Free Republic

The vast, mutilated African state of Congo is enjoying a ceasefire but butchery and theft continue apace while the West remains inactive reports Adrian Blomfield in Aru Nine-year-old Bahati lies on the ground whimpering, a urine stain slowly darkening the front of his baggy camouflage trousers. Two boys, perhaps three or four years older and also dressed in military uniform, stand over his body clutching bamboo canes in their hands. A boy soldier in the eastern Congo They look across at "General Jerome", a former traffic warden who now heads the Armed Forces of Congolese Patriots, or FAPC, one of...

An American technology executive and a Russian national have been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with alleged efforts to conceal Russian ownership and software development at a digital forensics firm that obtained U.S. government contracts, including work involving the Secret Service. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California announced on September 23 that Lee Reiber, 55, of Boise, Idaho, chief executive officer of Alexandria, Virginia-based Oxygen Forensics Inc., and Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov, 52, of Moscow, had been arrested Reiber was taken into custody in Idaho on September 20, made an initial appearance in...

The U.S. diplomat arrived in West Africa in mid-June with little fanfare, hopscotching along the Atlantic coastline for scheduled visits with senior government officials in the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Togo and Gabon, whose president greeted him inside an opulent seaside palace. The American, a career State Department official named Christian Ehrhardt, was an unlikely diplomatic VIP. For nearly two decades, he served as an officer in the agency’s security branch, focusing on embassy protection, before being summoned to Washington last year to lead a new initiative — the Office of Remigration. Since then, Ehrhardt, 41, has crisscrossed Africa, trying...

WASHINGTON — The Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who set up Don Trump Jr. for a meeting in Trump Tower as part of a Fusion GPS plot was operating out of the Washington offices of Cozen O’Connor, a law firm run by an anti-Trump former Obama administration official whose super PAC donated to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential election. Veselnitskaya’s work from the Cozen O’Connor office provides more evidence of a Democrat and establishment Republican effort to set up the Trump campaign for a future Russian collusion case. Veselnitskaya was allowed into the United States by the...

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and Prime Minister Boubou Cisse have been detained by mutinying soldiers in the capital during an apparent coup attempt. The development on Tuesday came hours after soldiers took up arms and staged a mutiny at a key base in Kati, a town close to Bamako. It followed a weeks-long political crisis that has seen opposition protesters taking to the streets to demand the departure of Keita, accusing him of allowing the country's economy to collapse and mishandling a worsening security situation. Mali's years-long conflict, in which ideologically-motivated armed groups have stoked ethnic tensions while jockeying...

Political consulting group Cambridge Analytica used Russian researchers and shared data with companies linked to Russian intelligence, a whistleblower told a congressional hearing on interference in the 2016 US election Wednesday. Christopher Wylie, who leaked information on the British-based firm's hijacking of data on millions of Facebook users, told a Senate panel he believes Russian intelligence services had access to data harvested by the consultancy. Wylie told the panel that Russian-American researcher Aleksandr Kogan, who created an application to harvest Facebook user profile data, was working at the same time on Russian-funded projects, including "behavioral research." "This means that in...

Oligarch Boris Berezovsky may have been killed by British spies from MI5 or MI6 to stop him leaking state secrets to the Russians, a leading supporter of Vladimir Putin argued today. Fears in the West that the tycoon was planning to make peace with the president and end his 13-year UK exile may have led to him being assassinated, Kremlin insider Sergei Markov has said. After falling out with Putin in 2000, the 67-year-old fled to Britain where he was later given political asylum.

Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch found lying on his bathroom floor with a ligature around his neck, was in good spirits the night before his died and was looking forward to a holiday to Israel, according to his girlfriend. Katerina Sabirova, 23, said she did not believe he had killed himself and said that he sounded “better than usual” when she spoke to him. She said they were due to go to the Dead Sea three days later. A post-mortem conducted last month found that Mr Berezovsky's death was "consistent with hanging" and that there were no signs of violence...

On Thursday, more than four months later, one of the questions surrounding Mr. Lesin’s death was answered: The office of the chief medical examiner in Washington announced that he had not died of a heart attack, but rather of blunt force injuries to his head.

Russian soldiers are operating drones over Venezuela as part of a search operation for members of a paramilitary force that led a botched invasion this week, local media reported on Friday, citing deleted tweets from a state military command centre. At least eight Russian special forces members will be “operating drones to run search and patrol operations” near La Guaira, the coastal state just north of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, according to a report from local news outlet El Nacional. It posted a screenshot of a tweet it said was later deleted on Thursday from the profile of the military command,...

Saddam Hussein's government provided senior Russian officials with oil rights worth millions of dollars under the oil-for-food program in an effort to lift U.N. sanctions against Iraq, according to a U.S. Senate Committee report released on Monday. The oil allocations were "compensation for support," Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report, based on documents as well as interviews with Ramadan and Tareq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, pointed to Alexander Voloshin, former chief of staff to President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Presidential Council, and ultranationalist parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Both men had...

