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Diplomacy

As Iranian and Western officials continue to hammer out a nuclear accord in Vienna, Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter imprisoned on espionage charges in Tehran, began his third hearing today, The New York Times reported. Mr. Rezaian is one of at least three Americans in Iranian prisons, an issue repeatedly...

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Diplomacy

The P5+1 nations threw away their leverage in the nuclear negotiations by not treating Iran as a “determined proliferator” and pushing it to comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), opting instead to approach negotiations as “a political dispute,” Emily Landau, a leading nonproliferation expert, wrote Saturday in The Times of Israel....

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Diplomacy

A source close to Iran’s negotiating team in Vienna said that terms of a nuclear deal were not yet agreed to, Iran’s semi-official news agency Fars claimed on Sunday, disputing a report by the Associated Press (AP) earlier in the day. An Iranian official has said that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani...

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Europe

VIENNA–A range of Austrian human rights and foreign policy groups came together in Vienna over the weekend to protest genocidal Iranian anti-Semitism, holding a rally in response to celebrations of Quds Day in Iran under the banner of “No Quds-Day! Together Against Anti-Semitism!” Quds Day is an official Iranian holiday...

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Diplomacy

Iran continues to defy existing sanctions on its nuclear and ballistic missile programs as nuclear negotiations proceed in Vienna. In a report published Friday in The Weekly Standard, Emanuele Ottolenghi and Benjamin Weinthal, fellows at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, cited a German intelligence agency that recently reported on Iran’s...

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Israel

A BBC documentary titled ‘Children of the Gaza War’ deliberately mistranslated the words of Palestinian children in Gaza, substituting their references to ‘Jews’ with those to ‘Israelis’, Ha’aretz reported Thursday. In one such case a Gazan child says that the ‘yahud’ (Arabic for Jews) are massacring Palestinians, but the subtitles...

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Israel

Hamas is exploiting the plight of two Israelis in an attempt to free more terrorists from jail, Avi Issacharoff reported in The Times of Israel yesterday. [Avraham] Mengistu and a second captive Israeli, a Bedouin who crossed into the Strip, constitute significant assets for Gaza’s Islamist rulers. Hamas tried hard...

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Diplomacy

Mark Dubowitz and Reuel Marc Gerecht, respectively the executive director and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argued that the emerging deal between the P5+1 nations and Iran makes an armed conflict over Iran’s nuclear program more likely in an op-ed that appeared Thursday in The Wall Street Journal....

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Featured

Millions of Iranians took to the streets today in celebration of al-Quds Day, an annual Iranian festival commemorated on the final Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan that features massive anti-American and anti-Israel protests. This year, the protests took place against the backdrop of the ongoing nuclear diplomacy between the P5+1...

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Diplomacy

Michael Makovsky, the CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, testified that the emerging nuclear deal with Iran will hurt American interests and credibility in the Middle East at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday. In the beginning of his testimony (.pdf), Makovsky highlighted five significant shortcomings...

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