Several states have already banned or are considering banning foreign ownership of farmland from U.S. adversaries such as China, a trend that has its recent roots in North Dakota.
Chinese food manufacturer Fufeng Group purchased 370 acres of land for a corn milling plant in Grand Forks in November 2021.
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Western media’s celebration of Iran’s alleged disbanding of the morality police plays into the regime’s “propaganda” efforts to convince the West it is open to reform, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
After Iran’s top judiciary official remarked that the Guidance Patrol, a police squad charged with enforcing the regime’s head covering laws for women, had “been put to a standstill,” Western media quickly seized the event as a victory for feminists in Iran demonstrating against restrictive modesty rules. However, the morality police remains active, suggesting many in the West fell for the regime’s ploy to restore legitimacy and deflect international pressure, experts told the DCNF.
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China and Iran agreed to strengthen military ties during talks in Tehran on Wednesday, according to Chinese state-run media.
China’s Defense Minister Wei Fenghe met with Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran for high-level talks, where the parties pledged to deepen counter-terrorism cooperation ostensibly to further security and stability in the Middle East, Xinhua News reported Thursday. Wei guaranteed China would support Iran’s national sovereignty and dignity and expressed his nation’s intention to further develop their nation’s military relationship, according to the Chinese state-run media report.
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Sen. Jim Risch (R-Id.) charged during a press conference on Wednesday that not only is the Biden regime allowing Russia to work with Iran on a nuclear deal, it is allowing our two adversaries to negotiate together behind closed doors with no American negotiators present.
“It is absolutely stunning that this deal is being negotiated by two of our worst enemies on the planet,” Risch said. “You’ve got the Iranians and the Russians. They won’t even let the Americans in the room!”
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The State Department will waive fees for immigrants seeking visas to come to the U.S. if they were previously denied one because of the Trump administration’s travel ban, according to a Wednesday announcement.
“An IV applicant who is the beneficiary of a valid immigration petition may submit another visa application after being refused and in most circumstances they are required to pay again the relevant application fees,” according to a Federal Register rule published Wednesday. “The Department exempts from such fees only those IV applicants who are applying again after being refused” a visa under the travel ban.
The ban prevented immigration from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. President Joe Biden issued an executive order repealing the ban on his first day in office in January 2021.
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The United States reportedly wants to apply “snapback sanctions” to deter Iran from continuing to enrich weapons-grade-uranium, a strategy that was part of the original JCPOA established in 2015.
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told Israelis this week that the Biden administration is looking at the sanctions as a way to stop Iran from enriching uranium to 90% purity, a softer stance than has previously been taken by the administration.
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Iran fired missiles in a provocation toward Israel and invited Venezuela’s socialist leader for a visit as it continued to antagonize the West in the midst of slow-moving negotiations to stop Tehran’s nuclear program.
The official IRNA news agency reported the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired 16 surface-to-surface missiles Friday at the end of five days of military drills in the desert, airing footage of the missile launches and suggesting it was a warning to Israel.
“These exercises were designed to respond to threats made in recent days by the Zionist regime,” Major General Mohammad Bagheri told the state television network.
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Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Thursday in New York accusing two Iranian hackers of successfully hacking into a state computer election system, stealing voter registration data and using it to carry out a cyber-intimidation campaign that targeted GOP members of Congress, Trump campaign officials and Democrat voters in the November 2020 election.
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When the Taliban assumed control of Afghanistan last month, the group took possession of a U.S.-funded weapons stockpile worth tens of billions of dollars.
The U.S. invested nearly $83 billion in bolstering the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), more than $24 billion of which went to funding weapons, vehicles and other equipment, according to a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report published in July. The amount of funding for weapons, vehicles and equipment is based on a 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimate that roughly 70% of the investment went towards other budget items like training.
In the aftermath of the shocking collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government last month, U.S. defense officials estimated that Taliban militants took dozens of aircraft including Blackhawk helicopters and thousands of vehicles, communications equipment and weapons. Republican lawmakers demanded the Biden administration provide them with a full accounting of the equipment that was in the Taliban’s possession while GOP members of the House Armed Services Committee introduced a bill requiring the White House to share the information with Congress.
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As I’ve watched the events of the past few weeks – and thought about the nature of Joe Biden’s young presidency – I began to ask myself: How much more of this can we take?
