A senior American official who spoke to Fox News described the authorization as a “limited” policy shift that would give Ukraine the means to defend the city of Kharkiv from long-range Russian bombardment:

The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S.-supplied weapons for counter-fire purposes in the Kharkiv region, so Ukraine can hit back against Russian forces that are attacking them or preparing to attack them. Our policy with respect to prohibiting the use of ATACMS or long-range strikes inside of Russia has not changed.

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Source: https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/05/31/joe-biden-gives-ukraine-permission-to-hit-targets-in-russia-with-u-s-weapons/

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Iran’s provision of around 400 missiles includes many from the Fateh-110 family of short-range ballistic weapons, such as the Zolfaghar, three Iranian sources said. This road-mobile missile is capable of striking targets at a distance of between 300 and 700 km (186 and 435 miles), experts say.

Iran’s defence ministry and the Revolutionary Guards – an elite force that oversees Iran’s ballistic missile programme – declined to comment. Russia’s defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/iran-sends-russia-hundreds-ballistic-missiles-sources-say-2024-02-21/

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The post Exclusive: Iran sends Russia hundreds of ballistic missiles first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The massive amount of explosive material was seized by the U.S. Naval Forces 5th Fleet on Nov. 8 while the ship was traveling along a route used to send weapons to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the war-torn country.

“The unlawful transfer of lethal aid from Iran does not go unnoticed,” Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, U.S. 5th Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces, said in a statement. “It is irresponsible, dangerous and leads to violence and instability across the Middle East.”

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Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-navy-intercepts-fishing-vessel-trying-to-smuggle-explosive-material-from-iran-to-yemen/ar-AA148eN4

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The post US Navy intercepts fishing vessel trying to smuggle explosive material from Iran to Yemen first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

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Source: https://news.yahoo.com/north-korea-fires-ballistic-missiles-142948018.html

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Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to Putin that the exercise was intended to simulate a “massive nuclear strike” by Russia in retaliation for a nuclear attack on the country.

The maneuvers followed Putin’s warning about his readiness to use “all means available” to fend off attacks on Russia’s territory in a clear reference to the country’s nuclear arsenals.

During the Russian drills Wednesday, a Yars land-based intercontinental ballistic missile was test-fired from the northern Plesetsk launch site. A Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea also launched a Sineva ICBM at the Kura firing range on the far-eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, and Tu-95 strategic fired cruise missiles at practice targets.

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Source: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-putin-europe-moscow-sergei-shoigu-752933fd7c59c22226ef377363955de8

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The ballistic missile was launched at 6:57 a.m. Friday Seoul time (5:57 p.m. Thursday ET) from the Sunan area of Pyongyang. It flew in an eastern direction around 2,300 miles and passed over Japanese airspace, a South Korean military official said.

The launch comes weeks after North Korea in late August fired a missile that traveled over Japanese airspace.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said in a televised address that the single missile launched Friday flew over Hokkaido. There were no reports of any objects falling in Japanese territory or any other damage, Suga said.

“We as a nation simply cannot accept these repeated provocative acts [by] North Korea, and we have lodged our firm protest and while communicating the strong anger from the Japanese public. We expressed our condemnation using the strongest of terms,” Suga said. He said the missile landed around 1,242 miles east of Cape Erimo.

U.S. Pacific Command also confirmed the launch and said it believed the missile was an intermediate-range ballistic missile.

North Korea has conducted several ballistic missile tests this year in defiance of U.N. resolutions, including two intercontinental ballistic missile tests that experts said suggest that a missile could reach parts of the United States. North Korea earlier this month conducted its sixth nuclear test.

The United Nations said the Security Council would meet to discuss North Korea in a closed session on Friday afternoon.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement: “These continued provocations only deepen North Korea’s diplomatic and economic isolation.” He said U.N. resolutions, including recent sanctions, “represent the floor, not the ceiling, of the actions we should take.”

Tillerson also said that “China supplies North Korea with most of its oil. Russia is the largest employer of North Korean forced labor” and both nations “must indicate their intolerance for these reckless missile launches by taking direct actions of their own.”

The news of the new launch came after three military officials told NBC News that North Korea may have be preparing to test an intercontinental ballistic missile in the coming days, defying sanctions imposed by the United Nations this week.

In the previous 72 hours, U.S. intelligence had observed North Korea moving mobile missile launchers and preparing sites that have been used for previous launches, according to the officials, who requested anonymity.

