Five years into the Syrian civil war, Qutaiba Idlbi, a native of Damascus, recalled a question he first heard at the onset of the revolution. “Why should we go out to the streets if we know that Assad is going to shoot unarmed people?” Idlbi remembered that question, raised by...

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A U.S. District Court in New York ordered Iran last Wednesday to pay approximately $10.5 billion total to the families of 9/11 victims and to insurance companies who paid claims resulting from damages incurred during the attacks. Documents related to the lawsuit allege that some of the 9/11 hijackers visited Iran prior...

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The European Union and the United Nations have delayed any decision to impose sanctions on Iran after the Islamic Republic and its allies argued that its ballistic missile tests last week don’t violate the UN Security Council resolution that implemented last year’s nuclear deal, The Wall Street Journal reported (Google link) Monday. Russian Ambassador to...

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Sen. Chuck Schumer (D – N.Y.) said that an Iranian cyber-attack on a dam near New York City was a “shot across the bow” of the United States, which should be answered with harsher sanctions, the Associated Press reported on Friday. “Now it looks clear that the Iranians did it,” Schumer said during...

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Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged his nation to engage with every country in the world except for the United States and Israel, The Independent reported on Saturday. “I do not favour cutting ties with West, but we must know who we are dealing with,” Khamenei said, according to Iran’s...

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Democratic and Republican lawmakers from both the Senate and the House of Representatives have called on the Obama administration to take action against Iran in light of its ballistic missile launches, which are in violation of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2231. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who voted for...

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Iranian civil life has been marked by an increase in executions, a “widening crackdown” on freedoms, the disqualification of thousands of candidates for public office, and ongoing discrimination against minorities and women, the UN’s investigator into the human rights situation in Iran reported Thursday. UN rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed’s report (.pdf) covered executions, freedom of expression,...

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A day after Iran announced that it tested a number of ballistic missiles across the country, in defiance of a United Nations Security Council ban, the Islamic Republic launched two more missiles marked with the threat “Israel must be wiped off the Earth” in Hebrew, CNN reported on Wednesday. The missiles, which are capable of...

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Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced that it had test-launched several ballistic missiles at sites across the country on Tuesday, the third time that it has violated UN Security Council bans on such tests in five months. “Our main enemies are imposing new sanctions on Iran to weaken our missile capabilities…but they...

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On Wednesday, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency stated that the nuclear deal with Iran has limited the types of Iranian nuclear activities on which the IAEA is required to publicly report. When asked, at 16:07 in the video linked to, why the IAEA is “not giving enough...

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