Free Republic

Top News Story Reuters In a stern warning to Iran, President Bush said "all options are on the table" if the Iranians refuse to comply with international demands to halt their nuclear program, pointedly noting he has already used force to protect U.S. security. Bush's statement in an interview on Israeli TV late Friday was unusually harsh. He previously said diplomacy should be used to persuade Iran to suspend its nuclear program and if that failed then the U.N. Security Council should impose sanctions. The U.S. government and others fear Iran's nuclear work is secretly designed to produce nuclear...

Top News Story Unrest in Iran's Kurdish Region Has Left 17 Dead; Hundreds Wounded The NY Times: Unrest has rocked Iran's northwestern region of Kurdistan in recent weeks leading to the deaths of more than a dozen civilians and several members of the country's security forces. READ MORE A Daily Briefing of Major News Stories on Iran: IranMania.com reported that the wife of leading Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji pleaded to be allowed to see him on his hunger strike for a 64th day.Xinhuanet reported that four more inspectors from the IAEA arrived in Iran to monitor Iran's nuclear activities.Rancher,...

Top News Story Iran Rejects Agency's Call to Suspend Nuclear Work The Washington Post:The governing board of the U.N. nuclear watchdog unanimously called on Iran on Thursday to halt sensitive atomic work it resumed this week in defiance of the West, a demand that Tehran rejected as unacceptable and illegal. READ MORE A Daily Briefing of Major News Stories on Iran: Reporters Without Borders condemned the current crackdown on Iran's Kurdish journalists.Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post delivered sobering evidence that the U.S. is retreating in the war on terror.BBC News reported that the situation with Iran is more a...

Top News Story Bush: Iran Leader Likely Will Come to N.Y. By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press WriterThursday, August 11, 2005President Bush indicated Thursday that the new Iranian president will receive a U.S. visa to attend an annual United Nations gathering next month and welcomed the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency's warning to Tehran about consequences of its nuclear ambitions. Bush, who met at his Texas ranch with members of his foreign policy team, also said that U.S. investigators still have not yet determined what role Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have played in the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy...

Top News Story Iran dissident Ganji still on hunger strike TEHRAN (Reuters) - Dissident Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji is still on hunger strike, a hospital official was quoted as saying on Wednesday, contradicting an official from the conservative judiciary who said he was eating again. Judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimirad said on Tuesday Ganji had ended his eight-week hunger strike after calls from his family and friends, who were concerned that he could die. But Sirus Tabesh, head of public relations at Tehran's Milad hospital, said this was incorrect. "Ganji is not consuming any food," he told the Sharq daily...

Top News Story Iran must be forced to give up nuclear weapons(Filed: 10/08/2005) Iran's seemingly ineluctable progress towards acquiring nuclear weapons has publicly resumed with the conversion of raw uranium outside Isfahan. According to Alireza Jafarzadeh, an exiled dissident based in Washington, it may never have been suspended, despite an agreement to that effect reached last November with the European Union troika of Britain, France and Germany. He claimed yesterday that the Iranians had manufactured about 4,000 centrifuges, capable of enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels, at a plant in Natanz, and had hidden this activity from the International Atomic...

Top News Story Iran not worried about Security Council referral By Parisa HafeziTEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran insisted on Sunday it would resume uranium conversion this week after rejecting EU incentives to end its nuclear fuel work, and said it was not worried about being referred to the U.N. for possible sanctions."Although we think referral of Iran's case to the Security Council would be unlawful and politically motivated, if one day they refer Iran's case...we won't be worried in the least," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.Britain, Germany and France, heading nuclear negotiations with Iran for the European Union,...

Top News Story Reuters TEHRAN, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Two people have been killed, eight injured and 145 arrested in unrest among the Kurds of western Iran, Iran's Interior Ministry said on Sunday. The deaths in the town of Saqqez followed rioting and a gun battle elsewhere in Kurdish-dominated territories. The Interior Ministry Web site named the dead men in Saqqez as Mohammad Shariati, a 55-year-old retired teacher, and 18-year-old Farzad Mohammadi. It quoted an unnamed senior official as saying that police had denied firing their pistols, but investigators were looking into the type of shots fired to work...