Free Republic

A dozen agents with the FBI and Riverside County District Attorney executed search warrants at Palm Springs City Hall on Tuesday morning, shutting the building down, sending employees home and removing evidence for an investigation. About half a dozen law enforcement officials are also at an apartment that Mayor Steve Pougnet listed as his home address in county voter registration records. Pougnet lives part of the year with his husband and two children in Colorado. Laura Eimiller, a public information officer with the FBI, said the warrants are sealed so she can't comment on their nature. But she did confirm...

Police from many surrounding communities are searching the area near Sayton Road in Fox Lake. Some media agencies are reporting that an officer was shot. Police scanner traffic indicates police from Antioch, Ingleside, Lake County and Fox Lake and Grayslake are searching an area along Rollins Road near Route 59 and Route 12. Several K-9 units, helicopters and appear officers to be searching near the Fox Lake Metra station, as well. Grant Community High School in Fox Lake is on lock down. There are some. Police scanner reports indicate that officers are searching for a white male, a black male...

One policeman has been killed and about 100 more injured outside Ukraine's parliament, after MPs gave initial backing to reforms for more autonomy in the rebel-held east, officials say. National guardsmen were pelted with fire crackers and petrol bombs and an explosion was heard in the crowd. MPs had just voted in a rowdy session to approve more powers in areas of Donetsk and Luhansk under control of pro-Russian rebels. (Snip) A missile was hurled from the crowd of demonstrators, many of whom were carrying banners supporting ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party. A loud explosion rang out and an AFP reporter...

'Significant find' confirmed in Poland as speculation builds it could be lost Nazi train carrying gold - follow latest updates. SNIP--- 23.02 At a press conference Zygmunt Nowaczyk, deputy mayor of Walbrzych, said “the discovery was in the town’s district”. The Polish state treasure and culture ministry have been informed in case the find contained anything of value, Matthew Day reports. SNIP-- All we know for sure so far from today's developments is a press officer in the Polish town confirming a military train has been found and the Walbrzych's deputy mayor saying there was "formal information".

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Breaking News... RT is the first English language source with this, but is not allowed on FR. NHK saying there were several explosions at the Sagami Depot in Kanagawa.

Initial tests on mortar fragments from an Aug. 11 Islamic State attack against Kurdish forces in Iraq have tested positive for the chemical weapon mustard gas, the Pentagon said Friday. A few days after the attack near Makhmour, the Kurdish Peshmerga forces brought fragments from the mortar rounds to U.S. forces. Makhmour is just south of Irbil, where the U.S. has one of its training center sites. “We were able to take the fragments and do a field test on those fragments, and they showed the presence of HD, or what is known as sulfur mustard. That is a class...

A gunman shot and wounded three people on a train travelling between Amsterdam and Paris before the assailant was overpowered by passengers, a spokesman for French state rail company SNCF said. The incident happened near Arras in northern France shortly after 4pm GMT

The top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un has ordered the country's frontline combined forces to enter state of war from 5pm (0830 GMT) Friday, the official KCNA news agency reported early Friday. Kim made the order at an emergency enlarged meeting of the central military commission of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, said the report. He ordered the forces to be well armed to cope with any possible operations at any time. Kim also gave the order that the frontline area enter quasi state of war from 5 pm Friday

North Korea's leader has ordered its military to be fully ready for war, South Korea's Yonhap news agency says.

The US stock market closed Thursday with its worst performance in 18 months, driven lower by another slump in Chinese shares and heavy selling by technical traders. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped 43 points, or 2.1 percent, to close at 2,035. It was the index’s biggest percentage decline since February 2014. The Dow Jones industrial average slid 358 points, also 2.1 percent, to 16,990. The Nasdaq fell 141 points, or 2.8 percent, to 4,877.

Donald Trump’s feud with GOP pollster Frank Luntz escalated Monday – with Trump calling on Fox News to fire Luntz from overseeing its post-debate focus groups, and Luntz launching a profanity-laden tirade to describe the real estate showman turned renegade presidential candidate. In an interview with POLITICO, Luntz said Trump — and Democratic presidential insurgent Bernie Sanders — are “delivering a big ‘f—- you’ to the elites in America. “And that resonates on both sides,” Luntz said. “But ‘f—- you’ doesn’t solve anything. ‘F—- you’ doesn’t make life any better. ‘F—- you’ makes you feel good, but it doesn’t get...

