Free Republic

Niger: Muslim mob torches Christian church, pastor’s car JUN 19, 2019 11:14 AM BY ROBERT SPENCER The persecution of Christians is ongoing, with increasing international indifference. Meanwhile, in Europe, Canada, and the U.S., earnest conferences about “Islamophobia” portray Muslims as being the victims of unique discrimination and harassment in the West, a false narrative that has been advanced with great effectiveness. “Muslim Mob Burns Christian Church,” by Jeff Katz, WRVA, June 18, 2019: A mob of Muslim activists ransacked and set fire to a Christian church in Niger this weekend to protest the arrest of an influential imam. On Saturday...

... The threat of bringing in dangerous diseases is higher than ever, yet there are no mandatory and universal screenings, quarantines, or universal detention before illegal immigrants are released into our communities, often within hours. According to preliminary weekly data used internally by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and given to CR by a border patrol agent who must remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak to the press, over 550 African migrants were apprehended in Texas in just one week - from May 30 through June 5. The lion's share come from Democratic Republic of Congo, the...

NIAMEY (Reuters) - Troops and air strikes have killed more than 280 Boko Haram militants since the Niger government started an operation against the group last week, the defense ministry said. Boko Haram has attacked Niger, Chad and Cameroon from its base in northeast Nigeria, where it has been fighting for more than nine years to carve out an Islamist caliphate. Niger’s defense ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that the army mounted a sweep operation against the group last Friday along the southeastern Komadugu river, which separates Niger from Nigeria. More than 200 militants were “neutralized” by air...

ROME (Reuters) - The Italian government denied on Wednesday reports that its secret services passed fake documents to the United States to help bolster claims about Baghdad's pre-war nuclear ambitions. Italian newspaper La Repubblica has been running daily articles since Monday alleging that Sismi intelligence officials helped pass-off forged documents that accused Iraq of trying to buy 500 tons of "yellowcake" uranium from Niger. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's office said in a statement the government and Sismi had no "direct or indirect role in the fabrication and the transmission of the 'fake dossier on Niger uranium."' La Repubblica accuses Sismi,...

Frederica Wilson says she never received an apology from outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly after he falsely attacked her. Instead, she’s received death threats and nooses in the mail over the past year. The Miami congresswoman was part of a national firestorm a year ago when she criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of a phone call with the widow of La David Johnson, a constituent of Wilson’s who was killed under mysterious circumstances during a military operation in Niger. In response, Kelly took the unusual step of addressing the national media from the White House briefing room...

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was livid last month when he summoned top military officials to a video conference at the Pentagon to press them about an investigation into a 2017 ambush in Niger that killed four Americans on a Green Beret team. His anger, Pentagon officials said, came from seeing news reports that junior officers were being reprimanded for the botched Niger mission while the officers directly above them were not. Days later, a senior officer who had largely escaped punishment was told he would be reprimanded. Another senior officer’s actions before and around the time of the mission were...

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are so pleased with reports that Leakgate prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is about to indict senior White House officials that they want him to lead an impeachment investigation into whether President Bush lied to Congress about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "The CIA leak issue is only the tip of the iceberg,” House Judiciary Democrat Jerrold Nadler complains in a message posted to his web site. In a letter asking the Justice Department to expand the scope of Fitzgerald's investigation, Nadler says: "We now have reason to believe that high crimes may have been committed...

Religious freedom is under threat in one of every five nations around the globe, in part because of an increase in “aggressive ultranationalism”, a Catholic NGO said in a report Thursday. Aid to the Church in Need found incidents of religious persecution in 21 countries in the two years to June 2018, including Niger, Myanmar, India and China. Acts of discrimination were reported in 17 other countries such as Algeria, Turkey and Russia, it said. It was the 14th edition of the aid group’s report covering all religions in 196 countries, carried out every two years with the assistance of...

The African source of the Amazon's fertilizer Sid Perkins In the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, massive dust storms from the African Sahara waft southwest across the Atlantic to drop tons of vital minerals on the Amazon basin in South America. Now, scientists have pinpointed the source of many of those dust storms and estimated their dust content. ON THE WAY. Satellite photo shows dust (arrow), bound for the Amazon, blowing away from the Sahara's Bodélé depression. NASA The Amazonian rainforest depends on Saharan dust for many of its nutrients, including iron and phosphorus (SN: 9/29/01, p. 200: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010929/bob9.asp)....

