Free Republic

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The chief executive and a managing partner of the collapsed Dubai private equity firm Abraaj Capital Ltd were arrested on U.S. charges that they defrauded their investors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a federal prosecutor said on Thursday. Abraaj founder and Chief Executive Arif Naqvi was arrested in the United Kingdom last Friday, while managing partner Mustafa Abdel-Wadood was arrested at a New York hotel on Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Griswold said at a hearing in Manhattan federal court. Abdel-Wadood appeared at the hearing and pleaded not guilty to securities fraud, wire fraud...

The relations between Russia and the Shiite's religious leadership in Lebanon started to develop in the beginning of the seventies. The spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community, Imam Moussa Al-Sadr, visited Moscow in 1972 and asked Soviet authorities to issue humanitarian aid to his people. At the same time cooperation between the Marxist factions of the PLO that were active in Lebanon and Soviet military intelligence – GRU, intensified greatly. Several soviet officers (speaking fluent Arabic) even visited Palestinian terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon between 1972-1975. Using their connections in PLO they managed to establish...

WASHINGTON -- Now that the festivities are over, it is time for the masters of the media to stop asking inane questions of the new folks in town -- such as, "How do you like your new office?" -- and for the Obama administration to get down to work on a clear and present danger. Notwithstanding the "day one" and "first week" coverage, the most pressing issue confronting the American people isn't closing "Gitmo" or the always ephemeral "Mideast peace process" in the aftermath of Gaza or even "fixing the economy." Item No. 1 ought to be preventing the world's...

Ed Husain's autobiography The Islamist: why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left (Penguin, 2007) is a remarkably candid account of the life of a British-born Muslim who was initially seduced by radicalism but gradually came to his senses to return to the more spiritual and devotional Islam that had defined his early years. It is also an important work, in that it both carefully grounds the issue of radicalisation that has so dominated recent intellectual and political discussion of Muslim communities in Britain, and points to potential solutions. Ed Husain grew up...

Rickey Medlocke has spoken out in favor of removing Saddam Hussein from power, and now he's urging people who share his feelings to speak out with him. Medlocke, lead guitarist for Lynyrd Skynyrd and a founding member of Blackfoot, has issued this statement about Hussein. "The time has come for us to speak up in support of our government and our troops," Medlocke said in the statement. "The very freedom we cherish, the freedom that allows us to disagree and to speak up about it, is the sort of freedom that Saddam Hussein has denied his own people. He has...

Ritter talks about the idea of peace via reverse-spin. and the question of a trillion dollars in the pentagon budget that simply turned up missing... The missing trillion might have something to do with our black-op manned space program...

It was a father's dilemma: What to do with a wayward son? In Saddam Hussein's case, the problem was his son Odai, who has been accused of murders and rapes too numerous to count.

Russian agent 'betrayed spy ring for money' A top Russian secret service agent suspected of blowing the cover of a sleeper spy ring in the United States was a heavy drinker who betrayed Moscow purely to make money, sources said on Wednesday. Alexander Poteyev, who will go on trial in absentia for treason in Moscow on May 16, is charged with having tipped off Washington about a ring of 10 Russian spies who were later deported in the biggest post-Cold War spy scandal. The Izvestia daily Wednesday published a slew of new information about Poteyev, saying he was linked to...

It's been two decades since, on March 19, 2003, United States forces invaded Iraq. President George W. Bush ordered the invasion to neutralize what he said was the threat of weapons of mass destruction posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Except it turned out Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. U.S. forces searched and searched and searched, and never found them. In all, 4,586 American servicemen and women died in the war, and 32,455 were wounded. It was the largest military and national security blunder of anyone's lifetime, a mistake so enormous it beggared belief. In the years...

It’s still too soon to make the definitive historical assessment of the Iraq War, the good, the bad, and the ugly — even assuming such a thing is even possible. But it’s never too soon to correct the historical revisionism that’s taken place in recent years. There’s a new narrative, peddled increasingly by people on the right, that the war was the sinister work of a cabal of neocon warmongers. I’ve seen this line of thought promoted, sometimes cruelly, by people who seem to have forgotten that, like me, they were on the pro side of the debate. Opinions changed...

Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi called for allowing Christians and Jews to perform pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam's holiest place. Speaking following prayers with the presidents of Mali, Sierra Leone, Niger, Mauritania and Senegal on the occasion of the Prophet Mohammed's birthday in Timbuktu, Mali, late on Monday, Qadhafi said "Mecca should be a meeting point to all people except heretics and impure". He said that Christians and Jews are not heretics or impure and "believe in God" and should be allowed to go to pilgrimage in Mecca. Qadhafi challenged Muslim religious leaders to allow US President George W. Bush to enter...

