Free Republic

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) – The case against a business associate of former national security adviser Michael Flynn went to the jury Monday, which will determine whether he illegally lobbied at the direction of Turkey without telling the federal government. During closing arguments Monday, prosecutors said 66-year-old Bijan Rafiekian tried to carefully mask who was behind a project he and Flynn worked on that aimed to discredit Fethullah Gulen, a cleric Turkish President Recep Erdogan has blamed for a 2016 failed coup against him. “They tried to subvert the American process so Erdogan could get his hands on Gulen,” U.S. Attorney...

A federal judge in Virginia on Tuesday struck down prosecutors’ efforts to characterize Michael Flynn as a co-conspirator with his former lobbying partner, who faces trial on charges that he secretly lobbied for the Turkish government. Judge Anthony Trenga said in a court filing that federal prosecutors failed to provide enough evidence to show that Flynn acted as a co-conspirator with Bijan Rafiekian, a former executive at Flynn’s consulting company, Flynn Intel Group. “The United States at this point has not presented or proffered evidence sufficient to establish by a preponderance of the evidence a conspiracy for the purposes of...

After a flurry of court filings and blockbuster developments last month, the Michael Flynn criminal case has been dormant for nearly three weeks. The parties and the public now await word from presiding Judge Emmett Sullivan on the pending motion to compel and motion for sanctions filed by Sidney Powell, the lead attorney who took over FlynnÂ’s case shortly after the special counsel team disbanded.PowellÂ’s motion seeks to force federal prosecutors to provide Flynn an array of documents withheld from his attorneys and to sanction government lawyers for their failure to provide relevant evidence to the defense team in...

“You are asking my client to lie,” Michael Flynn’s new defense attorney Sidney Powell charged in a contentious June meeting with federal prosecutors. Flynn would continue to cooperate with prosecutors, Powell stressed, but he could not provide the testimony the government sought at the July trial of Flynn Intel Group (FIG) co-founder Bijan Rafiekian, “because it is not true.” Soon after, the government filed a motion in Rafiekian’s case, branding Flynn a co-conspirator and informing the court that Flynn would no longer testify against his former business partner. While federal prosecutors are reticent to explain how Flynn went from being...

Prosecutors from the team of special counsel Robert Mueller wanted Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to testify to something that isn’t true, Flynn’s lawyers said. When he refused, they tried to label him a co-conspirator in a case where they previously said he was only a witness. A federal judge denied the prosecutors’ move, saying the government didn’t present enough evidence to introduce Flynn’s statement as one of a co-conspirator. ... In his November 2017 guilty plea, he said that the forms submitted by lawyers for his now-defunct lobbying company, Flynn Intel Group (FIG), contained false and misleading statements. The prosecutors,...

WASHINGTON --Gourmets savoring their roasted figs with goat cheese may not realize it, but they're tasting history. Archaeologists report that they have found evidence that ancient people grew fig trees some 11,400 years ago, making the fruit the earliest domesticated crop. The find dates use of figs some 1,000 years before the first evidence that crops such as wheat, barley and legumes were being cultivated in the Middle East. Remains of the ancient fruits were found at Gilgal I, a village site in the Jordan Valley north of ancient Jericho, Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University and Mordechai E. Kislev and...

Early Fig Farming Scientists tracing the origins of agriculture have followed the trail of cultivated grains like wheat and barley back to about 10,500 years ago in the Near East . Now a new study reported in the 2 Jun 2006 Science suggests that fig trees could have been the first domesticated crop, preceding cereals by about a thousand years. Kislev et al. ( http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/312/5778/1372) described the remains of figs found in several archaeological sites in the Jordan Valley as early as about 11,400 years ago. The carbonized fruits represent a variety of fig in which the fruit forms and...

Israeli archaeologists have uncovered dramatic evidence of what they believe are the earliest known attempts at agriculture, 11,000 years before the generally recognised advent of organised cultivation. The study examined more than 150,000 examples of plant remains recovered from an unusually well preserved hunter-gatherer settlement on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. Previously, scientists had believed that organised agriculture in the Middle East, including animal husbandry and crop cultivation, had begun in the late Holocene period – around 12,000 BC – and later spread west through Europe.

The team compiled a database of plant remains extracted from Bronze and Iron Ages sites in the southern Levant, both Philistine and non-Philistine... The species they brought are all cultivars that had not been seen in Israel previously... edible parts of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) which originates in western Europe; the sycamore tree (Ficus sycomorus), whose fruits are known to be cultivated in the eastern Mediterranean, especially Egypt, and whose presence in Israel as a locally grown tree is first attested to in the Iron Age by the presence of its fruit; and finally, cumin (Cuminum cyminum), a spice...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress09/mueller032509.htm Congressional Testimony Robert S. Mueller, III Director Federal Bureau of Investigation Statement Before the Senate Judiciary Committee March 25, 2009 Good morning Chairman Leahy, Senator Specter, and Members of the Committee. I am pleased to be here today. As you know, we in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have undergone unprecedented transformation in recent years, from developing the intelligence capabilities necessary to address emerging terrorist and criminal threats, to creating the administrative and technological structure necessary to meet our new mission as a national security service. Today, the FBI is a...

FIG business drives investment banks Total global investment banking revenues for the year to last Friday were $25.7bn (€16.3bn), with $10.8bn from the financial institution group business. Over the same period last year FIG accounted for 31% of global investment banking revenues at $12.7bn. Huw van Steenis, head of banks and financials research in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region at Morgan Stanley in London, said: “Given deleveraging is a multi-year process, we think the opportunities from FIG funding, asset disposals and M&A will provide a very rich seam for at least two years.”

Was fig first fruit of man's agricultural endeavours? By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 02/06/2006) The dawn of agriculture may have come with the domestication of fig trees near Jericho some 11,400 years ago, archaeologists report today. The discovery of ancient carbonised figs suggests that fruit, rather than grains that are traditionally thought to have heralded agriculture, may yield the earliest evidence of purposeful planting. The figs date back roughly 1,000 years before wheat, barley and legumes were domesticated in the region, making the fruit trees the oldest known domesticated crop, a team reports today in the journal Science. Nine...

Iraq: Blair seeks new 'fig-leaf' resolution to avert French veto By David Usborne in New York, John Lichfield, Paul Waugh and Anne Penketh 08 February 2003 An anxious Tony Blair and George Bush were pushing for a new "fig-leaf" United Nations resolution last night to avert a French veto and clear the way for war on Iraq. Senior diplomats told The Independent that the planned resolution would lay down a brief deadline for Saddam Hussein to co-operate fully with UN demands but would fall short of providing an explicit authorisation of force. President Bush would push for a "serious, effective...