Daily News Channel
A protest rally was scheduled to go ahead in Tehran Saturday despite warnings from Iran’s supreme leader. The rally against last week’s disputed presidential vote was scheduled to begin at around 4 p.m.
"Millions voted for President Ahmadinejad and that makes the elections definitive," declared Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Akbar Khamenei during his Friday sermon. With these simple words addressing Muslim worshippers, he ended speculations about his position following a week of pro-opposition demonstrations claiming vote-rigging and denouncing their candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi’s defeat
The head of the U.N.
Before we go too far down the road cheering the forces of Iranian democracy, let’s not forget that its public face, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has American blood on his hands. He was Iran’s Prime Minister during most of the 1980s, a time when the country was waging a terrorist campaign against the U.S
Some Iranian-Americans, watching the post-election unrest in Iran, say the tug-of-war between the people and their hardline government has come to a head after three decades. “I am absolutely convinced that what we are witnessing is a turning point in the history of the Islamic Republic,” said Dr. Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.
The global financial crisis has increased the worldwide trade in trafficked persons, says a State Department report released Tuesday. The State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report also says trafficking has increased in Africa and slaps six African nations on a blacklist of countries not meeting the minimum standard of combating trafficking. The report, mandated by Congress, features data and statistics from 175 countries around the world regarding the amount of human trafficking that goes on within their borders.
There is no denying that the news clips from Tehran are dramatic, unprecedented in violence and size since the mullahs came to power in 1979. They’re possibly even augurs of real change. But can we trust them
If the 300,000 West Bank settlers identified by the American President as an obstacle to Middle East peace were expecting Bibi Netanyahu to support their cherished dream of an Israel stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean sea, they were disappointed on Sunday night. The right wing leader instead took a sharp and unexpected lurch to the center and said he’d support a two-state solution, meaning something called Palestine is a step closer to being inked onto their 3,000-year-old Biblical map. To his credit, clench-jawed Netanyahu could have used the re-election of Israel’s favorite bogeyman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran to raise the usual security alarms and resort to time-tested fear-mongering
There’s a growing dread at the CIA these days that the vultures are circling, waiting to pick off the agency’s best parts. The latest move causing concern is a play by Admiral Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, to name the next intelligence chief in Kabul. CIA Director Leon Panetta, who has already named his own chief from the CIA’s ranks, is reportedly fighting back, much to his boss’s consternation.
Halfway through my interview with Khaled Mashaal, about an hour after Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, I realized that the leader of Hamas was calling the Israeli people, and their leaders, Israelis. That seemed new. The usual term of art used by Islamic militants is “Zionists” or worse.