In recent weeks Iran announced that it had begun work on enriching uranium to 20 percent -- just short of the level required to produce nuclear weapons -- as well as informing the International Atomic Energy Agency... that it was to resume work on producing uranium metal.

Both these developments represent a clear breach of the JCPOA. Under the agreement, Iran committed to keep uranium enrichment at 3.5 percent, the level required for civilian use, and signed up to a 15-year ban on "producing or acquiring plutonium or uranium metals or their alloys".

Iran's announcement that it was proceeding with the production of uranium metal has prompted a furious response from the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany, who, in a joint statement earlier this month, warned that there was "no credible civilian use" for the element, and that "The production of uranium metal has potentially grave military implications.

[W]hat makes anyone think Iran would honour a new deal any more than they honoured the old one? Why enter a new sham deal at all?

Not a week has passed since the inauguration of President Joe Biden -- whose son reportedly engaged in business deals with China worth $1.5 billion -- and the Chinese Communist Party, which illegally seized Hong Kong last summer, has already sent more than two dozen warplanes, including bombers, into Taiwan's airspace for two days in a row.

China also issued a new law permitting its "coastguards to launch pre-emptive strikes without prior warning" on any foreign ship that might enter disputed waters that China would like to consider its own.

Biden's team should not misinterpret any Chinese conciliatory rhetoric as being a sign of a less aggressive CCP effort to push US military assets out of the Western Pacific.

Xi, a stalwart of the "One China Policy," may still demand not words but actions, such as: a moratorium on Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) by US Navy vessels in the South China Sea, a cessation of US criticism of Chinese human rights violations, and a promise to reduce American VIP visits to Taiwan following President Trump's high-level contacts with Taipei.

China has clearly assessed Biden's capacity for bold leadership as highly improbable.

The Biden administration should not assume that Chinese objectives are negotiable. The CCP is committed to becoming the premier power in the world at the expense of US interests and is most likely willing to risk war to accomplish it.

The Swamp is terrified of Trump – still. That explains their fixation on eradicating him and his movement.

You are also supposed to ignore the facts concerning months-long violent protests with killings and burnings across America's cities by Antifa and BLM. Months ago, Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser, demanded that the National Guard withdraw from her city amid violent demonstrations. She then named a street after those demonstrators and allowed them to paint their motto across the entire street.

Watch for the same sort of public treatment and language applied to Trump supporters going forward. It is consistent with a government that is in fear of its own people. The type of government that has 25,000 soldiers guarding a few politicians in an empty city.

In "Four Principles to Guide U.S. Policy Toward China," the Atlantic Council's Ali Wyne suggests a weakened America needs to accommodate the People's Republic of China.

China also cannot get along with the United States, which maintained China-friendly policies for more than four decades. In fact, People's Daily, the most authoritative publication in China, in May 2019 carried a piece that declared a "people's war" on America.

China's "unrestricted warfare" on the United States has taken a toll. Recently, Chinese leaders deliberately spread the coronavirus beyond their borders, making deaths in America mass murder as well as "genocide," as that term is defined by Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Moreover, in late January of last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in the International Falls Port of Entry in Minnesota seized 900,000 counterfeit $1 bills, made in China.... Nobody, in China's near-total surveillance state, can counterfeit American currency without authorities knowing about it. [C]ounterfeiting another country's currency is considered an act of war.

Leaders of democracies, despite all the good will in the world, will find they cannot cooperate with thugs.

Muslim fighters tortured a 58-year-old Christian woman of Armenian descent by hacking off her ears, hands, and feet before finally executing her. — Medium.com, January 14, 2021, Artsakh.

As to why she was mutilated before being killed, jihadis often cite the Koran's calls to cut off the hands, feet, and throats of infidels (e.g., Koran 5:33, 47:4). — Artsakh.

One of the survivors... managed to escape his home in time and hide in the outside bathroom: "through the ventilator of the latrine he saw the rebels killing 4 members of his family including his wife and 3 children." — Virtueonline.org, December 3, 2020, Democratic Republic of Congo.

"My husband began reading verses in the Koran that allowed men to beat their wives if they disobey them, and after that he started beating me...." — Morning Star News, December 17, 2020, Uganda.

