Free Republic

South Africa, alas, is not our friend. Despite decades of financial and moral support from the United States, South Africa is drifting into alignment with our rivals for global supremacy. Daniel Greenfield reports for Front Page Magazine:In November 2022, Climate Envoy John Kerry announced a giveaway of $1 billion in foreign aid to South Africa. The failed racist state which regularly suffers blackouts from its socialist power system was being offered billions to subsidize electric cars and green energy.Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed that “President Ramaphosa and the South African Government have created a bold plan identifying a clear strategy...

Recent data show surges in trade for some of Russia’s neighbors and allies, suggesting that countries like Turkey, China, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are stepping in to provide Russia with many of the products that Western countries have tried to cut off as punishment for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian trade appears to have largely bounced back to where it was before the invasion of Ukraine last February. Analysts estimate that Russia’s imports may have already recovered to prewar levels, or will soon do so, depending on their models.

Two things are happening in the Black Sea which together could shift the dynamic in Russia’s favor. Russia has copied Ukraine’s’ maritime drones and started using them. At the same time, a decision by Elon Musk to limit Starlink use may stop Ukraine using their own. As the saying goes, Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The Russian military has copied Ukraine’s now famous ‘Maritime Drone’ and begun using it against Ukrainian targets. At the same time, Ukraine’s own ability to deploy maritime drones looks to have been massively reduced. SpaceX has said that it will prevent Ukraine using...

Mexico arrested Amer Haykel, a British man of Arab extraction, sought by US authorities in connection with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the Attorney General's office (PGR) said on Tuesday. Haykel was arrested in Todo Santos, a town in the northeastern Mexican state of Baja California, officials said. "The PGR arrested... Haykel, whom US authorities have linked to extremist groups presumably involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York," the office said in a statement. Officials said Haykel was arrested at the Todo Santos fire department, following "investigative and intelligence work and...

MEXICO CITY, June 22 (Reuters) - A man arrested in Mexico and named as a key terrorism suspect with possible links to the Sept. 11 attackers, is in fact a tourist who poses no security risk, red-faced Mexican authorities said on Wednesday. The attorney general's office set bells ringing on Tuesday when it announced it had detained Lebanese-born British citizen Amer Haykel at a fire station in the state of Baja California Sur in cooperation with U.S. authorities. It said Haykel was wanted in the United States and was "linked to extremist groups presumably involved in the Sept. 11,...

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.” That disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own...

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit will be held in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, from Thursday to Friday. The summit has received particular attention from the international community. Fifteen heads of state, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will attend the summit. This is the first face-to-face discussion between leaders of the SCO member states since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The meeting will include Iran as the ninth member of the SCO and issue the Samarkand Declaration to expound the SCO's position on a series of international issues. As the world's largest...

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on Wednesday introduced a bill that would designate Russia as a "state sponsor of terrorism," just a few months after the Senate Judiciary Committee members called on the Biden Administration to do so. The bipartisan duo is seeking to make Russia the fifth addition to the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism joining North Korea, Iran, Syria and Cuba...

The visit, which comes at the invitation of the Russian Foreign Ministry, will last for several days and aims to discuss prospects for bilateral relations to serve the Palestinian cause. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with a delegation of the Palestinian movement Hamas, headed by political bureau chairman Ismail Haniyeh, in Moscow on Monday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "On September 12, … Lavrov hosted … Haniyeh, who is in Moscow as the head of the delegation of this Palestinian movement. During the conversation, the main attention was paid to the development of the situation in the Middle East...

Iran has definitely crossed that line. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Wednesday that a first shipment of Iranian drones had been "newly introduced to the fight" in Ukraine.Iran and Russia have also reportedly been collaborating to evade Western sanctions, a partnership that could undermine U.S. efforts both to impose costs for the Ukraine invasion and to convince Iran to return to compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal. A marriage of convenience can be much more durable than a romantic relationship

Russian cargo planes left Tehran 10 days ago with UAVs, some of which have already malfunctioned, U.S. and allied officials say Russian cargo planes have quietly picked up the first of scores of Iranian-made combat drones for use against Ukraine, U.S. officials said, in a move that underscores deepening ties between Moscow and Tehran while also highlighting Russia’s struggles to supply its overstretched military. But while the weapons could provide a significant boost for Russia’s war effort against Ukraine, the transfer has been marred by technical problems, security officials from the United States and an allied government said in interviews....

