Free Republic

US President Barack Obama does not preclude the United States supplying weapons to Libyan rebels attempting to overthrow the Gaddafi regime, but NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says that is not part of UN Resolution 1973. NATO has taken over the operational military leadership of an international coalition enforcing UN Resolution 1973 from the United States, and apart from enforcing a no-fly zone is also currently enforcing a general weapons embargo on Libya. Obama’s statement came during an interview with NBC following the president’s speech to the nation on Libya. “I am not ruling it out, but I am...

Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad congratulated US President-elect Barack Obama and called for "fundamental and fair" changes to US policies in the region, Iran's official IRNA news agency said. "I congratulate you for attracting a majority of votes ... I hope you will prefer real public interests and justice to the endless demands of a selfish minority," Mr Ahmadinejad told Mr Obama in a statement published by IRNA. Iranian officials have said Mr Obama's election victory on Tuesday showed the American people's desire for fundamental change in domestic and foreign policy from the policies of President George W Bush, who...

ITALIAN Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi today praised US election victor Barack Obama as young, beautiful and "tanned" and said the world saw him as a messiah. "He is young, he is beautiful and he is tanned,'' Mr Berlusconi said in Moscow's Kremlin, when asked how President-elect Obama might get along with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. "I think that there is going to be good co-operation,'' Mr Berlusconi said. Mr Berlusconi warned that Senator Obama, the United States' first black president, would have to deal with inflated expectations from a world that had portrayed him "almost as a messiah''. "There...