"About 20 people who knew us wanted to help us with the searches, but the gendarmerie prevented them from coming.... and civilians were not allowed to help. If the permission required had been given, we would have found my mother right away...." — Father Remzi Diril, a priest of the Istanbul Chaldean Church and one of the couple's sons, after his mother's body was found bullet wounds in the head and back; interview with Milliyet, January 11, 2021.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Assyrians in southeast Turkey "suffered forced evictions, mass displacement and the burning down of their homes and villages." They were exposed to severe persecution "including abductions (including of priests), forced conversions to Islam through rape and forced marriage, and murders. These pressures, and other more insidious forms of discrimination, have decimated the community." — Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples, Assyrians, updated June 2018.

Today, EU candidate and NATO member Turkey is still not willing or able to provide security and basic human rights for this persecuted minority.

The aim, here, is exclusion rather than qualifications.

One fake university with an address in the island of Saba, in the Caribbean, has sold over 500 doctorates to Iranian officials for $25,000 apiece.

To complicate matters further, the conditions demand other qualifications that are hard if not impossible to measure.... For example, how do you prove "heartfelt belief in the necessity of religion" or "transparent hostility to the West" or "opposition to all seditions that have taken place against the Islamic Revolution"?

Things become more complicated when would-be candidates are asked to prove loyalty not only to the regime and all its policies but also to be committed to preserving all the existing institutions of the Islamic Republic. This means that those who dream of reforming let alone disbanding the High Council of Guardians of the Constitution or merging the Revolutionary Guard with the national army need not apply.

In France, a low-intensity war is bubbling, aimed at radicalizing education.

At the Pierre Mendès France School in Saumur, a student told his teacher, "My father will behead you". It has become impossible even to make a precise list of these incidents. They occur every day in France.

"Faced with Islamist intimidation, what should the free world do?" — Title of Robert Redeker's column in Le Figaro in 2006. A few days later, he began receiving death threats.

If extremists have managed to intimidate France's schools and universities, why should they not be able to subdue all of society?

The proposed Palestinian elections are part of a scheme designed to deceive the international community, specifically the US and EU, into believing that the Palestinians are serious about implementing major reforms, ending financial and administrative corruption, and engaging in another peace process with Israel.

Not only does Abbas have no plans to depart from the political scene anytime in the near future, he is even said to be considering running in the presidential election.

There is one reason, and one reason only, why Abbas is now talking about holding general elections: to continue milking the cash cow he has in the form of American and European governments. Abbas wants the money to ensure his continued dictatorial rule over the Palestinians.

Abbas is hoping that such an international conference, under the auspices of the United Nations, European Union, Russia and China, would impose a solution on Israel. Abbas has only one solution in mind: one that would see Israel fully withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, including east Jerusalem, and the establishment of a Palestinian state that would undoubtedly be used in the future as a launching pad to wage war on Israel.

The Palestinians live under two dictatorships: one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip. Elections, even if they are held, will not produce new leaders. They will produce Fatah flunkies and Hamas henchmen who bow obediently to their corrupt bosses.

Like most Arab countries, Syria denies citizenship to Palestinians. Children born in Syria to fathers who are Palestinian nationals are considered Palestinians, not Syrian nationals.

Palestinian leaders see no evil or wrong-doing when their people are being killed, injured, displaced, arrested and tortured in an Arab country. The attention of these leaders is solely focused on Israel, which they denounce day and night not only for what it does, but also for what it does not do.

On January 9, Abbas entered the 17^th year of his four-year term. He is again talking about his desire to hold new elections. This charade is played at least once or twice a year so that people will believe that he really wants elections.

The Palestinians do not need new elections. They need new leaders who will guide them out from their longstanding morass into a future of promise and peace.

Al-Azhar, the most respected Islamic university and organization in the Sunni world, is not – by their own definition – a terrorist organization. Yet the question remains. Is al-Azhar truly moderate, or could it be radical? If we fail to establish clear definitions, we can create chaotic situations that result in our asking radical institutions to help us counter radicalism.

It is notable in this context to mention that French President Emmanuel Macron met with the Grand Imam of Egypt's Al-Azhar University, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, and called for all French imams to be trained at the Al-Azhar religious institution. The President of France probably has asked for this form of training without determining if Al-Azhar itself was a radical organization or a moderate one.

Other metrics of Islamic radicalism such as accepting child marriage, considering the lives of Muslims to be more precious than the lives of non-Muslims, and accepting force or violence to impose Islamic religious values upon others can be also included.

