Free Republic

Iowa Democratic Party officials are hunkered down in their war room tonight, with presidential campaigns in the dark over the delay in the reporting of caucus results. Officials from two Democratic campaigns tell CNN they were told the app to tabulate results had crashed.

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, January 31, 2020 Airbus SE (Airbus or the Company), a global provider of civilian and military aircraft based in France, has agreed to pay combined penalties of more than $3.9 billion to resolve foreign bribery charges with authorities in the United States, France and the United Kingdom arising out of the Company’s scheme to use third-party business partners to bribe government officials, as well as non-governmental airline executives, around the world and to resolve the Company’s violation of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and its implementing regulations,...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, January 30, 2020 The former chief of Antigua’s Financial Services Regulatory Commission (FSRC) has pleaded guilty for his role in connection with the Stanford International Bank (SIB) Ponzi scheme.Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick of the Southern District of Texas made the announcement.Leroy King, 74, of Dickerson Bay, Antigua, was the last remaining defendant in the SIB scheme. Today, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and one count of obstruction of...

Sunspot activity on the surface of the Sun follows a well-known but little understood 11 year cycle. Activity rises and falls creating the so-called solar maximum and then solar minimum. During a solar maximum, the Sun is more powerful and is littered with sunspots. Conversely when the Sun enters a solar minimum – which it did about two years ago - energy from our host star begins to lessen. However, one expert has warned that the Sun will enter a period of “hibernation” this year, in what as known as a Grand Solar Minimum (GSM). **SNIP** “The reduction in temperature...

Just last week I told you how Illinois’ new automatic voter registration system led to a possible 545 non-U.S. citizens being registered to vote. Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White’s office said the data of 574 people who self-identified as non-citizens was erroneously forwarded to elections officials to be registered to vote. Election officials confirmed that 545 of them were ultimately registered. No worries though as demorat Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker claims the system has been “fixed!”

Dozens of scientists have endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) sweeping plan to combat global climate change after fellow Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden declared that “not a single solitary scientist thinks it can work.” The former vice president derided Sanders’ proposed $16.3 trillion Green New Deal during a campaign stop last week in New Hampshire, adding that “you can not get to zero emissions by 2030. It’s impossible.” Sanders swung back over the weekend, telling a crowd in Iowa that he would soon unveil “a long list of scientists” who back his plan. The Sanders campaign delivered on Tuesday, releasing...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, January 28, 2020   First of its Kind Enforcement Action by the Justice Department The Department of Justice filed civil actions for temporary restraining orders today in two landmark cases against five companies and three individuals allegedly responsible for carrying hundreds of millions of fraudulent robocalls to American consumers, the Department of Justice announced.  The Department of Justice alleges that the companies were warned numerous times that they were carrying fraudulent robocalls — including government- and business-imposter calls — and yet continued to carry those calls and facilitate...

A federal court has ruled Arizona Republicans’ ban on mail-in ballots is illegal and unconstitutional, calling it intentionally discriminatory toward people of color, who already face increased barriers to voting. The ruling is a major victory for the Democratic party, which filed the suit, and will likely make it easier for minorities to get their ballots counted in the largely red state. Four years ago, Arizona Republicans made it a felony, punishable by prison time, for third-party groups to collect mail-in ballots during elections – a process often called “ballot harvesting.” Marginalized communities in the state may rely more on...

The co-owners of DC Solar Solutions, Inc. plead guilty on Friday to charges associated with running a one billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Jeff and Paulette Carpoff (along with five others who have/will plead guilty) acknowledged that between 2011 and 2018 they sold investors mobile solar generator units (MSGs) that did not exist and manipulated documentation (think: financial statements, lease contracts) to make it appear as if the units had been leased out and were in use. New funds were used to pay the scam’s earliest investors and to make several sports related purchases including; NASCAR sponsorships, an independent league baseball...

"The owners of DC Solar, a Benicia-based company, pleaded guilty today to charges related to a billion dollar Ponzi scheme— the biggest criminal fraud scheme in the history of the Eastern District of California. The government’s investigation has resulted in the largest criminal forfeiture in the history of the District with over $120 million in assets forfeited that will go to victims, and has returned $500 million to the United States Treasury, with more to come, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced. Jeff Carpoff, 49, of Martinez, pleaded guilty today to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. His...

