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Tehran’s trickery and tactics of misdirection were on full show Saturday, April 19, when Iran’s Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi offered “to redesign” the controversial Arak reactor so that it produces one-fifth of the plutonium initially planned and his claim that this concession had “virtually resolved” Iran’s controversy with the West. But the giveaway was his mock-innocent comment: “We still don’t know why they [nuclear watchdog inspectors] want to visit Parchin for a third time…” Debkafile: For three years, Tehran has denied monitors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to this military facility to investigate suspected nuclear explosive...

At least 43 people were killed and more than 40 injured in three car-bomb attacks in Baghdad, Iraqi medical sources said Saturday. The three attacks took place in Shia neighborhoods, the sources said.

With Washington pressure rising, secretary of state heads to Vienna next week as target date for agreement on curbing Tehran atomic program nears America’s top diplomat is plunging back into Iranian nuclear talks, keeping one eye on the longtime US adversary and the other on political developments at home, as pressure rises in Washington for a deal ensuring the Islamic Republic cannot become a nuclear state. The prospect of a Republican takeover of the Senate means Secretary of State John Kerry will be on a tight leash with a late-November deadline approaching for an agreement. Kerry, European Union negotiator Catherine...

The exceptionally vicious condemnation of Israel with regard to housing construction in the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem is not merely misguided, but also reflects irrational bias. Incidentally, this behavior also has many ominous parallels to the inhumane incarceration of Jonathan Pollard, despite pleas for the commutation of his sentence from all sectors of American society. The harsh outburst relates to a 2,600-unit housing project planned as an extension of an exclusively Jewish neighborhood adjacent to the suburb of Talpiot and Kibbutz Ramat Rahel, both within the Green Line. It incorporates primarily barren land on which Ethiopian and Russian immigrants had...

Western airstrikes and Kurdish resistance appear to have slowed the Islamic State’s takeover of Kobani, a Syrian town on the border with Turkey, for now. But the situation in the area, where Syrian Kurdish rebels have been steadily losing ground to the jihadists, demonstrates the inadequacy and incoherence of President Obama’s strategy. The Obama administration has said that losing Kobani isn’t a big setback for the fight against the Islamic State. But if our goal is to degrade and destroy the group, it is. The president has prioritized driving the jihadists out of Iraq, but this is senseless when the...

Experts continue to debate whether the explosion at an Iranian military base at Parchin earlier in the week was an act of sabotage. The New York Times notes that the satellite images of the incident showed evidence “reminiscent of pictures of a missile-development site 30 miles west of Tehran that was virtually destroyed during a test in November 2011 that killed 17 people, including Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the leading force behind Iran’s advanced missile efforts.” Nonetheless David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security, told the Times that it “could have been an accident.” However, Hussain...

SURUC, Turkey (AP) -- Kurdish militiamen are putting up a fierce fight to defend a Syrian town near the border with Turkey but are struggling to repel the Islamic State group, which is advancing and pushing in from two sides, Syrian activists and Kurdish officials said Saturday. The battle for Kobani is still raging despite more than two weeks of airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition targeting the militants in and around the town. The strikes, which are aimed at rolling back the militants' gains, appear to have done little to blunt their onslaught on Kobani, which began in mid-September. Just...

Frank Gaffney neatly recaps a slew of breaking reports by Catherine Herridge, Aaron Klein and Clare Lopez concerning what might have drawn the late Amb. Christopher Stevens to Benghazi on September 10 and 11. The diferent strands of this developing story indicate that Stevens may have been there to oversee or inspect an ongoing covert CIA operation to supply weapons and men to the jihadist-dominated "rebels" fighting Syria's Assad. Stevens' last meeting, after all, was with Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin. Turkey, of course, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, is a leading supporter of the "rebels" fighting to ovethrow...

The freshly appointed chairman of a federal investigation into the Benghazi massacre is an apologist for Islamic terrorism who has a cozy relationship with Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. And to add insult to injury, at press time Tuesday evening the chairman of this new State Department panel, former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, was poised to participate in a panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia.” The news comes on the heels of a new report by the Investigative Project on Terrorism that found...

"I called it…John Brennan’s “iron claw”: he came down on Director Petraeus with an “iron claw” to prevent him from investigating what appears to have been John Brennan’s own arms trafficking. Look, when the president’s top advisor for counterterrorism engages in operational activity overseas — because that’s what this appears to be — that is a violation of the National Security Act of 1947. That’s exactly what they tried to convict Oliver North of doing during the Iran-Contra affair. The biggest difference of course between Iran-Contra and Benghazi is that nobody died during the Iran-Contra affair, and here there are...

