Free Republic

One hundred days after former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in an attack on his office in Tehran, the Islamic Republic has yet to bury the man who led the country for more than three decades. The delay has become one of the most unusual and politically sensitive aspects of Iran's post-war transition. While senior military commanders and officials killed in the same conflict have already been buried, repeated promises of a massive funeral for Khamenei have so far gone unfulfilled. Tehran municipal officials spoke of plans for a multi-day funeral procession later this month. Ceremonies, they said, are...

Donald Trump can be seen as a Russian asset, though not in the traditional sense of an active agent or a recruited resource, an ex-FBI deputy director who worked under the former US president said. Asked on a podcast if he thought it possible Trump was a Russian asset, Andrew McCabe, who Trump fired as FBI deputy director in 2018, said: “I do, I do.” He added: “I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term. But I do think that Donald...

On January 5, a giant statue of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian regime's dead terrorist mastermind, was displayed in the city of Shahr-e Kord. The regime unveiled the statue with much noise and fanfare just ahead of the second anniversary of Soleimani's elimination in a US drone strike in 2020. Mere hours later, the statue was engulfed in flames by dissidents, dealing a major blow against state propaganda to bill the former commander of the terrorist Qods Force as a "hero." Just a couple of days prior, the regime’s President Ebrahim Raisi delivered a televised speech in which he promised revenge...

BEIRUT - Lebanon announced it cannot meet its debt payments and halted a March 9 bond payment of $1.2 billion on Saturday, setting the heavily indebted state on course for a sovereign default as it grapples with a major financial crisis. In a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Hassan Diab said foreign currency reserves had hit a “critical and dangerous” level and were needed to meet basic needs. He called for “fair” negotiations with lenders to restructure the debt. The default will mark a new phase in a crisis that has hammered the economy since October, slicing around...