Free Republic

Nicaraguan prosecutors charged three U.S. citizens and 11 Nicaraguans with money laundering. | Mountain Gateway Ministries/ADF InternationalThe Nicaraguan judiciary has convicted 11 Nicaraguan pastors linked to the U.S.-based Mountain Gateway ministry on charges of money laundering. The case, which has caused great controversy in the Central American country and throughout the region, also implicates three U.S. citizens who have not yet been arrested, according to the prosecutor's office.The charges relate to an alleged money laundering network that operated through wire transfers from the U.S. to Nicaragua. The charges came just weeks after the ministry held a series of massive evangelistic...

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi is among the first to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his “decisive” win in Russia’s presidential election, state media reports. “The President of the Islamic Republic of Iran in a message sincerely congratulated Vladimir Putin on his decisive victory and re-election as the President of the Russian Federation,” state news agency IRNA reports. Chinese President Xi Jinping also sends a congratulatory message to Putin, saying his re-election “fully reflects the support of the Russian people,” Beijing’s state media reports.

The world’s despots have rushed to congratulate Vladimir Putin for his all-but-assured Russian election win. -snip- North Korean media says Kim Jong-un sent his congratulations via his embassy in Russia this morning – unsurprising as North Korea has provided Putin with supplies and munitions for his war in Ukraine. Putin has also received well-wishes and congratulations from the authoritarian ruler of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, and Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla. ‌The presidents of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and Bolivia, Luis Arce, joined the small repressive group hailing Putin’s overwhelming victory

'You have to have blinders on to not see that there have been problems'... WHITEWATER, Wis.—The migrants began to trickle into Whitewater, a sleepy town of 15,000 an hour west of Milwaukee, toward the end of 2021. Prior to their arrival, local news and political debates generally revolved around school fundraisers or the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater's D3 athletics. Today, residents are focused on their 1,000 new neighbors, who mostly hail from Nicaragua and Venezuela and largely keep to the shadows because they lack official identification. Locals say the real number of migrants in the town could easily be double the...

United Airlines finding loose bolts and other issues as it inspects grounded Boeing 737MAX 9 airliners... In Canada outside Toronto a brutal arrest of Rebel News reporter David Menzies... Train drivers in Germany are allowed to strike. A German labor court ruling... Major shipping companies denying they are cutting deals with the Houthi government in Yemen... The federal court clerk in New York releasing more documents related to Jeffrey Epstein... Dutch politics Party of Freedom leader Geert Wilders signaling his willingness to "moderate" in order to form a new government. The "Anti-Islam" bills intoduced by Wilders party were withdrawn... In...

The more people Ortega can drive out of his country, the richer and more oppressive he gets. With Joe Biden's migrant surge, migrant remittances follow, and some very baleful developments are happening abroad. The one that stands out is that of Marxist socialist Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's little dictator, who along with a string of failed leaders before him, impoverished his country in relative obscurity, leaving it the hemisphere's second-poorest after Haiti. The country boasts a per capita income of about $2,200 per year which is lower than even Cubans are paid, and hard as heck to live on even in...

Is the migrant crisis plaguing the U.S. just the spontaneous movement of the globe's peoples to the U.S. ... or the work of an evil little banana-republic dictator plotting to take down the U.S.? Based on a new report from Agence France-Presse, which ran on the Voice of America's website, it actually looks like the latter: … analysts say that the government of Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega, a longtime nemesis of the United States, has deliberately made it easier for migrants to bypass the Darien by flying straight into his country and then heading north overland. Manuel Orozco, a migration...

SAN JOSE (Reuters) - Nicaraguan migrants sent relatives back home record remittances this year through November, data from the country's central bank showed on Wednesday, fueled by massive waves of migration leaving the Central American nation in recent years. In a statement, the bank noted a record haul of about $4.24 billion in remittances for the 11-month period, 47% more than the amount sent home during the same period last year. The 2023 remittances tallied by Nicaragua's central bank showed that nearly 60% came from the senders in the United States and almost 20% from neighboring Costa Rica.

Paris, France CNN — French authorities grounded a passenger plane carrying 303 Indian citizens, including 11 non-accompanied minors, at the airport of Vatry, on suspicion of human trafficking, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office told CNN on Saturday. The plane, belonging to Legend Airlines, a company based in Romania, was on its way from the United Arab Emirates to Nicaragua and had stopped over at Vatry airport, roughly 150 kilometers east of Paris, for supply, according to the Prosecutor’s Office. French authorities seized the plane on December 21 after receiving an anonymous tip. The plane was chartered by a company registered outside...

