Iran’s navy: Stealth-stalking the planet

On 9 March 2023, a webcam caught Iranian frigate IRIS Dena (F-75) underway departing Rio de Janeiro at the end of an extended port visit that began on 26 February 2023.

Forward support base IRINS Makran (441) was presumably in company with Dena.  Although Iran’s leaders have threatened to send the two-ship flotilla through the Panama Canal on this “round the world” deployment, it has been a vexed question from the beginning where the ships are at a given time, and it isn’t clear if they’re headed for the canal now.

There is naturally speculation that the warships will stop in Venezuela next.  If they do, they could already be off the coast from Caracas given their departure from Rio on Thursday.

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Latest airliner loss for Malaysia: AirAsia flight QZ8501

Plenty of weather to go around on this one.

New post up at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!

Spain prepares to commit cowardly act of dhimmitude

Imran Firasat and family.

There’s no sugar-coating this one.  New post up at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!

Why is the U.S. taxpayer funding a ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’ sponsor?

Christ at the Checkpoint, or CatC, is a conference sponsored by the Bethlehem Bible College and the Holy Land Trust.  It was held in 2010 and 2012, and is now being held again, in Bethlehem (Judea, in the West Bank), in 2014.  A great deal can be written about the anti-Israel affiliations of its sponsors and the participation of left-wing Western – and in particular, left-leaning evangelical – Christians; a sampling of the background can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

But a group called NGO Monitor has pointed out what I want to highlight, which is that the U.S. taxpayer is contributing to CatC, if perhaps indirectly, through grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).  (See the full NGO Monitor report here.)  The NED receives funding from Congress, and between 2006 and 2012, it made grants in excess of $230,000 to the Holy Land Trust.*