Free Republic

US intelligence briefings cited by The New York Times on Friday indicate that Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, displays a far greater willingness to build nuclear weaponry than his father who preceded him. His father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who died in joint US-Israeli airstrikes during the opening phase of the war, had maintained a long-standing fatwa (religious decree) against weaponization. While American analysts previously maintained that Tehran sought the threshold capacity to assemble a device, many considered the former leader's religious reluctance genuine. The younger Khamenei has avoided explicit public calls for a nuclear arsenal, noted The New...

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials. The acceleration of the American campaign in recent weeks comes amid a violent conflict in Yemen that has left the government in Sana, a United States ally, struggling to cling to power. Yemeni troops that had been battling militants linked to Al Qaeda in the south have been pulled back to the capital, and American officials see the strikes as one of the few...