Free Republic

<p>WASHINGTON - An order from President Bush authorized a series of U.S. raids against Iranians in Iraq as part of a broad military offensive, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday.</p> <p>Bush issued the order several months ago, Rice told The New York Times as she prepared to visit the Middle East. She said the president acted "after a period of time in which we saw increasing activity" among Iranians in Iraq "and increasing lethality in what they were producing."</p>

BEIJING — North Korean leader Kim Jong-il told a visiting Chinese delegation that the communist nation didn't plan to conduct additional nuclear tests, a news report said Friday. Kim told Chinese envoy Tang Jiaxuan that "we have no plans for additional nuclear tests," Yonhap news agency reported, citing an unnamed diplomatic source in Beijing. Kim also expressed regret about his country's nuclear test to the delegation and said Pyongyang would return to nuclear talks if Washington backs off from its financial sanctions, a South Korean newspaper reported Friday.

Full Text: North Korea statement The following is the full text of a statement released by the foreign ministry of North Korea, which calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK): On 14 October, the United States instigated the UN Security Council to unjustly find fault with our self-defensive nuclear test as a threat to international peace and safety, and once again passed the vicious resolution on sanctions and blockade against the Republic. Our successful nuclear test is a positive defensive countermeasure to defend our country's sovereignty and the people's life and safety so as to cope with the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials say North Korea's military has informed China it intends to carry out a series of underground nuclear tests, NBC News reported on Tuesday. No further details were provided in the report. The United States said North Korea had moved equipment into place that may indicate it plans a second nuclear test, despite international condemnation of its first underground nuclear explosion on October 9. North Korea has denounced U.N. sanctions over its nuclear test as a declaration of war.

On the forefront of our country's most western state, against the backdrop of the USS Arizona Memorial and the Battleship Missouri, floats 4 of our major Missile Defense assets; the USS Russell (DDG-59), USS Lake Erie (CG-70), USS Port Royal (CG-73), and SBX-1. These 4 ships, in conjunction with the GBI sites in Alaska and California can neutralize North Korea's ballistic missile intentions. In the last 12 months, the United States has successfully intercepted 13 ballistic missiles during realistic operational testing. In the last 90 days, the United States intercepted 4 ballistic missiles from long range to short range and...

UNITED NATIONS — The United States dropped the possibility of using force against North Korea over the regime's purported nuclear test, a concession to Russia and China in the hope of seeing a U.N. Security Council resolution on the standoff passed by Friday.

Four days after North Korea tried to set off its first nuclear bomb, U.S. intelligence agencies think the blast detected by seismic sensors was a plutonium-fueled device that did not fully explode. "The working assumption is that what happened, more likely than not, was an attempted nuclear test that fell far short of being successful," said one U.S. official familiar with the latest intelligence assessment. There is still no confirmation that North Korea succeeded in creating a nuclear explosion, and so far no radioactive particles that would confirm a successful nuclear test have been detected. The Washington Times first reported...

TOKYO - Japan is ready for North Korea to carry out its threatened nuclear test as soon as this weekend, officials said yesterday. Japanese Vice-Foreign Minister Shotaro Yachi, on a visit to Washington, said Pyongyang's resolve to test its first atom bomb should not be underestimated. "We discussed the possibility that the test would occur this weekend," Mr Yachi said after talks with US Deputy National Security Adviser Jack Crouch. North Korea issued a statement on Tuesday saying it would test a nuclear bomb, dramatically raising the stakes in its standoff with the US on its quest for atomic weapons....

"S. Korean Dollar Payments to Kaesong (North Korea) Illegal"

US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made his strongest public case for a plan, opposed by some in the US Congress and by Russia, to convert some Navy long-range missiles from a nuclear to a conventional role for potential use against terrorist targets anywhere in the world. Rumsfeld held talks Sunday with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, and they discussed the issue at a joint news conference. Opponents of the plan argue that it could create a situation in which a conventionally armed US Trident missile, launched from a submarine, would be mistaken for a nuclear launch, thus risking the...

