Free Republic

Iran has not been submitting to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, tasked with ensuring United Nations compliance. Iran is just weeks from having enough fissile material to power a nuclear bomb, while simultaneously completing the deployment of 1000 new centrifuges which will allow the regime to enrich its own uranium at an increasing pace, Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Gantz is warning. The news Tuesday came as nuclear talks between Iran and world power, fueled by the United States and European Union have experienced an awkward pause as it appears the two sides are having trouble compromising. “Iran continues...

Russian energy officials have claimed control of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Station, Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant, according to Ukrainian officials. Energy officials from Rosatom, the Russian state atomic energy corporation, arrived in Zaporizhzhya on Friday and said the plant is now part of their company.... ...The International Atomic Energy Agency said that two of the four high voltage offsite power lines at the Zaporizhzhia plant have been damaged...Ukrainian technicians have begun to repair the damaged power lines at the plant, Insider reported on Saturday. The Russian military has also gotten dangerously close to the nuclear plant in Yuzhnoukrainsk...

A team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived in Japan on Monday to review a plan to release treated radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean. Japan hoped the visit would help it push through the plan, which is opposed by the local fishing industry and neighboring countries. The wastewater has been kept in massive tanks since the plant went into meltdown in 2011, and storage space is running out. The IAEA team would evaluate the safety and radiation effects on humans and the sea.

WASHINGTON — The head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog says his monitoring program in Iran is no longer “intact” after Tehran refused requests to repair cameras at a key facility, creating the possibility the world will never be “able to reconstruct the picture” of what the Iranians have been doing. In an interview with NBC News, International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi says he’s been unable to establish the type of direct communication with Iran’s government that he had before a new hardline government run by President Ebrahim Raisi was elected in June.

Something strange is going on. Why is the EU so keen to shoe-horn America back into the nuclear deal with Iran? Former US president Donald Trump ditched the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal three years ago and imposed heavy sanctions on the mullahs’ regime under his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign. Since then, the Iranians have boasted about how they have flouted the terms of the deal by accelerating their advanced centrifuge program and enriching uranium to almost weapons grade fissile status. The Biden administration is being ultra-cautious. But the EU’s high Representative for Foreign Affairs & Security, the Spanish...

Assessment could likely increase pressure on U.S., other world powers to restore the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Iran is now reportedly within roughly a month of having enough material to fuel a nuclear weapon. The prediction comes from experts studying data in recent reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ atomic inspection group, who say Iran has enriched enough nuclear fuel in recent months to reach near bomb-grade levels and has gained the capability to produce the fuel needed for a single nuclear warhead within roughly a month, according to The New York Times. The newspaper...

Iran told the UN’s nuclear watchdog on Tuesday that it plans to produce uranium metal enriched to up to 20% purity for reactor fuel in a move that the US branded “provocative.” Such a development would put Tehran in further breach of a 2015 nuclear accord negotiated under the Barack Obama administration. The deal bans all work on uranium metal since it can be used to make the core of a nuclear bomb. It committed Iran to sourcing such material from abroad rather than producing it domestically. “We have made clear that such provocative steps would not and will not...

Team Obama-Biden's decision to brand its 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called "Iran nuclear deal," as comprehensive was White House disinformation of the vilest sort: a blatant lie told to deceive the American people. President Barack Obama's JCPOA was anything but comprehensive. It had weak nuclear inspection requirements and enforcement mechanisms, which Iran easily skirted. Documents that Israeli intelligence acquired in 2018 confirmed Tehran routinely violated the JCPOA. The plan of action? Inaction in the face of Tehran's calculated violence is more apt. Team Obama-Biden failed to penalize the Iranian regime's covert and overt violent troublemaking, a grievous...

<p>Fire. That's a reoccurring theme with Iranian assets. I'm thinking the Israelis have a weapon that starts fires. Could be a laser or some kind of computer virus that causes electronic equipment to malfunction and overheat or it could simply be Drew Barrymore. Who knows, but it's very interesting.</p>

A massive fire broke out Wednesday night at the oil refinery serving Iran’s capital, sending thick plumes of black smoke over Tehran. It wasn’t immediately clear if there were injuries. The fire struck the state-owned Tondgooyan Petrochemical Co. to the south of Tehran, said Mansour Darajati, the director-general of the capital’s crisis management team. Firefighters believe it struck a pipeline for liquefied petroleum gas at the facility, Darajati told Iranian state television. He did not elaborate.