British woman who ran off to join ISIS in Syria is feared to have returned to the UK with two jihadis in tow. Sally Jones signed up for the extremist group in 2013 with her husband Junaid Hussain, who together have been dubbed 'Mr and Mrs Terror'. But reports suggest she may have been seen in Birmingham this week with two other people, both said to be aged around 20. Former rock musician Jones, 45, and Hussain, 21, were this week named as two ISIS recruiters seen boasting online about a planned terror attack in the UK. They told undercover...

Hillary Clinton’s 3.6 million Twitter followers may not be as impressive as it seems, as it emerged that around 2 million of them may be fakes that her team paid for. Online measuring tools suggest that only 44% of her social media fan base are actually real people, with the rest of them either fake or inactive.

As Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign insists that the former secretary of state never sent or received classified information via her personal email, a State Department official supposes that a member of Clinton’s “inner circle” likely cleared emails of any classification markings. An anonymous official at the State Department told Fox News that intelligence community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III confirmed that at least one of the seven Clinton emails he deemed classified contained information that could have only come from the intelligence community. The message reportedly contained satellite images and signals intelligence. “If so, they would have had to...

They're the ultra-Nationalist swastika-loving battalion which is openly against the ceasefire agreed with pro-Russian separatists. Now extremists from the Azov unit, a far-right neo-Nazi militia defending the port city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine, are teaching children as young as six how to fire guns in an attempt to entice them into the country's bloody conflict. Disturbing pictures have emerged from a military summer camp held on the outskirts of Kiev which show members of the voluntary group teaching so-called 'Azovets' how to behave as young fighters. The children - which include girls and boys, some as young as six...

A Ukrainian website has created a comprehensive list of Ukraine's supposed 'enemies'. The eclectic list naturally includes a slew of Ukrainian and Russian statesmen and public personalities, but also, more surprisingly, nearly two dozen foreign figures, from Xi Jinping and Nicolas Sarkozy to Steven Seagal and even Donald Trump. After quickly gaining widespread media attention in Ukraine, the highly stylized website, which had a kyiv.ua domain, was quietly taken down, but not before internet archive Wayback Machine managed to index some of its content. Ukrainian media reported that the comprehensive list was prepared on the basis of an anonymous survey...

The "one-off" adjustment has now reached its 3rd day as The PBOC has now devalued the Yuan fix by 4.65% back to July 2011 lows. The PBOC seeks to reassure... -CHINA PBOC SAYS YUAN REMAINS STRONG CURRENCY IN LONG-TERM -PBOC SAYS THERE IS DEMAND FOR DEVALUATION OF YUAN VS USD -PBOC CHANGE OF YUAN MECHANISM RELATED TO JULY CREDIT: ZHANG -PBOC SAYS YUAN CHANGE IS BENEFICIAL TO LONG TERM STABILITY -PBOC SAYS YUAN EXCHANGE RATE ADJUSTMENT ALMOST COMPLETED *YUAN RATE ADJUSTMENT POSITIVE TO CONFIDENCE IN YUAN: PBOC'S YI *NEW YUAN MECHANISM `POSITIVE' TO INTERNATIONALIZATION: PBOC YI *PBOC SAYS NO BASIS...

Chinese stocks opened lower, extending yesterday's losses, after The PBOC weakened its Yuan FIX dramatically for the 2nd consecutive day (from 6.1162 Monday to 6.2298 last night to 6.3306). Offshore Yuan fell another 9 handles against the USD after China closed but was hovering at 6.40 as the market opens (now at 11 hnadles weaker at 6.51). Bear in mind the utter devastation in Chinese credit markets that data showed occurred in July, it remains ironic that for the 3rd days in a row, Chinese margin debt balances grew. Before the real fun and games started, Chinese officials once again...

Video of Lurch speaking at the Zerohedge Link