Free Republic

The captured archives are starting to show that post-Soviet Russia hadn't stopped its old Soviet ways in Iraq. Among the initial revelations: Russia's SVR foreign-intelligence service recently spied on British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, eavesdropping on their conversations and passing the information to Saddam Hussein's regime. As recently as last fall, Russia was continuing to train the Iraqi secret police. Rooting through an office of the Mukhabarat secret police, Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle discovered documents showing that the SVR trained five Iraqi officers in "phototechnical and optical means" and "acoustic-surveillance means"...

To enforce President Joe Biden’s forthcoming COVID-19 mandate, the U.S. Labor Department is going to need a lot of help. Its Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t have nearly enough workplace safety inspectors to do the job. So the government will rely upon a corps of informers to identify violations of the order: Employees who will presumably be concerned enough to turn in their own employers if their co-workers go unvaccinated or fail to undergo weekly tests to show they’re virus-free. What's not known is just how many employees will be willing to accept some risk to themselves — or...

Based on what you'll read in this report, we can clearly establish that not only Havel was privileged to receive certain favors from the communists [his frequent visits of the capitalist West Germany, Austria and so forth - ordinary people would not be allowed to travel there during the openly communist era], but also Havel was glad to co-operate with these communist criminals...

Not content with exporting "democracy" to Iraq, elements in the U.S. government, in their infinite hypocrisy, self-righteousness and busy-bodyness, have decided to push for "democracy" in Russia. The General Prosecutor's Office's attack on Yukos' now-defrocked CEO is being read on the other side of the Atlantic, apparently, as a heinous attack on "democracy" that must be punished by Russia's being thrown out of the G8. Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle, his democratic credentials well attested-for by his having helped toss hundreds of people into prison sans charge, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Joseph Lieberman...