The activity was a strong indication that North Korea’s ballistic missile program is proceeding on its internal schedule and that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, is unfazed by the international condemnation of country’s Sept. 3 nuclear test.

Last week, the Trump administration proposed crippling sanctions on North Korea in response to Kim’s underground test of a nuclear device that North Korea claimed was a powerful hydrogen bomb.

However, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was forced to water down her proposals to win the support of Russia and China.

After the Security Council adopted the sanctions with a unanimous vote, Trump officials heralded them as the toughest international action approved by the United Nations to date, while expressing some doubt that they would persuade Kim to stop his pursuit of nuclear weapons and an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The resolution “does continue to send a consistent message to the regime of North Korea and, importantly, to those who continue to enable North Korea’s activities that the international community does have a common view on the seriousness of North Korea’s proliferation program,” said Tillerson, who was in London on Thursday meeting with French and British officials — conversations that included counteracting North Korea’s nuclear proliferation.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Mattis was in Omaha on Thursday visiting U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), and evaluating the nation’s nuclear posture.

“These are the most severe sanctions yet laid on North Korea,” Mattis said Tuesday. “We’ll see what choices the North Koreans make. “The United Nations Security Council spoke with one voice, again recognizing the global threat that DPRK, North Korea constitutes,” he said.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-possibly-preparing-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-test-n801401

The post North Korea Fires Ballistic Missile Over Japanese Airspace Again first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Last week, Reuters revealed the existence of a confidential U.N. report claiming that two North Korean shipments bound for the government agency in charge of Syria’s chemical weapons were intercepted in the past six months.

Put in its proper context, the news of the shipments, both of which violated existing international sanctions, is further evidence of North Korea’s nefarious role in spreading weapons of mass destruction and missile technology to other rogue regimes across the globe. The U.N. report highlights the extent to which North Korea has been a principal strategic partner to Iran and Syria for decades. Understood correctly, it should have major implications not only for how the U.S. handles the saber-rattling regime of Kim Jong-un but for how the Trump administration chooses to approach Iran today.

Pulling a single thread reveals the tangled web of relations between Pyongyang, Tehran, and Damascus. Take, for instance, the 2007 Israeli raid that destroyed Syria’s covert nuclear reactor. North Korean scientists provided the technology and material for that reactor, which, according to former CIA director Michael Hayden, was “an exact copy” of a North Korean reactor. “The Koreans were the only ones to build these reactors since they purloined the designs from the British in the 1960s,” Hayden recalled. Ten North Koreans who “had been helping with the construction” of the Syrian reactor were killed in the Israeli strike, according to media reports at the time.

In 1991, then-Syrian president Hafez al-Assad made a military-acquisition alliance with North Korea, which allowed him to purchase missiles from the North, and gave him access to the expertise needed to produce more-advanced weapons domestically. North Korea also helped the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center construct a missile complex in Aleppo used for fitting chemical weapons on Scud missiles in the early 1990s. A quarter century later, it turns out the two recently intercepted North Korean shipments were headed for the same Syrian agency.

The timing is suspect as well. The U.N. report specifically addressed shipments intercepted in the last six months. The Assad regime only retook Aleppo from the rebels in December 2016. It doesn’t take an expert, then, to guess at the likely contents of the shipments.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the two states signed a “scientific cooperation” agreement. The year was 2002 — the same year that the existence of Iran’s own plutonium reactor in Arak was publically exposed. Tehran appeared to understand the benefits of redundancy; it was an insurance policy if something should befall its own burgeoning nuclear program. That helps to explain why Iran financed the North Korean nuclear venture in Syria to the tune of $1 billion. It was only then, in 2002, that the construction of Assad’s al-Kibar plutonium reactor began in earnest.

Although Israel destroyed the site five years later, denying Iran the dividends from their investment, they were impressed by the cooperative agreement reached between the Kim and Assad regimes in 2002. The result was a duplicated and expanded science-and-technology deal inked between Iran and North Korea a decade later.

The North Korean Nexus with Iran
Of course, the bilateral collaboration between Pyongyang and Tehran predates that 2012 agreement. For example, WikiLeaks exposed a February 2010 diplomatic cable from confirming Iran’s purchase of 19 advanced ballistic missiles from North Korea — missiles that put Western European capitals within Tehran’s reach.

Just as Iran’s Shahab-2 missile is modeled on North Korea’s Hwasoong-6, Iran’s Shahab-3 missile also matches North Korea’s Nodong. That shouldn’t be too surprising, considering that Iranian scientists and military officers frequently attend North Korean test launches of long-range ballistic missiles and have maintained a presence at North Korean nuclear-test sites for at least the last decade. It’s only natural that such curiosity would run both ways, too: From the 1990s onward, dozens of North Korean scientists and technicians are also known to have worked inside Iran.

