Free Republic

Kim Jong-un speaks saying "the world will witness a new strategic weapon' from North Korea 'in the near future' more later on.... Part of the alert brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division deploying to Kuwait tonight, some 750 US soldiers. More to follow in the coming days..... This after thousands of protesters in Iraq attacking and some entering the US Embassy grounds in Baghdad forcing US forces to disperse them with tear gas today. The protesters angered by the US air strikes in Iraq and Syria Sunday against an Iranian backed militia group.... Chelsea Manning, who gave Wikileaks documents on...

Events related to Iran and Israel appear to be dominant with numerous Israeli attacks reported in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria since Saturday night. There's also been a rocket attack aimed at southern Israel from Gaza..... Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif arrived by airplane at Biarritz, France. site of the G7 summit, just after 8am Eastern US time Sunday morning.... The Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri said the Israeli drone strike reported in the suburbs of Beirut early Sunday was a: "blatant attack on Lebanon's sovereignty"..... The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke with the Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri Sunday...

Breaking News: Syrian air defenses engaging targets early Monday morning in Hama province near Masayaf in northwestern Syria.... The Iranian Foreign Minister pointing at outside forces being behind the British seizure of an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar earlier this month that led to Iran's seizure of a British oil tanker Friday... "It's clear they're glorifying a violent assault on Tommy Robinson designed only to desensitize the public in case he's murdered in there. They don't want you to care" That's the message from Tommy Robinson's spokesman Avi Yemeni in response to Sunday tabloid reports..... The Battle of Brexit and...

"I disagree with it by the way....I was not happy with it. I disagree with it...I didn't say that, they did" Part of what President Trump had to say about his supporters shouting "Send Her Back"..... Comments of condemnation coming from the President of the European Council.... In stronger terms than that at the Montreal news conference was Canada'a Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.... In Japan 33 have died in an arson attack on anime studio in Kyoto..... And from the Syrian war the claims from various sources related to it.... Also from the war in Syria the horrible story of...

The United States imposing sanctions on four top generals from the country of Myanmar (formerly Burma). Those generals and their families banned from entering the USA because of the conflict in the predominately Buddhist country with the Rohingya Muslims. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blaming the generals for what are considered harsh policies against the Rohingya Muslim minority in the country. The Myanmar government views the conflict a a fight with Islamic terrorism. A "partial preliminary injunction" from a federal judge against ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond in Oregon Tuesday.... The US House voting 240-187 to condemn President Trump for...

Duke Professor Omid Safi: Islam for 1,400 Years Has Had Clear Emphasis on “the Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life” JUL 11, 2019 10:00 AM BY HUGH FITZGERALD In late June, Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, announced by way of riposte to Donald Trump’s warnings to Iran not to renew its nuclear weapons program, that there was no need for such warnings, for Islam itself forbids such a program. This same statement has been made several times in the past, ever since 2010, by the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who has claimed that nuclear weapons are “forbidden under Islamic law.”...

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Thursday tweeted a warning to US President Donald Trump. "Misconceptions endanger peace," he warned. "Sanctions aren't alternative to war; they ARE war. 'Obliteration'=genocide=war crime. 'Short war' with Iran is an illusion." Last week, Trump sent Iran an ultimatum, setting a deadline for the start of negotiations and warning that if Iran refuses to talk, the US will attack for the downing of an American surveillance drone.On Monday, Trump announced additional sanctions against Iran, which he said were retaliation for the downed drone, and on Tuesday he warned that "any attack on anything American...

For more than a year we’ve known that Obama’s secretary of state and longtime U.S. senator, John Kerry, has been attempting to undermine President Donald Trump’s foreign policy with the Islamic republic of Iran. In May 2018, we posed the question: “What is John Kerry doing talking to the Iranians?” We noted: Reports … revealed that former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to ‘save’ the Iran nuclear deal he helped negotiate by holding secret meetings with Iranian diplomats. The Boston Globe reported that Kerry began his secret meetings as reports spread that President Donald J. Trump was...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) had a dinner meeting with Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, Politico Playbook reported Thursday morning—a move even the left-leaning media outlet called “unusual.” Feinstein’s staff told Politico the meeting, which took place a few weeks ago, was “in consultation with the State Department” but it was not at State’s request that she go. "The office was in touch with State in advance of the meeting to let them know it was happening and to get an update on U.S.-Iran activity," the California Democrat’s office said.

Imagine, for a moment, what the political reaction would be if a leading Republican senator met with an antagonistic foreign power, say Russia, in the midst of high-tension standoff between President Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin? Such a scenario seems nearly ­inconceivable. Yet, it’s exactly the situation Sen. Dianne Feinstein created when hosting Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif for dinner a few weeks ago. Politico reported on the meeting, noting that it was “a bit unusual” for a former chair of the Intelligence Committee and a member of the Senate minority to dine out with the acting foreign minister of...

