Free Republic

WASHINGTON - Army brass in Iraq whitewashed an incident of a soldier killed by his own lieutenant by blaming the dead hero, stonewalling his family and promoting his killer, the Daily News has learned. The friendly-fire victim, Pfc. David Sharrett, 27, of Oakton, Va., was "misidentified" by 1stLt. Timothy Hanson as an enemy gunman during a botched night raid Jan. 16, 2008, against an Al Qaeda in Iraq stronghold north of Baghdad, the Army belatedly acknowledged. Sharrett bled to death as his buddies searched frantically for him for 25 minutes after the firefight ended. For four months after the Army...

Has land for peace ever worked — even lately? We’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s look at a critical moment in the Russian offensive in Donbas. If Putin wants to force a face-saving settlement, he needs to win a decisive battle to secure an area that he, um, largely controlled by proxy before the invasion. Reuters casts the ongoing battle on the Siverskiy Donets river as Putin’s last, best hope to get out with some claim of victory:The decisive battles of the war’s latest phase are still raging further south, where Moscow is attempting to seize...

George Santos had better have set aside some of those millions of dollars that mysteriously showed up in his campaign accounts (allegedly) because his lawyers must be running up some hefty legal bills that he’ll need to cover. And that action isn’t all taking place in New York and Washington. One of his lawyers was in Brazil this week, securing a plea deal for him that will avoid a messy trial in that country. The Brazilians had been looking for Santos since 2008 regarding allegations that he defrauded a store clerk out of $1,300 for a suit and a pair...

Bout is alleged to have fueled multiple conflicts across the globe through arms dealing, sometimes to both sides ... A senior defense official is concerned that convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, the "Merchant of Death" .. could go back to illegally trafficking weapons, thereby fueling deadly conflicts around the world. "I think there is a concern that he would return to doing the same kind of work that he's done in the past.. Bout was in the middle of serving a 25-year prison sentence in a U.S. prison for several offenses, including conspiring to kill Americans ... Bout, a...

Agency says radioactive materials recovered in home of man allegedly slain by his wife ...BELFAST, Maine — James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a “dirty bomb.” According to an FBI field intelligence report from the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, an investigation into the case revealed that radioactive materials were removed from Cummings’ home after his shooting death on Dec. 9 It says that four 1-gallon...

On this date in 1741,* at Tyburn‘s largest mass-execution of the mid-18th century, renowned cutpurse Jenny Diver was hanged along with 19 others. Born Mary Young in Ireland around 1700, the girl was abandoned as a child but deserted a benefactor’s household to take passage to London where she meant to work as a seamstress. What the Newgate Calendar reads as ingratitude, the modern reader might more sympathetically see as the allure of a burgeoning city for a teenager full of dreams. Dreams may nurture the spirit, but flesh must have bread. Like countless others through time — indeed, like...

A familiar face from a past economic disaster could be on the verge of profiting off the current Silicon Valley Bank calamity. SVB, taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation at the request of California regulators, is arguably the second-biggest bank failure of its kind in America — but that clearly doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to capitalize off of its collapse. According to a report from Bloomberg, the managers of the investment banking arm of Silicon Valley Bank, SVB Securities, are seeking a “management buyout of the business.” They are reportedly looking to expedite a deal because regulators...

EcoHealth Alliance — the nonprofit that infamously funneled taxpayer funds into the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat-based coronavirus research — was given a shocking loophole in Congress’s omnibus spending package to receive money for research in China supported by the country’s communist leadership. Why? Our government won’t tell us. Back in December, Congress inserted a clause in its omnibus appropriations act that finally defunded the Wuhan Institute of Virology and appeared to defund other similar research in China, but the latter section appears to be hollow. While EcoHealth has been barred from feeding tax dollars directly into the Wuhan...

Polling data reveals interesting things about U.S. public opinion and the death penalty. If you ask an open-ended question about the death penalty –- for example, “Do you feel the death penalty is appropriate for certain egregious crimes?” –- then you usually see somewhere around a 65 to 35 percent split in favor. On the other hand, if you ask which is preferred – the death penalty or life in prison without parole, the results tend to be closer to 50-50. Upon occasion, another question is asked: Do you feel an innocent person has been put to death in the...

