Free Republic

Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), said in its annual report that Iranian efforts to illegally procure technology, especially in the nuclear area, had continued at a "high level" in 2015. A separate report from the intelligence agency in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia this week said it had registered 141 attempts to acquire technology for proliferation purposes last year and that two-thirds of these attempts were linked to Iran. Asked about the reports on Friday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said Germany expected Iran to stick to a United Nations Security Council...

Taysir Kubaa, deputy head of the Palestinian National Council, on Thursday called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to abandon the path of negotiations with Israel which, he said, does not lead to success for the Palestinians. Speaking in an interview with Hamas's Palestine newspaper, Kubaa said that the Palestinian reliance on false negotiations is wrong, since negotiations are “worthless”, as he put it, and “the only option we face is a return to national unity and enlisting our people to the forces of the struggle.” Referring to the French peace initiative which calls for an international conference to renew peace...

Prior to the late 20th century, the venerable civilization of Iran had virtually always existed under a monarchic government. This was a long tradition of the Iranian people, stretching all the back to Cyrus the Great. That all changed in 1979, when, after thousands of years of monarchy, the King (called the Shah) of Iran was overthrown, and a powerful Islamic cleric called Ruhollah Khomeini rose to the new position of Ayatollah (supreme leader). That much is settled history. What has not been so clear since the Islamic Revolution, however, were the specific feelings and actions of then-US President Jimmy...

The time has surely arrived for trilateral negotiations to be commenced between Israel, Jordan and Egypt to allocate sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza between their respective sovereign States The Quartet—America, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations—has effectively consigned any negotiated two-state solution to political oblivion with its latest Report. Two statements in the Report stymie any resumption of negotiations—stalled since April 2014.

Franks said that one strategic strike could create blackouts nationwide. And the consequences of this could be a field day for hackers, cripple our military defense system, and that’s not even mentioning what life would be like for normal Americans if they had no power. The risk of an EMP attack has been around since the Cold War but according to Franks, “we’re a thousand times more vulnerable than we were even 50 years ago.”

The House Foreign Affairs Committee heard expert testimony detailing the Palestinian Authoritie's payment of funds from its budget in assistance to imprisoned and dead terrorists and their families. Yigal Carmon, the president and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute says that most of the funds come from donor countries like the US and western Europe, making them virtually complicit in attacks on Israeli citizens.

Study of 44 ancient Middle Eastern genomes supports idea of independent farming revolutions in the Fertile Crescent. Two Middle Eastern populations independently developed farming and then spread the technology to Europe, Africa and Asia, according to the genomes of 44 people who lived thousands of years ago in present-day Armenia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Iran. ...the research supports archaeological evidence about the multiple origins of farming, and represents the first detailed look at the ancestry of the individuals behind one of the most important periods in human history — the Neolithic revolution. Some 11,000 years ago, humans living in the...

A senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) recently threatened Israel, saying the ground is ready for the annihilation of “the Zionist regime”. The comments by IRGC Deputy Commander Hossein Salami were made at a sermon in Tehran this past Friday prior to prayers marking Al-Quds Day. He also declared that Iran has over 100,000 missiles waiting in Lebanon alone and that tens of thousands of other missiles were placed throughout the Muslim world in order to wipe "the accursed black dot" – that is Israel – from the map of the world. Salami also threatened Kurdish leaders...

Please ID the modded gun with the woman on the left. I want one. Pic of Lebanese women armed against #ISIS#Syria pic.twitter.com/aM473kP36M— Nutsflipped (@Nutsflipped_z_1) June 29, 2016

Truncated title. Full title: Ex-Secret Service Agent: Mainstream Media ‘Blacklisting’ Me to Help ‘Clinton Machine’ ‘Squash’ Message Gary Byrne, the retired U.S. Secret Service agent who has written a blockbuster new book about his time in the Clinton White House, suspects that the so-called “Clinton Machine” is getting the mainstream media to “blacklist” him in order to “squash” his message about how Hillary Clinton is unfit to become the country’s next President. Byrne answered questions about his book last week at Barnes & Noble in McLean, Virginia, and C-SPAN aired the event over the weekend. His book, Crisis of Character,...