President Joe Biden’s parole pipeline at the United States-Mexico border has released a foreign population into American communities larger than Las Vegas, Nevada’s, population in less than a year. On Friday, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released illegal immigration figures for November. The data shows that since the start of the year, more than 670,000 foreign nationals have been released into the U.S. interior through the administration’s parole pipeline. The parole pipeline is made up of so-called “humanitarian parole” that Biden’s DHS offers to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans as well as the “CBP One” migrant mobile app whereby...

Nicaraguan police have charged the director of the local Miss Universe franchise with conspiracy, treason, money laundering and spreading fake news as part of a plot to overthrow the government, weeks after the Central American nation’s first victory in the pageant. Karen Celebertti and two others have been accused of participating in “terrorist actions of a failed coup attempt” in 2018, when Nicaraguans protested against President Daniel Ortega’s attempted reforms to the country’s social security system.

Democrats across Congress are calling on President Biden to allow Palestinians entry into the U.S. on humanitarian grounds as war drags on in Gaza. Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., together with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Was., led a letter of 103 colleagues to the president asking him to grant the Palestinian territories Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and/or authorize Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) for Palestinians already living in the U.S. The TPS program allows those from war-torn or crisis-wracked countries to legally live and work in the U.S., but does not give them permanent residency. It allows...

<p>Later that night, Holland America released a statement that it was working to facilitate the transit for the Zaandam and Rotterdam.</p> <p>“We are aware of reported permission for both Zaandam and Rotterdam to transit the Panama Canal in the near future. We greatly appreciate this consideration in the humanitarian interest of our guests and crew. This remains a dynamic situation, and we continue to work with the Panamanian authorities to finalize details,” Holland America’s statement read.</p>

West Coast Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose members earn average wages and benefits of $285,000 by raising labor hell, is facing existential risk from the widened Panama Canal. The San Francisco Chronicle described the 42,000 card-carrying International Longshore and Warehouse Union members that since 1934 has maintained iron-fisted control of all 29 West Coast commercial ports, "the aristocrats of the working class." ILWU full-time workers receive an average of $175,000 in annual wages, along with a non-wage benefits package costing more than $110,000 per active worker per year. Benefits include fully paid health care, employer 401(k) matching, 13 paid holidays,...

The LNG carrier Oak Spirit transits the Expanded Panama Canal with a cargo LNG loaded from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass terminal. Photo Credit: Teekay Executives from U.S. LNG exporter Cheniere Energy met with representatives from the Panama Canal this week in Panama to discuss the waterway’s growing LNG vessel segment. (Underlines mine.) Since the opening of the Expanded Panama Canal in 2016, LNG has emerged as the fastest-growing segment for the waterway in part due to the United States emergence as a gas supplier to Asia and other global markets. To date, the Canal’s Neopanamax locks have transited more than 280...

Link only (Bloomberg)

[Bloomberg] The expansion also coincided with a population boom that has made the south home to 10 of the 15 fastest growing cities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, meaning there is a growing market for goods being imported. At the same time, manufacturing growth throughout the south means shipping lines also can pick up American-made exports to transport abroad.

BATH, Maine — The Bath-built USS Zumwalt, the first-in-class “stealth” destroyer that left the Bath shipyard on Sept. 7, broke down Monday night while passing through the Panama Canal and was towed by tugs through the locks toward the Pacific Ocean. The DDG 1000, the first of a class of three destroyers that cost an estimated $22 billion combined, “suffered an engineering casualty,” the Navy Times reported. The Zumwalt was towed through the locks to Rodman, a former U.S. military base.

The U.S. Navy’s newest littoral combat ship USS Montgomery has had its hull cracked for a second time after hitting a lock wall during a transit of the Panama Canal, the U.S. Navy has confirmed. The latest incident occurred Saturday, Oct. 29 during southbound transit of the Panama Canal’s old locks on its way to its homeport in San Diego

"A century after transforming global trade and markets, the Panama Canal is about to revamp world trade once again. On June 26 the canal is scheduled to reopen after a massive project costing more than $5 billion that will allow bigger ships to pass through the 102-year-old waterway, doubling cargo capacity. U.S.-based businesses are recognizing the new growth opportunities. Many logistics experts predict the expansion of the so-called Panamex may shift international trade routes, allowing ships to reach Asia from the U.S. Gulf Coast more than two weeks faster than going east through the Suez Canal." Excerpt; full story at...