Based on these metrics, if any person or Islamic organization fails to reject such abhorrent ideological values, they should not be called moderates. Instead, they should be called what they are: Islamic radicals. We urgently need to detect and expose ideological radicalism before it turns – as it inevitably will – into acts of terrorism.

"Jewish people today on campus can be tolerated, protected or abused. At no point are they treated as equals." — David Collier, Academia, January 18, 2021.

This Jew-hate is cloaked in anti-Zionism, a doctrine that claims the Jewish state, alone among the nations, has no right to exist. It seeks to whip up anti-Israel hatred by focusing on three core lies: accusations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and settler-colonialism.

The government has been working to persuade universities to adopt the IHRA definition, including the threat of removal of funding streams. Often bitterly contested by academic staff desperate to remain unchallenged in their bully pulpits, as of last autumn only 29 of 133 higher education institutions had complied....

Iran... rejoined the global financial system with full legitimacy -- plus billions of dollars flowing into the treasury of the IRGC and its expanding militias across the Middle East. You would think, then, that the regime would be delighted to return to the same nuclear deal, right? Wrong. The mullahs want an even sweeter deal.

Biden already showed his cards by stating that he wants the deal. The regime now knows that Biden seems desperate for a deal, and doubtless sees this as a delectable weakness.

The ruling mullahs also most likely assume that they can extort even more concessions from a Democrat administration, particularly Biden's, because they successfully did so in the past....

Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif... told a forum... that he wants a new deal. "A sign of good faith is not to try to renegotiate what has already been negotiated," he said, adding in the same speech that the US must "Compensate us for our losses." Iran's top judicial body had already demanded that the US pay $130 billion in "damages."

The regime, in addition, is playing another dangerous game, as it did with the Obama administration, to program to extort greater concessions from the Biden administration: It is ratcheting up nuclear threats.

While one looks with alarm at the massive Russian nuclear modernization effort now nearing completion, the disarmament lobby -- such as Ploughshares and Global Zero -- views such modernization as simply a reflection of how the American threat is perceived by the Russians.

There is also little doubt that the Russian Federation's priority investment in nuclear weapons was -- and remains -- aimed primarily to checkmate the United States' conventional weapons superiority, and give Russia a free hand to use its own military power for hegemonic purposes. The same could be said of North Korea and Iran's decisions to go along their respective paths to nuclear breakout.

What brings the issue to the forefront today is that many luminaries of previous administrations who may now be staffing the incoming administration still hold these historically inaccurate views.

A commitment to a "sole-purpose" posture -- or to its equivalent, a "no-first-use" stance -- not only undermines the US nuclear umbrella upon which America's allies have relied for 70 years, it also invites a Russian first strike. Moscow's conventional and nuclear forces are configured for just that kind of operation and are ultimately restrained only by the American nuclear deterrent.

If the United States wrongly assumes that Russia's deterrent serves no offensive purpose, we would be ignoring recent and authoritative evidence to the contrary.... Russia's military posture is fundamentally offensive.... "active defense."

Russia's ability to initiate conventional strikes against its rivals and adversaries is closely backed up by nuclear weapons.

Iran would undoubtedly see even partial unilateral US disarmament as a green light for its nuclear quest. One can imagine what that would lead to in the Middle East.

Moreover, US unilateral acts of altruism, designed to lead by example, will not be reciprocated: states in general, and certainly Russia and China, are, to quote Charles De Gaulle, "cold monsters."

Doctors are warning that as the virus becomes more infectious, even a trip to the supermarket with a mask is risky.

Vaccine supply is not the problem.... The problem is that state and local authorities are bungling vaccine distribution.

Every evening, Governor Andrew Cuomo sends out an e-mail blast blaming the vaccine chaos in New York on inadequate supply from the federal government. It is a lie. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show New York is delivering only 37% of its vaccine supply into people's arms.

All this is proof that the states are failing miserably. It is time for a federal emergency mass vaccination program staged at malls, arenas and other public sites.

On Friday, President-elect Joe Biden announced his plan to improve vaccination rates. It is modest. He promised 100 million shots in the first hundred days of his term. That will not do the job. It is barely half of what is needed.

For the last week, members of Congress did not see fit to spend even one minute tackling the life-threatening virus terrorizing the rest of us.