While most war crimes committed by Serb forces during the Balkan wars are being investigated and made public knowledge, the role played by Russian mercenaries kontraktniki [contract soldiers] deserves more attention. Many Russian citizens voluntarily fought in the Balkans for the government of Serbian President Slobodan Miloševiæ, committing a range of crimes along the way including mass murder, assault and battery, rape, robbery, and theft. Most, if not all, of these Russian kontraktniki war criminals have gone unidentified by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague – hence, so far, unpunished. As the Miloševiæ trial...

Last November, a few days after the election, thousands of people gathered for a rally in New York to protest Donald Trump. The Guardian reported on the scale of the Nov. 12 rally at the time: More than 10,000 people indicated on Facebook that they would attend a noon march from Union Square to Trump Tower, the future president’s home and corporate headquarters.As marchers mustered at East 17th Street and Broadway, organisers estimated the turnout at 2,000. As the march began to move, however, the true figure seemed closer to the promised 10,000.Chanting “Not my president!”, the crowd set...

Days after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, thousands flocked to the streets of New York City to demonstrate against the president elect in a protest organized by a Kremlin-connected Facebook page called BlackMattersUS, The Hill reports. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people attended the protest organized by the Facebook page, which, according to an archived screen grab, had more than 99,000 likes.“Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda!” the Facebook event page reads for the protest, which was called “Trump is NOT my President. March against Trump.” “Divided is the reason we just fell,” it reads. “We must...

First came a single helicopter, flying low over the marshes around the river outside the village, then the rattle of automatic fire scattered the crowds gathered for the weekly market. Next came more helicopters, dropping troops off around the homes and cattle pens. The soldiers moved swiftly, ordering men into the centre of the village, gunning down those trying to escape. When some armed militants fired back, the shooting intensified. Soon at least 20 civilians and a dozen alleged members of an al-Qaida affiliated Islamist group, were dead. Over the next five days, hundreds more would die in the village...

An al Qaeda affiliate and Tuareg rebels claimed responsibility on Saturday for coordinated attacks across Mali, in one of the boldest operations ​insurgents have mounted in their campaign against the military-led government.Mali's army said in a statement it had killed "several hundred" assailants and repelled the assault, which hit ‌multiple sites in or near the capital, Bamako. It said a large-scale sweep operation was underway in Bamako, the nearby barracks town of Kati and elsewhere in the gold-producing country.It was unclear how many soldiers or civilians were killed in the attacks. In a statement read out on state television on...

Despite continued uncertainty about the future of the Wagner Group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, recent satellite imagery indicates that the private military company (PMC) is not only staying in Mali but is actively expanding its base capacity in Bamako and may intend to transfer additional valuable military equipment there in the near future. With Prigozhin’s and Putin’s goals aligned toward maintaining Wagner’s operations in Africa, policymakers seeking to disrupt Wagner’s presence should monitor and publicly highlight more subtle signs of security service disruption or incompetence, rather than waiting for Russia to gut Wagner or for the PMC to implode....

The video is as triumphant as it is gruesome. Rebel fighters, rifles slung over their shoulders, step among more than a dozen bodies strewn across the sand and rocks. Off camera, the pop of gunshots can be heard. The scene is from another battle in the vast deserts of northern Mali – except that this time the victims were Russians. At the end of the video, the camera pans to a bearded white man on the ground, apparently begging for mercy. A different video shows several white men, still alive, kneeling amid the wreckage of a vehicle, as guerrilla fighters...

The 17-year-old son of Chechen Head Ramzan Kadyrov, Adam, has been married to a local girl named only as Medni, reportedly a relative of Adam Delimkhanov, an MP from Chechnya and close ally of Ramzan Kadyrov. The large-scale wedding took place over three consecutive days, from Thursday to Saturday, in the village of Akhmat-Yurt (formerly Tsentoroy), the ancestral home of the Kadyrov family in Chechnya. According to unconfirmed reports, Adam Kadyrov married the daughter of Chechen Senator Suleiman Geremeev, who is a close ally of Ramzan Kadyrov and is a cousin of Russian MP Adam Delimkhanov. The ceremony was preceded...

Swedish researchers have joined Danish colleagues in an attempt to establish Denmark's claims to parts of the Arctic region. The expedition follows the planting of a flag on the underwater Lomonosov Ridge by a Russian expedition last week. The expedition, led by Swedish icebreaker Oden, set off from Norway on Sunday. It is being led jointly by Martin Jakobsson of Stockholm University and Christian Marcussen of the Geological Survey of Denmark. The Danes claim that the ridge is on the same continental shelf as Greenland, which is a Danish territory. They hope that the expedition will prove the country's claim...