WASHINGTON, DC — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reviewing claims Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother, The Post has learned. Two FBI agents held an hours-long meeting in Minnesota in mid-October with a concerned party who handed over a trove of documents regarding Omar’s 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a source with knowledge of the event said. At the meeting, first reported by website The Blaze, the agents discussed concerns the Somali-born Democrat married Elmi, a British citizen rumored to be her brother, so he could obtain a green card and study in America, the source said.

ITHACA, N.Y.(WENY) - The City of Ithaca is now looking for a Director of Sustainability to help launch the city into a organizational transformation initiative. This position was created to help meet the goals of the city's Green New Deal. WENY News Spoke with Ithaca City Mayor, Svante Myrick, to find out what he is looking for. "So we're looking for somebody with a particular set of skills, somebody who understands both environmental justice, as well as racial and social justice. Somebody who is capable of leading a broad community conversation around those issues, and somebody who's willing to work...

A professor at the University of Kansas has been charged wth fraud for surreptitious collaboration with the Chinese government. Feng Tao allegedly ran a "scheme" wherein he allegedly planned to transfer "intellectual property."

Former US vice-president Al Gore has tried to mobilise the global elite to fight the climate crisis by comparing it to some of history’s greatest battles, from Agincourt to Dunkirk. Gore told delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the scale of the climate emergency was much worse than people recognise, and getting worse much faster than people recognise. “The burden to act on the shoulders of the generation of the people alive today is a challenge to our moral imagination,” said Gore, during a session on protecting the Amazon and developing sustainable markets. “This is Thermopylae. This...

Someone posted this in the comment section of yahoo...and for once I read some really great points worth thinking about. THOUGHTS TO PONDER: Life is not a fairy tale. If you lose your shoe at midnight, you’re drunk. If women are upset at Trump’s naughty words, who in the hell bought 80 million copies of 50 Shades of Gray? Jim Comey answered, “I don’t know,” “I don’t recall,” and “I don’t remember” 236 times while under oath. But he remembered enough to write a book. President Trump should nominate Hillary Clinton for the next opening on the supreme court. Then...

The Justice Department has concluded that the evidence underlying multiple warrants authorizing the surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page failed to show Page was a foreign agent, as the law requires. The department delivered its conclusion in a December letter to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secretive federal body that approved the department’s four surveillance applications of the Trump aide. A Justice Department assessment found that in at least two applications "there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power," states a FISC court...

It is a truism in American politics that Democrats cheat.Dead voters, repeating voters, voters with false IDs, and the new angle of “ballot harvesting” are just some of the ways that the leftist party has devised to subvert the will of the American people. Historians, even liberal ones, now mostly agree that Democrat John F. Kennedy stole the 1960 presidential election from then-Vice President and Republican standard-bearer Richard Nixon in Texas and Illinois by using the political machines of Kennedy’s own running-mate, Lyndon Johnson, and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to add voters to the Democrats’ count and suppress the GOP...

One of President Donald Trump’s strongest supporters on cable news and Capitol Hill was surprisingly excluded from his impeachment defense team — and he has suspicions as to why. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) was widely believed to have been a frontrunner to join a select group of House Republicans to defend the president through media outreach and providing consultation to his legal team, but he was snubbed. In an interview with Politico, Gaetz said he wasn’t entirely sure why he was kept off the team, but he has been told by someone in the White House that Eric Ueland, the...

DAVOS, Switzerland - Youth climate delegates from around the world are taking part in a "collaborative protest" against the rich and powerful by camping in subzero temperatures at the World Economic Forum. The annual January get-together - which is often criticized for being out of touch with the real world - is set to welcome more than 3,000 participants this week, with those in attendance poised to focus on the intensifying climate crisis. **SNIP** "We are just trying to show them that we are doing the right thing despite the fact that we are not sleeping or staying in the...

Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia installed online voter registration kiosks in its emergency department this month to help boost the number of registered voters in the state, reports Philly Mag. Hospital patients, visitors or employees can use the kiosks to check their registration status and register to vote. At present, about 12 percent of eligible voters in Pennsylvania are not registered to vote. Many of these individuals come from underserved populations and often face various socioeconomic challenges that are directly affected by public policy. As a result of these challenges, many unregistered voters end up in Einstein Medical Center's ED. The...