Russia and Iran are have begun talks to create an OPEC-like cartel for natural gas which would allow them to coordinate an “extraordinary” level of reserve output, giving them tremendous control over the tightness of the market and the price of the resource, according to a report by OIlPrice. The report said, “Occupying the number one and number two positions in the world’s largest gas reserves table, respectively – Russia with just under 48 trillion cubic meters (tcm) and Iran with nearly 34 tcm – the two countries are in an ideal position to do this.” Russia’s Gazprom and the...

Hizbullah-Affiliated Lebanese Academic Dr. Sadek Al-Naboulsi: If Israel Does Not Meet Lebanese Demands In Maritime Border Negotiations, We Are Headed To War; Khomeini's Fatwa Against Rushdie Prevented Further Insult To Islam #9765 | 02:03 Source: Al-Jadeed TV (Lebanon) Hizbullah-Affiliated Lebanese academic Dr. Sadek Al-Naboulsi said in an August 15, 2022 show on Al-Jadeed TV (Lebanon) that there has been no real breakthrough in the maritime border negotiations between Israel and Lebanon. He said that a confrontation is on the horizon if there is no American or Israeli response to Lebanese demands, and he said that Israeli silence amounts to aggression...

President Joe Biden hasn’t blocked Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi from entering the U.S. to speak at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting in New York City next month. Raisi will attend even after an Iranian military officer was charged this month with trying to assassinate former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. For weeks, Senate Republicans have been calling for President Joe Biden to block Raisi, who the U.S. sanctioned in 2019 for his role in executing children in 2018 and 2019. Earlier this month, The Department of Justice charged an Iranian military officer with trying to hire people...

Intel officials told VICE World News Hadi Matar had been in contact with members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. .. The 24-year-old man accused of stabbing author Salman Rushdie had been in direct contact with members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on social media, European and Middle Eastern intelligence officials told VICE World News. Hadi Matar has been charged with attempted murder after Rushdie, 75, was repeatedly stabbed on stage ahead of a speaking event in Chautauqua, New York, on Friday. On Sunday, Rushdie’s son Zafar Rushdie said his father was in a critical condition and had sustained “life-changing” injuries...

WASHINGTON — Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have succumbed to his own mythmaking and hyperbole, unable to let go of his desire to conquer Ukraine, no matter what the costs, according to a public assessment by America’s top spymaster. CIA Director William Burns, the last U.S. official to meet with Putin before he ordered Russian forces into Ukraine in February, warned late Wednesday that the Russian leader truly believes he must conquer Ukraine to fulfill his destiny. “Putin really does believe his rhetoric, and I’ve heard him say it privately over the years, that Ukraine's not a real country....

Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to travel to the Middle East this week, a rare trip abroad intended to signal that the protracted and costly war in Ukraine hasn’t diminished Moscow’s place on the world stage. In only his second trip outside Russia since the country invaded Ukraine in February, Mr. Putin is set to travel to Tehran on Tuesday, where he will meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. The visit reflects the importance Mr. Putin places in maintaining the leverage Russia gained from years of military and diplomatic intervention in the Middle East.

After being shot Abe was airlifted to a hospital but he was not breathing and his heart had stopped, officials said. He was declared dead hours laterJapan's former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe succumbed to his injuries on Friday after being shot during a campaign speech in western Japan earlier in the day. Earlier, as the news of the attack alarmed people across the world, Chinese nationalists began to celebrate the incident on Weibo and terming the attacker a 'hero'. The post was shared on the Twitter handle of Badiucao - a Chinese political cartoonist, artist and rights activist based in...

While U.S. intelligence has been unable in two years to determine for sure if COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab, Congress has decided it no longer wants to take the risk of funding medical research at labs controlled by Beijing or other American adversaries.With little fanfare and in bipartisan fashion, House appropriators quietly amended the 2023 federal budget for health and science agencies on Thursday to ban any funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which U.S. intelligence fears may have been the origin point for the coronavirus pandemic, and other labs like it."None of the funds made available by...

To say that the United States’ foreign policy situation has shifted dramatically in the past couple of years would be an understatement. While the world is largely united in its opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America’s individual relationships with some countries have grown increasingly rocky even as former rivals in other parts of the world seem to be on the mend. For one example, look no further than the recent rapprochement between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Just this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Saudi Arabia for the first time in five years, taking meetings with both Crown...