges of fleeing to avoid prosecution in Wisconsin...