Free Republic

WASHINGTON, Feb 20 (Reuters) - The U.S. will announce a major package of sanctions against Russia on Friday over the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the two-year Ukraine war, President Joe Biden said on Tuesday. Biden, speaking to reporters as he departed on a trip to California, did not give details but said he would provide more information about the package on Friday. The package will "hold Russia accountable for what happened to Mr. Navalny" and for its actions over the course of the war in Ukraine, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said, without providing details...

Hussein Used Oil to Dilute Sanctions WA Post and Agencies = ByRobin Wright and Colum Lynch,  10-07-2004 Oil "vouchers" that could be resold for large profits were given to officials including Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and former Russian presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky as well as governments, companies and influential individuals in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the report said. Another recipient was Benon Sevan, the former top U.N. official in charge of humanitarian relief. Sevan ran the former oil-for-food program designed to benefit the Iraqi people in the face of economic sanctions intended to...

WASHINGTON - A top Pentagon official said he favors resuming training Pakistani officers in US military academies as a way of increasing US influence in the country’s armed forces and reducing that of Islamic radicals. “You don’t promote military reform in a country like Pakistan by cutting off education for Pakistani military officers here and pushing them into the one alternative, which is the Islamic extremists,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday. “It’s not as though if we leave them alone, nobody else will go out to recruit them,” he added. The United States...