Lake Chad, which once straddled the borders of Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, has shrunk by an estimated 95% since the mid 1960s, due to the growth of agriculture and declining rainfall. Image: Unep

Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman on Monday released a new tape of President Trump featuring a private discussion about the deadly ambush in Niger last year that left four U.S. soldiers dead. Manigault Newman played the tape from October 2017 on “MSNBC Live with Craig Melvin.” Trump can be heard on the tape calling the military a “rough business” and saying that the militants who carried out the ambush are “rough, too." “They got attacked by 50 real fighters,” Trump says on the tape. “These were people in many cases that were in the Middle East, that now...

The Pentagon is considering withdrawing nearly all American commandos from Niger in the wake of a deadly October ambush that killed four United States soldiers. Three Defense Department officials said the plans, if approved by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, would also close military outposts in Tunisia, Cameroon, Libya and Kenya, as well as seven of the eight American elite counterterrorism units operating in Africa. The shift in forces is part of the Pentagon’s defense strategy to focus on threats from China and Russia. But they represent a more severe cut of Special Operations forces in Africa than initially expected, leaving...

The 2017 Niger ambush that killed four U.S. soldiers was the result of “individual, organizational and institutional failures," according to a new report from the Pentagon. The eight-page summary released by the Department of Defense on Thursday detailed the findings leading up to and during the ambush and made recommendations to improve guidance for the planning and approval of military operations. Those recommendations included a full review of equipment requirements and improving coordination with forces from U.S. allies. During a press conference with reporters Thursday, Army Maj. Gen. Roger Cloutier, the lead investigating officer, praised the heroic actions of the...

Up to 95 per cent of plastic polluting the world’s oceans pours in from just ten rivers, according to new research. The top 10 rivers – eight of which are in Asia – accounted for so much plastic because of the mismanagement of waste. About five trillion pounds is floating in the sea, and targeting the major sources – such as the Yangtze and the Ganges – could almost halve it, scientists claim. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt flew in coach-class seats on at least two trips home to Oklahoma when taxpayers weren’t footing the bill, despite claims he...

Trump knows the Deep State, and he is not George W. Bush WARNING: The following is, necessarily, somewhat extensive reading because the web of deceit it outlines is itself complex. Media speculation over the meaning of President Trump’s pardon of Lewis “Scooter” Libby is predictable and wrong. Three examples:

A militia in Mali says it has recovered weapons and a vehicle abandoned by US special forces during a deadly ambush in Niger last year, and is prepared to return them to the Americans. The Tuareg rebel group says it seized the battered four-wheel-drive and two rifles during clashes with "bandits" on the Mali-Niger border. Four members of the US special forces were killed in last year's raid. An offshoot of the Islamic State (IS) group said it carried out the attack. In a statement, the MSA-GATIA militia group said it captured the materiel from unidentified "armed bandits" on the...

President Trump sat down in Asia with the president of China and devoted valuable time to springing from jail three UCLA basketball players who decided to try to steal stuff from a Louis Vuitton store in China. The players themselves thanked Trump, but one of their fathers, LaVar Ball, decided to use the moment to diss the man who kept his son out of Chinese prison, where one can only imagine the conditions. “Who?” Ball told ESPN when asked about Trump’s assistance. “Don’t tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out.” Trump, not suprisingly,...

Congresswoman Frederica Wilson says she wants answers following revelations a South Florida soldier killed in Niger may have been captured and executed. The congresswoman released a statement saying, “On Tuesday, November 7th, I received a classified briefing on the attack in Niger during which Sgt. La David Johnson and three other members of his unit were ambushed and killed. I am not at liberty to discuss the details of what I was told... Did his death occur while he was engaged in combat against the Islamist militans or did they capture and execute him? Has an autopsy been done, and...

Serving and retired officers say soldiers also tried to convince French jets to engage in incident in which four Green Berets died The US special forces detachment ambushed in the Niger last month fought alone for hours after the local Nigerien forces they were accompanying fled in the first minutes of the engagement, retired and serving special forces officers with knowledge of events have said. The trapped soldiers also made repeated efforts to convince French warplanes sent from neighbouring Mali to engage the enemy, attempting to “talk in” the pilots who refused to attack due to poor weather, rough terrain...

ichelle Black is primarily focusing on her 9- and 11-year-old sons these days. She said she’s making sure, in the wake of their father’s death, they are physically and emotionally OK. Special Forces soldier Bryan Black was among four soldiers killed in Niger earlier this month during a mission that remains somewhat unclear. The military is still trying to determine if the soldiers were randomly targeted or if they were led into an overwhelming ambush. Michelle Black wants the nation to know her husband was more than a Special Forces soldier. He was also a master chess player and avid...