Free Republic

Large amounts of uranium may have gone missing from a nuclear technology company in Sweden. The American Central Intelligence Agency fears a worst-case scenario where the material has already fallen into terrorist hands, newspaper Expressen reports. "The company (Ranstad Mineral) is a security risk and we have taken the matter to top level to get the Swedes to stop them," a CIA spokesman told the Swedish newspaper. The CIA operative claims to know that the little Swedish company has educated Syrian nuclear physicists in the treatment of uranium. He also has information that a Swedish consultancy has sold nuclear equipment...

The insistence of a Washington state couple that they have a right to build a four-foot concrete wall along 80 feet of the 1,270-mile-long U.S.-Canada boundary in the West has cost a U.S. member of the International Joint Commission his job, according to reports appearing last week in the Canadian news media. If the incident did nothing else, it gave Canadians (prone always to accept the dicta of officialdom) an inkling of how things work on the other side of the border. Apparently, it all started because Herbert and Shirley Ann Leu of Blaine, Wash., couldn't prevent dogs escaping from...

The top American on the International Joint Commission is fired by President Bush. And the reason may be a retaining wall in the Washington border town of Blaine. The city of Blaine doesn't require a building permit for wall four feet high or shorter. The wall is right around four feet. The top American and the top Canadian on the boundary commission both say the fence must come down because it is within ten feet of the border line. They say the "no obstructions within ten feet rule" is established by a 1925 treaty. Shirley-Ann Leu owns the property the...

Although it’s not widely appreciated, the nuclear deal Washington is currently dangling before Iran to entice it to halt its declared uranium-enrichment program is a cure nearly as awful as the disease. To be sure, Iran’s enrichment effort, if unchecked, could bring Tehran within days of acquiring a bomb. But Washington’s latest overture to Tehran—offering advanced large nuclear reactors, hundreds of tons of lightly enriched uranium, and a pass on Iran’s violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty—will only make it tougher to toe a hard line against Iran later this fall. And it could literally blow up in our faces...