Libyan leader says Eid al-Adha holiday opportunity to bring three main monotheistic religions closer together Roee Nahmias Published: 12.31.06, 15:13 Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi called to “allow Jews and Christians to visit Mecca and circle the Kaaba (cubical building surrounded by the Sacred Mosque).” These days Muslims all around the world are marking Eid al-Adha, the most important Islamic holiday. Some three million people have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Gaddafi believes the holiday offers a great opportunity to bring the three main monotheistic religions closer together. “Everyone has the right to stand atop Mount Arafat and circle the Kaaba,”...

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine on February 24th, it caused a lot of problems for voices on the right and the left. Putin has a lot of fans in both corners, and these fans had spent years portraying him as a tactical genius, bamboozling us all with his four-dimensional chess moves. Right up until February 23rd, these Putin stans had been assuring us that Putin would never do something as dumb as launch a full-scale invasion of a sovereign democracy. Ever since then, the right have been able to change gears on Putin fairly seamlessly. This is WAR, and...

Kuwaiti Journalist Abdallah Muhammad Al-Mulla: The Palestinians Supported Saddam's Invasion of Kuwait, Hitler in WWII – Now They Support the Houthis, IRGC; Arabs Today Are Less Inclined to Support the Palestinians Cause #Kuwait #Palestinians pic.twitter.com/uNjIILPuzt— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 2, 2022

It’s hard to believe that, less than 30 years ago, South Africa was a nation riven by apartheid and segregation. To look back on that time period and realize that it wasn’t that long ago is astonishing. Brave men and women stood up and spoke out against the horrendous policy, and eventually, South Africa shook off the bond of apartheid. Desmond Tutu was one of those voices who spoke of the importance of freedom for black South Africans, and now he is with his Heavenly Father. Tutu passed away on Sunday at the age of 90. “The passing of Archbishop...

A U.S. intelligence report for the first time links China’s largest telecommunications company to Beijing’s KGB-like intelligence service and says the company recently received nearly a quarter-billion dollars from the Chinese government. The disclosures are a setback for Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.’s efforts to break into the U.S. telecommunications market. The company has been blocked from doing so three times by the U.S. government because of concerns about its links to the Chinese government. The report by the CIA-based Open Source Center states that Huawei’s chairwoman, Sun Yafang, worked for the Ministry of State Security (MSS) Communications Department before joining...

'Saddam's deputy' in anti-US call The US blames Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri for attacks on its troops A message purported to be from the fugitive deputy of executed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has called on insurgents to make a final push against US forces. The message attributed to Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri urged Iraqi fighters to "make this year... decisive for victory". The message also called on US President George W Bush to "come clean about the scale of US losses". Ibrahim is the most senior member of Saddam Hussein's regime still at large. The message, aired by Dubai-based satellite broadcaster...

Nine days after registering his presidential exploratory committee last November, Rudolph Giuliani appeared in Singapore to help a Las Vegas developer make a pitch for a $3.5 billion casino resort. Though the bid ultimately failed, and there was nothing illegal about the involvement, it drew Giuliani into a complex partnership with the family of a controversial Hong Kong billionaire who has ties to the regime of North Korea's Kim Jong Il and has been linked to international organized crime by the U.S. government. ... Giuliani's public involvement in the gaming bid began at a September 2006 news conference in Singapore...

The legal conditions for extraditing a suspect linked to a 1982 attack in France, in which six people were killed, have been met, a Norway appellate court found Friday. Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed, a 61-year-old Palestinian who became a Norwegian citizen in 1997, is wanted by French authorities on suspicion of being one of the shooters in the attack on the Jo Goldenberg restaurant in Paris's Marais district, a historically Jewish quarter. The attack on August 9, 1982, which left six people dead and 22 injured, was blamed on the Abu Nidal Organisation, a splinter group of the militant Palestinian...

"Gambling on the losers": a storm after the Saudi prince attacked the Palestinians Roy Kaise. Oct.6.2020 Following the agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Saudi Arabia was designated as a state that if Israel succeeds in normalizing its relations with it, it will be a breach of equality with the Arab world. Tonight, Israel may have received a positive message in this direction, in an interview with one of the Saudi princes on the Al-Arabiya network: he attacked the Palestinians for their opposition to agreements between Israel and the Gulf states, implicitly mentioned Abba Eben. [From the clip: 'We...