<p>Last week, the Navy released the results of a lengthy investigation it had completed, concerning the conduct of one officer and nine enlisted sailors after they willingly surrendered their two Riverine Patrol Craft to the Iranians and were subsequently detained for 15 hours in the Persian Gulf last January.</p>

Left-wing writer Max Blumenthal helped inspire Hillary Clinton’s debunked talking point that an obscure YouTube movie called “Innocence of Muslims” was responsible for the deadly terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya in 2012. The son of Clinton’s longtime political adviser and informal Libya consultant, Max Blumenthal pushed his conspiratorial theories onto the secretary of state in the hours after Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed. The Daily Caller reported in December that Hillary Clinton received the “Youtube video” talking points before the rest of the Obama administration. Clinton was the first administration official to suggest...

President Hassan Rouhani said the last year’s nuclear deal “was the cheapest way to achieve Iran’s goals and interests.” Speaking in Tehran on Saturday at an iftar meal breaking the Ramadan fast, Rouhani said the pre-Iran nuclear-deal era is past and Iran now needs to take advantage of the new atmosphere to pursue its “national interests more than before,” Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency reported. The country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday called for student associations to establish a “unified anti-US and anti-Zionist front” among the Muslim world’s students, Tasnim News Agency reported. “By using advanced means of...

A long profile on Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post earlier this week highlights (the 2011 Libyan intervention) as a key indicator of her approach to foreign policy. Clinton claims that the Libyan bombing campaign was an example of “smart power at its best.” If she actually believes that, it raises serious questions about her judgment, as well as about her ability to analyze foreign policy dispassionately and with the best interests of the United States at heart. If Clinton is willing to point to Libya as a “signature moment in her four-year tenure” as secretary of state, as the...

A search is under way for a cargo ship which may have travelled through the English Channel after apparently being hijacked by pirates. Coastguards fear the Maltese-flagged Arctic Sea, carrying 15 Russian crew, was hijacked in the Baltic sea. UK authorities made contact before it entered the Strait of Dover but the Russian navy told the Itar-Tass agency it was now looking for the ship. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency said the situation was "bizarre". Spokesman Mark Clark said: "Who would think that a hijacked ship could pass through one of the most policed and concentrated waters in the world?...

The military airlifted the suspected hijackers of the Arctic Sea and most of its Russian crew from Cape Verde to Moscow on Thursday, after the lumber freighter mysteriously vanished and reappeared in the Atlantic. Eleven of the 15 crew members arrived in Moscow, while the captain and three sailors remained on the ship, which was adrift about 200 nautical miles from the West African island nation of Cape Verde. Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said the freighter was sailing to the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. The sailors and their suspected captors arrived in two separate Il-76 cargo jets at the...

Russia says it tracked hijacked Arctic Sea all along, but questions grow over cargo Tony Halpin in Moscow Russia’s top general hinted today that the ship allegedly hijacked by pirates earlier this month may have been carrying a secret cargo, as it emerged that the country’s Navy tracked the vessel throughout its journey. President Medvedev sent the Russian Navy to find the Arctic Sea after it apparently disappeared while passing through the English Channel en route to Algeria from Finland. However, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow now says that Russian and international agencies had monitored the ship throughout its strange...

can’t say anything about the roots of this story and I don’t plan to dig further… I need to think about my own skin too. Understand that as you will.” —Mikhail Voitenko, editor of the Russian maritime Bulletin Sovfrakht., speaking about the “hijacking” of the Arctic Sea While it might seem like an unusual morphing of the movies Inside Man and The Hunt for Red October, the account of the cargo ship Arctic Sea is far stranger than either fictional account. Based on information developed through our extensive investigation, we can authoritatively state, without hyperbole, that the mysteries surrounding the...

The hijackers of a cargo ship that disappeared off the coast of France threatened to blow it up if their ransom demands were not met, Russian news agencies said.Russia has arrested eight people on suspicion of hijacking the Arctic Sea off the Swedish coast and sailing it to the Atlantic Ocean, ending weeks of silence about the fate of a ship which has intrigued European maritime authorities. Limited information from Russian officials has failed to satisfy sceptics who voiced doubts about whether the piracy actually took place or was a convenient cover story to conceal a possible secret cargo of...

ULAN BATOR (Reuters) - Russia's top general said on Wednesday the military would search the Arctic Sea merchant ship for a possible secret cargo when it returns to Russia from a maritime odyssey that has made headlines around the world.Russia says the Maltese-registered Arctic Sea, officially carrying timber from Finland to Algeria, was hijacked by eight men off the coast of Sweden on July 24. This month Russian warships intercepted the vessel off the coast of Cape Verde."We do not know yet what it is carrying, we only know it is timber. But what else it is actually transporting. It...