In just seven months, President Biden has overseen a remarkable number of complete blunders. To make sense of them all and consider how to overcome them, I decided to make a list of them. Of course, it would take months of time and writing to list all the errors Biden has made in his 48 years in politics, so I decided to start at his inauguration in January. These are roughly in chronological order. It seemed impossible to rank them as so many of them could have lasting, unforeseeable consequences.
1 – Bipartisan Baloney
As I write in my upcoming book, Beyond Biden, which will be released on Nov. 2, the first major mistake Biden made was immediately failing to live up to the pledges he made in his inaugural address. In his inaugural address, Biden said: “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.”
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Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and 14 other Republican Senators issued a letter to the international business community warning against resuming business with Iran.
The opportunity to resume business with Iran comes as President Joe Biden and his administration officials may repeal some sanctions in order to facilitate negotiations to return to a nuclear deal similar to the one implemented by President Obama in 2015.
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Media outlets around the world recently reported on leaked audio comments in which Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif admitted that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls all of Iran’s foreign policy decisions. Although President Joe Biden was careful to mention neither Zarif nor Iran in his speech before Congress last month, Zarif’s embarrassingly candid revelations have direct implications for Biden’s entire Iran policy: namely, it underscores that reducing economic sanctions in order to moderate the Iranian regime cannot work.
For decades, U.S. policy toward Iran has produced disappointing results, largely because American administrations have underestimated the entrenched ideology of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship and mistakenly assumed the regime can be tamed by conciliatory diplomacy. Western efforts to placate Tehran have failed consistently since the revolutionaries took power in 1979, yet recent reports indicate President Biden is in the process of repeating this failure.
Just as the Obama administration did with its disastrous 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Biden administration is now seeking to lift economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for temporary commitments from Tehran to curb its nuclear program. A senior State Department official recently revealed that the Biden administration is reviewing all U.S. terrorism and human rights sanctions on Iran since 2017 to assess whether those sanctions were “legitimately imposed,” and that some sanctions will need to be lifted to ensure Tehran is “benefiting” from the nuclear deal. Like Obama, Biden hopes that relaxing economic pressure can convince the regime to put aside its nuclear ambitions, focus on Iran’s economy and people, stop bankrolling terrorist proxies, and become a normal member of the international community.
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Senator Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) and Representative Rob Wittman (R-Virginia-01) announced the SHIPYARD Act to provide $21 billion to invest in the Navy’s four public shipyards, including Norfolk Naval Shipyard. The plan, announced Wednesday, would also provide $2 billion for new construction of private shipyards, and $2 billion to repair the Navy’s existing private shipyards.
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Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday demanded the “definitive punishment” of those behind the killing of a scientist who led Tehran’s disbanded military nuclear program, as the Islamic Republic blamed Israel for a slaying that has raised fears of reignited tensions across the Middle East.
After years of being in the shadows, the image of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh suddenly was to be seen everywhere in Iranian media, as his widow spoke on state television and officials publicly demanded revenge on Israel for the scientist’s slaying.
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An Iranian scientist named by the West as the leader of the Islamic Republic’s disbanded military nuclear program was killed Friday in an ambush on the outskirts of Tehran, authorities said.
Iran’s foreign minister alleged the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh bore “serious indications” of an Israeli role, but did not elaborate. Israel, long suspected of killing several Iranian nuclear scientists a decade ago, declined to immediately comment. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once told the public to “remember that name” when talking about Fakhrizadeh.
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Joe Biden portrays himself as Israel’s ally and a friend of the Jewish people. Obama did the same when he was running for president and then he played bait and switch. It’s time voters wizen up because Biden vows to repeat the Obama-Biden playbook on Israel and the Middle East. It’s even worse: today’s Democrat party leadership has taken a major turn to the left. They are no friend of the Jewish people here or in Israel.
A quick history lesson is instructive: In 2008, Candidate Obama pledged Israel’s security was “sacrosanct” and “non-negotiable” with “secure recognized defensible borders,” where Jerusalem would “remain” Israel’s capital and “must remain undivided.” Fast forward, months later in 2009, then President Obama wasted no time abandoning his empty words. Embarking on their true agenda, Obama-Biden declared a “serious problem” existed precisely because there was no daylight between the United States and Israel. Obama-Biden was determined to change that and, off to the races, they didn’t look back.
