Source: The New York Times
The Michigan family of a former Marine incarcerated for more than three years in Iran has been receiving telephone calls and emails from that country proposing prisoner swaps for Iranians held in the United States, he said in a letter to Iran’s president made public by his relatives on Tuesday.
Source: The Washington Times
Sen. Ted Cruz didn’t pull punches at a recent speech before the Heritage Foundation, telling conference listeners that President Obama’s foreign policy failures had a lot to do with the fueling of radical Islamism and that his leadership skills were actually proving dangerous.
Source: GCR
Work on some 2,700 infrastructure projects in the Islamic Republic of Iran has been halted as a result of funding shortfall caused by the collapse in the price of oil.
Source: The New York Times
HOUSTON — Oil prices took another sharp turn downward on Monday to levels not seen since the depths of the 2009 recession. Several international banks predicted even lower prices later this year because of an oversupplied global crude market.
Hamid Yazdan Panah is an attorney focused on asylum and immigration in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also a human rights activist focused on the Middle East and Iran.
The attack that took place this past week against Charlie Hebdo in Paris was nothing short of terrorism in its most horrific form. There is no justification for such crimes, nor is there any room in the modern world for these acts. Much has been said in the way of solidarity Charlie Hebdo, yet little has been offered in terms of policy as it pertains to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism itself. I propose a simple, yet long overdue stance in regards to this issue. Stand with those who have been fighting against fundamentalism and terror, and support an interpretation of Islam that is progressive, tolerant, and peaceful.
Source: UPI
TEHRAN, Jan. 12 (UPI) — A decline in oil exports, largely because of Western economic sanctions, has cost the Iranian economy more than $100 billion, a senior official said.
Source: THE DIPLOMAT
By Struan Stevenson
“The spread of violent jihad across the world was the inspiration of Ayatollah Khomenei.”
The horror assassination of ten journalists and two policemen in Paris is simply the latest manifestation of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism whose genesis can be traced directly back to the Iranian revolution and the coming to power of Grand Ayatollah Ruholla Khomenei, who made Iran the world’s first Islamic Republic. His medieval belief that his authority came directly from God enabled him to rule over a fascist theocracy that could imprison, torture, maim and execute at will, ruling by fear and violence and defending these excesses by stating they were the will of God. Similar to the “divine right of Kings” which bathed Europe in blood for centuries, this discredited anachronism plunged the 74 million forward-looking and highly civilized Iranians back to the Middle Ages, where women could be stoned to death and men hanged from cranes in town squares because they were guilty of “waging war on God.”
President Obama’s recent interview with NPR suggest that the US government is trying to get Iran by a soft policy of nudging and negotiation, but analyst like Jonathan Keller call this “detente” bragging and wishful thinking, it wont be possible to outwit the Iranian mullahs.
The strategy of the US government till now has been ineffectual. It contains a policy of rapprochement with Iran. The standoff with Iran prevents application of American power in the “Indo-Pacific”, and this seems to be the only reason why the administration is not playing hardball with Iran. This precludes only marginal reallocation of some naval resources.
This was bound to happen and no one was surprised by it. . The savage religious war being waged in Iraq and Syria now affects the entire world, and nobody’s freedom of speech and right to life is owed any respect by Islamist extremists. Masked gunmen stormed the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Wednesday, killing 12 people, including the paper’s editor and a cartoonist, before escaping in a getaway car.
Source : Reuters
Republican lawmakers said on Thursday they are close to reintroducing legislation seeking a voice in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and to impose tougher sanctions against Iran, now that they control both houses of the U.S. Congress.