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif said on Sunday that a new Iran Action Group in the U.S. State Department aimed to overthrow the Islamic Republic, but would fail. He was speaking on the 65th anniversary of a U.S.-backed coup that overthrew a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, an occasion when anti-American sentiment runs particularly high in the Islamic Republic. Comparing fresh U.S. sanctions on Tehran imposed by President Donald Trump with the 1953 coup that ousted nationalist Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, Zarif said Tehran will not let history repeat itself. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday...

A holdover from the Obama administration who helped broker the Iran nuclear deal continues to work in the Trump State Department as a member of the “policy planning staff,” according to her biography on the agency website. “Prior to joining the Policy Planning Staff, she served as a Director for Iran and Iran Nuclear Implementation on the National Security Council Staff from 2014-2016,” Sahar Nowrouzzadeh’s bio states. “Sahar also previously served as a Foreign Affairs Officer at the U.S. Department of State and a Team Chief and Senior Analyst at the Department of Defense.” In an October 2016, Nowrouzzadeh was...

Do social media and security clearances go together? Er … maybe not, especially if the person who holds the clearance ever has to show up in court. Following up on an article in the Daily Beast about Reality Sara Winner, the woman arrested by the FBI for transmitting Top Secret information to The Intercept, Twitchy discovered that the would-be whistleblower has a rather odd set of loyalties. Almost exactly four months ago, Winner sent a message of solidarity to Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif: There are many Americans protesting US govt aggression towards Iran. If our Tangerine in Chief...

U.S. president-elect Donald Trump will be “surprised” by Iran if he annuls the nuclear deal between the Islamic Republic, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Thursday, according to the Trend news agency. “As I said earlier, Trump will be surprised if he tries to renegotiate the deal,” Zarif was quoted as having told the Iranian IRNA news agency. “We believe that nuclear deal is an international one and we are not worried about it at all,” he continued. “We are not going to be wary of what Trump does and we will have our options,” Zarif added, noting...

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Iran nuclear kabuki last year, told the Council on Foreign Relations June 23 that the Joint Plan of Action, JCPOA had been successfully implemented so far... Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton is for the agreement, but Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been skeptical. Asked about Trump’s threats to renegotiate the agreement, Coons called that possibility “a fool’s errand.” Coons said that personal relationships between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and between Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz and Ali Salehi, Iranian Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] — have been apparently been effective....

It has been the longstanding belief of these authors that Obama’s White House, especially its foreign policy penchant for supporting jihadis (both Sunni and Shiite), is run by a troika. The front man of the troika is obviously Barack Hussein Obama, who uses his position as President of the United States of America to cajole the U.S. and the rest of the world to accept terrorists as politically legitimate players. Obama’s deputy, and often his mouthpiece, is Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry is indirectly related through his daughter’s marriage to the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif. The brains of...

This has been the most dramatic week in US/Iranian relations since 1979. Last weekend ten US Navy personnel were caught in Iranian waters, as the Pentagon kept changing its story on how they got there. It could have been a disaster for President Obama's big gamble on diplomacy over conflict with Iran. But after several rounds of telephone diplomacy between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif, the Iranian leadership - which we are told by the neocons is too irrational to even talk to - did a most rational thing: weighing the costs and...

The day before the Obama administration was due to slap new sanctions on Iran late last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif warned U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry the move could derail a prisoner deal the two sides had been negotiating in secret for months. Kerry and other top aides to President Barack Obama, who was vacationing in Hawaii, convened a series of conference calls and concluded they could not risk losing the chance to free Americans held by Tehran. At the last minute, the Obama administration officials decided to delay a package of limited and targeted sanctions intended...

Iranian officials stressed that they taught the U.S. a lesson by seizing 10 sailors from two boats in the Persian Gulf.The semi-official Fars News Agency reported Wednesday that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told Secretary of State John Kerry that the U.S. needed to apologize before the sailors were released. According to a statement from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, "the Americans have extended an apology," Fars said.Zarif tweeted today: "Happy to see dialog and respect, not threats and impetuousness, swiftly resolved the #sailors episode. Let's learn from this latest example."Washington denies any "official" apology was offered. Iran broadcast a video...

Republicans on Monday blasted Secretary of State John Kerry for suggesting in a letter to his Iranian counterpart that the administration could help the country get around new visa restrictions passed by Congress. Instead of bending over backwards to try to placate the Iranian regime, the White House needs to be holding it accountable for its recent missile tests, its continued support for terrorism, and its wrongful imprisonment of Americans, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif ... Kerry responded to these concerns in a Dec. 19 letter to his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif -- and suggested the...