...In Rome in C.E. 270, Valentine enraged the emperor Claudius II,* who had issued an edict forbidding marriage. Claudius felt that married men made poor soldiers, because they would not want to leave their families for battle. The empire needed soldiers, so Claudius abolished marriage. Valentine, bishop of Interamna, invited young couples to come to him in secret, where he joined them in the sacrament of matrimony. Claudius learned of this “friend of lovers,” and had the bishop brought to the palace. The emperor, impressed with the young priest’s dignity and conviction, attempted to convert him to the roman gods,...

For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick's Army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: They served as occasional consultants for the FBI in the investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects. Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their latest unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire criminal defense lawyers, according to one of Ivins's former supervisors. In tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed...

On this date in 1547, the Duke of Norfolk was to have been beheaded. But thanks to the previous day’s death of the corpulent 55-year-old King Henry VIII, the duke’s death warrant was never signed, and the condemned noble died in bed … seven years later. A force in the gore-soaked arena of English politics for two generations, Thomas Howard had steered two nieces into the monarch’s bed. Both girls had gone to the scaffold,* and the disgrace of the second, Catherine Howard, brought a collapse in the whole family’s fortunes. Thomas Howard’s son Henry was not as lucky as...

On episode 20 of the show we are joined by Viktor Bout, a man whose life story is quite worthy of a film adaptation. A polyglot, entrepreneur, graduate of the Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages. In the West Viktor is portrayed as the “lord of war” and the “merchant of death”. A Russian businessman, a case against whom was fabricated by the American intelligence services on the basis of a provocation they carried out against him in Thailand in 2008. After extradition to the United States, Bout was sentenced to 25 years in a maximum security prison. He was...

On this date in 1775, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great had Cossack rebel Yemelyan Pugachev chopped to pieces in Moscow for sustaining a major insurrection whose effects would haunt Russia for decades to come. Pugachev’s Rebellion was the most spectacular specimen in populous family tree of 18th century peasant uprisings. Most such disturbances were local and fundamentally unthreatening. Pugachev’s was neither. The Cossack commander raised a revolt in the Urals in 1773, styling himself the long-lost tsar Catherine had overthrown a decade before. Catherine was slow to see the import, but this hinterlands pretender set up a state-like bureaucracy...

In 1850, 60-year-old Robert Newsom, a prosperous farmer, traveled forty miles from his home in Callaway County, Missouri to neighboring Audrain County to buy a slave. Newsom was the head of a large and complex household that included several of his grown children, grandchildren, and five enslaved boys and men. His wife had died a few years earlier, a consideration that may have influenced his decision to purchase a female slave, a fourteen-year-old girl named Celia. From the first day, Newsom treated Celia as his concubine. Testimony given before the Missouri Supreme Court in 1855 indicates that Newsom raped Celia...

We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled – doubled – since we were children. We know the statistics – that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

Now, a grand jury is alleging that Dolan, 71, was behind at least some of the claims included in the dossier, according to a 39-page indictment obtained by John Durham, the special counsel probing the Justice Department’s Russia investigation. The indictment also suggests that Dolan, who worked on both Bill and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns and on a State Department advisory board during the Clinton administration, was so partisan that any information he provided would be suspect. Dolan is left unidentified in the charges against Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who, the indictment claims, provided the core allegations included in...

A presenter on Russian state television has issued an apparent threat to "traitors" living in Britain. Kirill Kleymenov warned of the dangers of spying on Russia and advised those who betrayed their country: "Don't choose Britain as a place to live." The comments, made on Channel One's Vremya news programme on Wednesday evening, came amid speculation over who was behind the attempted murder of a double agent on British soil. "I don't wish death on anyone, but, purely for educational purposes, I have a warning for anyone who dreams of such a career," he reportedly said. "The profession of a...

China's troubled property sector suffered another blow this month when frustrated homebuyers stopped making mortgage payments on units in unfinished projects. The boycott came with many developers struggling to manage mountains of debt, and fears swirling that the crisis could spread to the rest of the Chinese -- and global -- economy. Colossal. Property and related industries are estimated to contribute as much as a quarter of China's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The sector took off after market reforms in 1998. There was a breathtaking construction boom on the back of demand from a growing middle class that saw property...

Steve Schmidt, cofounder of the disgraced Lincoln Project and former presidential campaign manager for the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), admitted Friday that he did not actually vote for McCain in the 2008 election, won by Barack Obama.