TEHRAN, Iran - The largest warship in the Iranian navy caught fire and later sank Wednesday in the Gulf of Oman under unclear circumstances, semiofficial news agencies reported. The blaze began around 2:25 a.m. and firefighters tried to contain it, Fars said. The vessel sank near the Iranian port of Jask, some 1,270 kilometers (790 miles) southeast of Tehran on the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf. Photos circulated on Iranian social media of sailors wearing life jackets evacuating the vessel as a fire burned behind them. State TV and...

The United States imported a rare cargo of 1.033 million barrels of Iranian crude in March despite sanctions on Iran’s energy sector, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed. The cargo is only the second oil import by the United States from Iran since late 1991, data on EIA’s website showed.

Bernie Sanders continues his campaign to undermine Israel in favor of a brutal, aggressive Iran. The liberal media approached the latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East as a renewal of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, if not a return to the Arab-Israeli Wars of half a century ago. Former president George W. Bush, however, saw the situation for what it was. In an exclusive interview with Fox News on May 19, he correctly stated that what "you're seeing playing out is Iranian influence targeted toward Israel." The 4,000 rockets fired by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists from Gaza were...

And one candidate in particular is leading: Ebrahim Raisi, the current judiciary chief, appointed by Mr. Khamenei, who has a long history of involvement in human rights abuses, and who lost in 2017 in a surprise victory by the outgoing president, Hassan Rouhani. With no credible challenger, Mr. Raisi is expected to win this time. Any serious competition has been winnowed from the race. Even some members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, known for their strong hostility to any political dissent, described the election as anti-democratic.

If Biden administration re-enters a nuclear deal with Iran and lifts sanctions on the regime, this will be like giving them another airplane full of cash.President Joe Biden’s national security team appears to be insistent upon reversing policies just because they were attached to the Trump administration, regardless of the disastrous consequences. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Middle East, where we have traded four years of peace through strength for four months of violence through weakness.The Middle East is like an ancient puzzle of interconnected interests, histories, alliances and suspicions. For decades, we tried to jam ill-fitting...

The Biden administration is loaded with people who can't admit the obvious. The border is in crisis. Immunization means you can't catch COVID. COVID originated in a ChiCom lab. Inflation? What inflation? Now it's Secretary of State Antony Blinken's turn. Get a load of this exchange reported by the Daily Caller, describing Blinken's appearance on ABC's "The Week":The show’s host [former Clinton administration operative George Stephanopoulos] then brought up a May 13 letter by a group of Senate Republicans, in which the lawmakers urged Biden to stop offering sanction relief to Iran, citing its funding of Hamas.“Do you believe that...

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping expressed his support for Iran in a phone call Monday with his nominal counterpart, outgoing Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Xi said Beijing supports Iran’s “reasonable demands” for reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s readout of the call said Xi saluted Iran as a partner in fighting the coronavirus pandemic and achieving “positive results in bilateral practical cooperation.” After reflecting on 50 ostensibly successful years of Chinese-Iranian diplomacy, Xi threw China’s weight behind Iran on a few specific issues: China will continue to firmly...

If you were to ask anyone at random, what is the most dangerous threat to our country, he'd likely say China, Russia, or Iran, because those countries are, or soon will be, a military threat to our nation. Some might say a polluted environment is our greatest enemy, while others might say the increase in rioting and looting from coast to coast. It's highly unlikely that many people will say the greatest threat comes from the drug cartels that destroy the lives of tens of thousands of Americans each year. Deaths from illicit drug use can be differentiated in several...

State-owned NIOC said that operations have begun to start injecting oil into the 1,000km Goreh-Jask pipeline, which will be inaugurated "in the near future." The 46-inch diameter pipeline connects Iran's southwest Bushehr province to Jask, on the country's southern Gulf of Oman coast. The Jask terminal will provide an alternative to the Kharg Island loading point — from where most Iranian crude is shipped — and smaller terminals Lavan, Sirri and Soroush, all of which are located further into the Mideast Gulf. Iranian condensate exports are served by the Assaluyeh terminal. Iran has overwhelmingly relied on Kharg Island for its...

(CNSNews.com) – Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday acknowledged that Iran funds terrorist proxies across the Middle East, but confirmed that the Biden administration is looking to lift sanctions against the regime in Tehran anyway. In doing so, he echoed the arguments put forward by the Obama administration to the effect that Iran would be even more dangerous without a nuclear deal – thereby justifying an agreement that freed up billions of dollars for the terror-sponsoring regime. On ABC’s “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos noted that 42 Republican senators have urged President Biden to halt diplomatic talks in Vienna...