The watershed year between the two states came in 2012, as President Obama was concluding his disastrous nuclear deal with Tehran. According to detailed analysis published in February by Israel’s BESA Center, since reaching their cooperation agreement, North Korea and Iran have been working on “miniaturizing a nuclear implosion device in order to fit its dimensions and weight to the specifications of the Shahab-3 re-entry vehicle.” The authors of that analysis went on to conclude that, “the nuclear and ballistic interfaces between the two countries” are “long-lasting, unique, and intriguing,” and that North Korea is ready and able to clandestinely assist Iran in circumventing the nuclear deal, while Iran is likely helping North Korea upgrade its own strategic capacities.

The Parchin Connection

It should set off alarm bells that North Korea and Iran have been working together to overcome some of the remaining challenges that prevent Pyongyang from targeting the U.S. homeland with nuclear warheads — namely, the warhead-miniaturization process and the perfection of its long-range ballistic missiles. But it should set off sirens that some of that work has been carried out at Parchin, the Iranian facility that Tehran insists is a military site and keeps off limits to international inspections.

Parchin should be familiar. When Obama administration officials were cooking up their nuclear deal with Iran, they repeatedly promised that critically important “anytime, anywhere” inspections would have to be part of the agreement. What happened instead was that they folded like a tablecloth, as they did on every declared red-line issue crucial to verifying Iran’s past nuclear-related military activity.

In 2015, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei personally and repeatedly rejected any access to what he called military sites, including Parchin. So Team Obama came up with a secret side agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which would allow Iran to inspect its own site and provide its own soil samples.

Anyone could have guessed what would happen next.

“Despite years of Iran sanitizing the site and the Iranians taking their own environmental samples, the IAEA nonetheless detected the presence of anthropogenically-processed (‘man-made’) particles of natural uranium,” reads a new report released by the Institute for Science and International Security.

After years of Iranian denials and attempts to block access to the site, it turns out “substantial evidence exists that Iran conducted secret nuclear weapons development activities at Parchin,” including “the presence of uranium particles” and “a variety of other evidence of work related to nuclear weapons,” the report claims. It goes on to note the many suspicious site alterations that Iran made after the IAEA requested access in 2012 — which, again, is when Iran and North Korea signed their science-and-technology cooperation agreement.

It is also worth mentioning that in November 2012, the IAEA reported that Iran completed the installation of some 2,800 centrifuges at its Fordow uranium-enrichment facility, which was built and buried deep inside a mountain near the city of Qom. That report also noted that Iran installed more centrifuges at its fortified, underground fuel-enrichment plant in Natanz. Both facilities were producing uranium enriched up to 20 percent — a level useful only in the production of nuclear weapons.

Add it all up, and it becomes clear that because of Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal, the U.S. and the IAEA don’t know the scope of Iran’s past nuclear activities at precisely the moment when that knowledge is critical. The same lack of access afforded by the deal also prevents the U.S. from grasping the range of North Korea’s nuclear efforts, specifically experiments relevant to the detonation of a warhead that took place at Parchin. And the kicker is that a growing chorus of analysts today is calling for the Trump administration to negotiate a similar agreement with Kim Jong-un. Let that sink in for a moment.

An Evolving Axis Fifteen years ago, many scratched their heads at President George W. Bush’s inclusion of North Korea alongside Iraq and Iran in what he described as “an axis of evil.” Few recall that North Korea was actually the first of the three countries he listed in his 2002 State of the Union address, followed by Iran. It’s quite clear now that the third state on that list should have been Syria rather than Iraq. After all, according to Hayden, by 2001 the CIA was gathering “scattered, unverified and ambiguous information” regarding nuclear ties between Syria and North Korea. Even if the literal picture presented by Israel didn’t become clear until a few years later, by 2002 the two had signed their scientific-cooperation agreement and Iran’s plutonium reactor had become public. The writing was on the wall.

The recent sanctions-busting North Korean shipments to Iran highlight how dangerous it is to seal a structurally defective nuclear deal with a rogue state while leaving other distressing aspects of that state’s behavior untouched. They should make it abundantly clear that we must seriously address this blooming axis of proliferation, because any bilateral agreement with one of its members can be easily undone by another.

Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450997/un-report-north-korea-syria-iran-relationship-extensive-long-standing

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