Free Republic

Violence and murder are now rampant in big cities across the nation. 79 shot, 15 fatally, over Fourth of July weekend in ChicagoThere were 11 shootings in Atlanta during the July 4th weekend. Out of the 31 victims, 5 of them died.Seven dead and almost two dozen injured in 17 Philadelphia shootings over July 4 weekendFourth of July weekend shootings leave 7 dead, 18 injured in St. LouisAh, New York, New York...if you can survive here, you can survive anywhere... On Sunday, July 5th, police officers from the 44th Precinct responded to a 911 call for a male shot at...

Steven Bing, Peter Benjamin Lewis, George Soros It is late in the day, but there is still time to ask the Kerry-Edwards campaign and the Democratic National Committee about their financing sources. Equally important to ask is just what do these ridiculously rich and strange people expect to get for their millions of dollars. Let's look at three of Kerry's friends, probably responsible for at least $30 million in donations. Steven Bing: Our Victorian ancestors had the right words to describe Bing. He would have been known as "a cad and a bounder," while today he is dismissed as a...

Former Secretary of State John Kerry is using some dangerous rhetoric about the 2020 election. In a recent panel discussion for the Alliance of Democracies, he made the following statement: “If people don’t have adequate access to the ballot, I mean that’s the stuff on which revolutions are built. If you begin to deny people the capacity of your democracy to work, even the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, we have an inherent right to challenge that. And I’m worried that increasingly, people are disaffected.” Kerry’s comments should not be construed as typical Democrat rhetoric...

S former top-ranking Obama official has revealed that the Democratic Party is prepared to support a “revolution” in the streets to force Donald Trump out of office if he wins re-election this fall. It’s a familiar face: Former Secretary of State John Kerry. He signaled that party leaders will support a violent “revolution,” if that’s what it takes.

Agnes Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing, said on Thursday night that the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian terrorist mastermind Gen. Qasem Soleimani was a violation of international law. The U.N. has been oddly quiet about Soleimani’s violations of international law, including activities that indisputably violated U.N. sanctions. “The targeted killings of Qasem Soleiman and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis are most likely unlawful and violate international human rights law: Outside the context of active hostilities, the use of drones or other means for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal,” Callamard wrote on Twitter. She proceeded...

The January U.S. drone strike in Iraq that killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and nine other people represented a violation of international law, a U.N. human rights investigator said on Monday. The United States has failed to provide sufficient evidence of an ongoing or imminent attack against its interests to justify the strike on Soleimani's convoy as it left Baghdad airport, said Agnes Callamard, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The attack violated the U.N. Charter, Callamard wrote in a report calling for accountability for targeted killings by armed drones and for greater regulation of the...

Pakistan said Saturday that it will re-open its western border with Iran from July 5 for trade. In a notification, the ministry of interior said it will re-open the border at four crossing points at Gabd, Mand, Katagar, and Chedgi and they will remain opened seven days a week from morning till evening. “Unlimited number of trucks will be allowed while ensuring all Covid-19 related SOPs and protocols,” read the notification. The ministry said the decision to re-open border crossings with Iran was taken on July 2 in the meeting of National Command Operation Center. Pakistan had first closed its...

Cliff Kincaid writes of the protest, "The “peace director” of the October 2 “One Nation Working Together” rally says that the U.S. should immediately withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, military aid to Israel should be ended, and that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons as long as the U.S. has them. He also says that Marxists are invited to participate at his upcoming rally. Michael McPhearson, one of the key organizers of the event and former executive director of Veterans for Peace, tells Accuracy in Media, “I’m not all that concerned if you’re a Republican, Democrat, or Marxist...

Ho-hum, another day in Tehran, another incident of careless explosive-tank handling. Or so the Iranians want everyone to think, for now. Officials claim that “careless handling” of oxygen tanks triggered an explosion south of Tehran that killed two people in Baghershahr late yesterday. “Human error,” the Iranian regime called it: Two men have been killed in yet another Iran explosion, as officials blamed ‘human error’ for the blast.The explosion rocked the Sepahan Boresh factory in the city of Baqershahr, south of Tehran, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, according to state media.It was caused by ‘workers being negligent...

[Tehran] is in a difficult position because it labeled the explosion an accident, but it is now facing a deluge of foreign media reports seeking to conclude that the explosion was perpetrated by a state or group. This is what Iran's regime is reading: Major media from The New York Times to The Washington Post and local media such as Kuwait's Al-Jarida have all sought to assert that Israel was involved in the mysterious July 2 explosion at a warehouse in the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility... [t]hat could set back the program for months or a year. Iran, however, is...