October 11, 2014 4:00 AM Why Won't Republicans Get to the Bottom of Benghazi? It’s not just Democrats who don't want a full public airing. By Andrew C. McCarthySomething bothers me about the first and only hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Something I haven’t been able to shake. It was a desultory hearing. That’s not the main thing that bothers me, but it grates. Many Americans still seek real accountability for the jihadist-empowering policies and recklessly irresponsible security arrangements that preceded the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack — to say nothing of the fraud and stonewalling that...

It is still unclear what happened on Sunday night at Iran’s illicit nuclear installation at Parchin. According to Iranian sources, there was a large explosion that rocked the area within a 15-km. radius of the facility. Two people were reportedly injured. According to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency and Israel, the Parchin facility is a key component of Iran’s suspected military nuclear program. It is at Parchin that Iran is allegedly building a nuclear explosive device – that is, a nuclear warhead. The timing of the blast is notable. On Monday night, a delegation from the IAEA landed in...

Ethnic Kurds clashed overnight with alleged members of a hardline Islamist movement in Hamburg last night, as ISIS clashes spread far from Syria. Police in the northern German city say 14 people were injured overnight in the violence involving hundreds of demonstrators before riot police were able to quell the disturbance. Police spokesman Karina Sadowsky said this morning that fighting began after hundreds of Kurds held a protest against the Islamic State group... ...Last night's violence in Germany came as at least nine Kurdish demonstrators were killed by police in Turkey as demonstrations against the government's failure to help Syrian...

KURDISH FIGHTERS THWARTED a bid by Islamic State group jihadists to advance into the centre of the battleground Syrian town of Kobane early today, a monitoring group said. The attack came after the IS militants overran Kurdish headquarters in the border town on Friday..

Abu Gharib is a mere 8 miles from the runway perimeter, while the distance from BGW to the US Embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone is roughly 9.5 miles. The Washington Times reported earlier this summer that ISIS captured upwards of 52 American made M198mm howitzer heavy artillery pieces, capable of hitting targets 14-20 miles away. The captured M198's reportedly cost $500,000 per piece. To add insult to injury, the Islamists have also seized 1,500 up-armored Humvees which cost the American taxpayer $220,000 each.

A quick update on the largely forgotten half of President Obama’s shambolic Syria policy. You’ll recall, of course, the blown chemical weapons “red line” and the subsequent, humiliating Putin/Assad plan that accidentally became US policy due after John Kerry blundered into it. Kerry has since admitted that the entire proposition has collapsed, forcing the White House to publicly disagree with its own Secretary of State. Nevertheless, a loyal band of administration lackeys triumphantly cheered news of Syria’s alleged disarmament when it broke over the summer, after several missed deadlines. ‘No Drama Obama’ had done it again, they crowed, achieving...

This year's fall in energy prices is hastening the decline of big oil, as the seven Western majors sell-off assets, cut investment, return money to shareholders and shrink in size, leaving ever more output to small producers and state firms. Companies that were already deep in the red when the price of Brent was at $109 a barrel last year are having to redraw business plans for prices as low as $90. With promised shareholder dividends probably untouchable for now, they will have to divest, cut costs and borrow more against a smaller business just to make ends meet. And...

Iran has reduced its oil prices to Asia to its lowest level since December 2008, hard on the heels of a similar Saudi cut last week, people familiar with the pricing said Friday... The National Iranian Oil Co. has cut its light crude oil price for Asian deliveries in November to a discount of 82 cents a barrel below the Oman/Dubai benchmark, the people said. The cut, which compares to a premium of 18 cents in October, is identical to a Saudi reduction of $1 a barrel last week for the Arab Light grade to Asia....

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Drew Gilpin Faust Office of the President Harvard University Massachusetts Hall Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Dear Dr. Faust: This letter is being sent to you on behalf of the Qatar Awareness Campaign Coalition. The purpose is to inform you and the public of the activities of Qatar. Harvard University is assisting the Qatar Foundation to establish a law school in Doha, in order to “revitalize legal education in the Middle East, and represent Islamic and Arabic legal traditions in the global dialogue on legal and governance issues.” These traditions include Sharia law. Harvard University is arguably the greatest institution of...