http://ak.imgfarm.com/images/ap/ADDITION_CUBA_CASTRO.sff_NY110_20060813062244.jpg This is one of four photographs published Sunday Aug. 13, 2006 by Cuba's Communist Youth newspaper's online edition Juventud Rebelde proporting to show The first photographs of Fidel Castro since his illness two weeks ago. Castro holds a copy of the Saturday Aug. 12, 2006 edition of Granma, the Communist Party newspaper. The headline reads "Absolved by history." The Associated Press cannot verify the authenticity or the date when these photographs were shot. (AP Photo/HO) Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All right reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Mr Chavez said he wanted to conclude "a unity pact" in Minsk Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has praised Belarus "as a model social state" like the one he and his government are building. During a visit to Belarus, he called for joint efforts to counter what he described as "hegemonic" capitalism. Mr Chavez later met Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko, accused in the West of crushing fundamental rights. Mr Chavez is on a world tour, partly to win support for a Venezuelan seat on the UN Security Council. From Belarus, he will travel to Russia, Qatar, Iran, Vietnam and Mali....

Opening a security conference in Tehran on July 8, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad exhorted the Islamic world to mobilize against Israel and "remove the Zionist regime." Four days later, Hezbollah terrorists staged a raid across Israel's northern border, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing eight more. It was Iran that supplied Hezbollah with its immense arsenal of artillery rockets. When Hezbollah launches them at Israel, it is doing the bidding of its patron. The same is true of Hamas, which is likewise financed by Iran. Israel may be able to inflict a punishing defeat on Hezbollah, but regime change in...

WASHINGTON - Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation hotspot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, alligator ancestors and palm trees. It's smack in the middle of the Arctic. First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show. The scientists say their findings are a glimpse backward into a much warmer-than-thought polar region heated by run-amok greenhouse gases that came about naturally. Skeptics of man-made causes of global warming have nothing to...

MOSCOW: Russia on Thursday rejected a US call for Moscow to end its cooperation with Iran in constructing the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Foreign ministry spokes-man Mikhail Kamynin said that the plant had no relation to Iran's work in uranium enrichment. "The adoption of a commitment on ending cooperation with this or that state in some sphere lies exclusively in the competence of the UNSC," he said in a statement. "Up to now, the Security Council has taken no decision on ending cooperation with Iran in nuclear energy." Every country "has the right to decide with whom and how it...

Russia has insisted it is opposed to moves by the United States and its allies to impose sanctions against Iran. At a meeting in Moscow, Russian officials met delegates from the US, Britain, France, Germany and China to discuss the latest moves in Iran's disputed nuclear programme. Afterwards Russian spokesman Mikhail Kamynin insisted that neither the sanctions route nor the use of force would lead to a solution of the problem. In Washington, the Bush administration says further action is needed. White House spokesman Scott McLennan said: "Violations and failures by the regime to comply with its international obligations run...

Not meant to scare, rather to serve as a wake-up call. This Monday Russia's Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported that part of Ukraine's Soviet-era nuclear arsenal may well have found its way to Iran. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians agreed to transfer the Soviet nuclear arsenal that remained in Ukraine after independence to Russia. According to Novaya Gazeta, some 250 nuclear warheads never made it to Russia and are thought to have been sent to Iran instead. The report further noted that the warheads in question will remain operational until 2010. ............................ Iran's recent financial maneuverings also...

Not only were neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq mentioned in a film about the Iraq-Kuwait war, but the Manchurian corporation's technicians rewire the brains of the abducted U.S. soldiers with false memories of al-Qaida-type jihadists so that they will lay the blame for their terrorist acts on an innocent Muslim jihadist. Why don't the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have "outreach...

In his first State of the Nation address during his first term, Bush lumped Syria along with Iran and North Korea as the so-called the world's "axis of evil."

Iran says it has found the wreckage of two US unmanned spy planes on its territory in recent months, accusing the US of violating its sovereignty through illegal overflights. The Foreign Ministry says Iran "strongly protests against such unlawful acts and emphasises the necessity to observe the principles of international law concerning the sanctity of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states". The Pentagon has no immediate comment to the protest, which came in letters to the US Government written months ago but only made public at the United Nations on Monday. They described the crash of a Shadow 200...