Report: In Devastating Blow, Israel Sets Back Iran's Nuke Program Two YearsThe last couple of weeks have seen a string of apparent sabotage incidents in Iran. Questions about them abound. Possible answers are intriguing to say the least. Probably the most significant attack came early Thursday morning at Natanz, when, as the New York Times reported:...A Middle Eastern intelligence official…said the blast was caused by an explosive device planted inside the facility. The explosion, he said, destroyed much of the aboveground parts of the facility where new centrifuges…are balanced before they are put into operation…. ... ... Instead, Iran appears...

"After a decade of studying the cultural evidence yielded from the three seasons of archeological excavations at Kaldar Cave, the recent results show that a Paleolithic layer in the middle of this the cave is more than 63,000 years old," CHTN quoted Iranian archaeologist Behrouz Bazgir as saying on Sunday. Kaldar is a key archaeological site that provides evidence of the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition in Iran. The cave is situated in the northern Khorramabad valley of Lorestan province and at an elevation of 1,290 m above sea level. It measures 16 meters long, 17 meters wide, and seven...

At pro-Palestinian Black Lives Matter rallies in New York and Washington, chants were heard calling for “Death to Israel,” “Death to America” and “From Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the Intifada!” Several hundred protesters attended the July 1 demonstration in Brooklyn dubbed as a “Day of Rage” event, set to coincide with the earliest date Israel could begin its plans to apply Israeli law over parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Speakers issued inflammatory rallying cries that ran the gamut from anti-Semitic and anti-American to just plain absurd. One pro-North Korea activist called for the end of the...

Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs said in a heated speech today in Parliament that he “coordinated” everything with the now dead commander of the Quds Force. Javad Zarif said that he had weekly sessions with Qasem Soleimani and coordinated with him. “In regional talks, whatever we did, we coordinated with each other,” he said today. He told lawmakers who were calling him out for “lying” that those who knew Soleimani and other known regional terrorists knew that he worked very closely with Soleimani. “Those who know Soleimani the Martyr and Seyed Hassan Nasrollah, and the Iraqi, Lebanese, and Palestine Resistance,...

Iran is stewing over the potential loss of its most advanced centrifuge production plant after some kind of explosion and fire severely damaged it. Naturally, the Iranians are being pretty closemouthed about the incident. They haven’t said much about the fire and explosion at what was suspected to be a nuclear research facility in the mountains outside of Tehran, either. But it’s hard to hide what happened at Natanz — the nuclear facility with the highest-profile in the country. And Iran is hinting that the destruction of its advanced centrifuge plant might have been caused by some kind of variation...

For US National Security Advisor John Bolton warned that President Trump’s reelection could imperil Israel. Speaking with Israel’s Channel 13 in an interview which is set to be aired Thursday night, Bolton said he fears that if President Trump is reelected this November, it could create a ‘risk’ for Israel. Specifically, Bolton claimed that Trump is “eager” to open negotiations with Iran and could offer sanctions relief, something which would pose a “a danger”. .....

Israel was responsible for two blasts at Iranian facilities — one related to uranium enrichment, the other for missile production — over the past week, a Kuwaiti newspaper reported Friday. The Al-Jareeda daily cited an unnamed senior source as saying that an Israeli cyberattack caused a fire and explosion at the largely underground Natanz nuclear enrichment facility in the predawn hours of Thursday morning. According to the source, this was expected to set back Iran’s nuclear enrichment program by approximately two months. The newspaper also reported that last Friday Israeli F-35 stealth fighter jets bombed a site located in the...

A Revolutionary Court in southern Iran sentenced seven Iranian Christian converts to prison, exile, a financial penalty, and a ban on work and social activities. The Human Rights News Agency identified the Iranian Christian coverts as Habib Heidari, Sam Khosravi, Sasan Khosravi, Maryam Fallahi, Marjan Fallahi, Pouria Pima and Fatemeh Talebi. The seven men and women were sentenced by a Revolutionary Court in Bushehr on June 21 for “spreading propaganda against the state”. The “evidence” brought against them for their conviction was the possession of Christian books and symbols, holding home church sessions, and being in contact with Iranian “evangelists”...

Kuwait's Al-Jarida newspaper on Friday reported that Israel was responsible for a Thursday "accident" at an Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz. It is believed that the Natanz facility is used to enrich uranium. According to the Al-Jarida report, the explosion was caused by an "Israeli cyber attack" which targeted the computers which control the pressure gauges inside gas containers. Tehran has allegedly lost 80% of the uranium hexafluoride gas it needs in order to enrich uranium. The report also claimed that Israel is responsible for the Parchin blast which occurred last week. On Thursday, Iran's state news agency IRNA published...

President Donald Trump should appoint a special envoy for Nigeria and the Lake Chad region to “focus like a laser beam” on the attacks by Boko Haram and other Islamic militants, according to one of the main architects of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. Former Congressman Frank Wolf said such a move was necessary to stop a genocide of Christians in the region. Wolf was speaking to journalists during a press call on the situation in Nigeria sponsored by In Defense of Christians, a Washington D.C. human rights group. Nigeria has had over 50,000 people killed since 2009...