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Iran has agreed to allow inspectors in to two sites where the country is suspected of having stored or used undeclared nuclear material, the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Wednesday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran was “voluntarily providing the IAEA with access to the two locations specified by the IAEA and facilitating the IAEA verification activities to resolve the issues.”
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The Iranian navy boarded and briefly seized a Liberian-flagged oil tanker near the strategic Strait of Hormuz amid heightened tensions between Tehran and the U.S., the American military said Thursday.
The U.S. military’s Central Command published a black-and-white video showing what appeared to be special forces fast-roping down from a helicopter onto the MT Wila, whose last position appeared to be off the eastern coast of the United Arab Emirates near the city of Khorfakkan.
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An online video and messages purportedly claiming responsibility for a fire that analysts say damaged a centrifuge assembly plant at Iran’s underground Natanz nuclear site deepened the mystery Friday around the incident — even as Tehran insisted it knew the cause but would not make it public due to “security reasons.”
The multiple, different claims by a self-described group called the “Cheetahs of the Homeland” included language used by several exiled Iranian opposition organizations. They also focused almost entirely on Iran’s nuclear program, viewed by Israel as a danger to its very existence.
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U.S. federal prosecutors are seeking to seize four tankers sailing toward Venezuela with gasoline supplied by Iran, the latest attempt to disrupt ever-closer trade ties between the two heavily sanctioned anti-American allies.
The civil-forfeiture complaint filed late Wednesday in the District of Columbia federal court alleges that the sale was arranged by a businessman, Mahmoud Madanipour, with ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.
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While the establishment media have studiously ignored reporting the story, the social media accounts of Middle East and national security experts have been abuzz with questions and information on the huge explosion or explosions that recently rocked a site believed to house one of Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities – the facilities that Obama and the Iranians claimed do not exist.
Rick Moran writing for our friends at PJ Media reported the explosion happened in the Alborz mountains, just east of Tehran. Satellite photos show the massive extent of the blast. The area of the blast near Iran’s Khojir missile base was identified in 2017 as a nuclear research facility despite Iran’s pledge to reveal all its nuclear infrastructure in the nuclear deal with the West.
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As tensions remain high between Iran and the U.S., the Islamic Republic appears to have constructed a new mock-up of an aircraft carrier off its southern coast for potential live-fire drills.
The faux foe, seen in satellite photographs obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, resembles the Nimitz-class carriers that the U.S. Navy routinely sails into the Persian Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz, its narrow mouth where 20% of all the world’s oil passes through.
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Iran has continued to increase its stockpiles of enriched uranium and remains in violation of its deal with world powers, the United Nations’ atomic watchdog said Friday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reported the finding in a confidential document distributed to member countries and seen by The Associated Press.
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by Will Racke Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Wednesday the U.S. will terminate a 63-year-old treaty with Iran, hours after a top United Nations court ruled in favor of Tehran in a lawsuit challenging U.S. sanctions. Pompeo said the abrogation of the 1955 Treaty of Amity was “39 years overdue,”…
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by Fred Lucas Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reaffirmed Friday that the Trump administration is committed to religious liberty, both at home and abroad. Speaking at the conservative Values Voter Summit in Washington, Pompeo said that more than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that place…
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by Evie Fordham Secretary of Defense James Mattis backed up President Donald Trump’s fiery message about Iran at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, on Tuesday. “[Iran] cannot continue to show irresponsibility as some revolutionary organization that is intent on exporting terrorism, exporting disruption across the region,” Mattis said, reported The…
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Reuters One of the world’s biggest cargo shippers announced Saturday that it was pulling out of Iran for fear of becoming entangled in U.S. sanctions, and President Hassan Rouhani demanded that European countries to do more to offset the U.S. measures. The announcement by France’s CMA CGM that it was…
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Ahead of the May 12th deadline and against the many requests from European allies, President Trump announced Tuesday afternoon the United States will withdraw from the Obama-era “Iran Deal.” The president announced his decision in a speech at the White House in the Diplomatic Room as Trump’s National Security Adviser…
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by Fred Lucas President Donald Trump, without saying he would pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, said Monday that he is open to signing a better agreement with the Islamist regime. Commenting after Israel accused Iran of cheating on the deal, Trump also rejected the premise that by pulling…
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