Iranian women are hoping to attend the June 19 volleyball match between Iran and the United States at Azadi Stadium in Tehran, but official and unofficial forces are arrayed against them, according to a report published Wednesday in The Daily Beast. Although Iran’s vice-president for women’s affairs has said that 500 women will...

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The erosion of sanctions against Iran over the past year and a half, which led to increased business ties with Western companies, has lessened the economic pressure on Iran to make a deal limiting its nuclear infrastructure, argued an editorial (Google link) published today in The Wall Street Journal. The Journal noted that increased commercial interest in Iran...

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Secretary of State John Kerry asserted that Iran will not be required to account for its past nuclear work as part of any nuclear deal. At a press briefing yesterday, Kerry said: Michael, the possible military dimensions, frankly, gets distorted a little bit in some of the discussion, in that...

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The continuing repression of Christians and other religious minorities in Iran raises questions about President Hassan Rouhani’s inclination to adhere to any nuclear deal his country might sign, Benjamin Weinthal, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote Sunday in an analysis for The Jerusalem Post. After...

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Sen. Bob Corker (R – Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to President Barack Obama, criticizing his administration for their “breathtaking” retreat from their “original goals and statements” at the beginning of nuclear talks with Iran, The Hill reported today. “It is breathtaking to see how far from...

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Matthew Kroenig, a former Defense Department official in both the Bush and Obama administrations, argued in an article published today in Tablet that the nuclear deal with Iran currently being pursued by the Obama administration, which will allow Iran to maintain its capacity for uranium enrichment, is an abandonment of a “70-year-old bipartisan...

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An Israeli cybersecurity firm released a report on Iranian hacking efforts primarily targeting Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Yemen, The Times of Israel reported Sunday. The Israeli ClearSky cybersecurity company said it has discovered an ongoing wave of cyber attacks originating from Iran on targets in Israel and the Middle East. The...

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A photographer known only as “Caesar” who photographed thousands of victims of the regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, and smuggled those pictures out of the country as documentation of the regime’s brutality, shared his story in an extensive report published Thursday in Vanity Fair. Caesar had been a crime-scene photographer for Syria’s...

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Iran is sending arms and money to support the Taliban in Afghanistan, The Wall Street Journal reported (Google link) Thursday. Afghan and Western officials say Tehran has quietly increased its supply of weapons, ammunition and funding to the Taliban, and is now recruiting and training their fighters, posing a new...

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In a public debate last month against an advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollahi Ali Khamenei, Prof. Sadegh Zibakalam of Tehran University, who is associated with the reformist movement in Iran, argued that Iran’s enrichment program has been expensive for the country with little benefit. His remarks were translated Tuesday by the Middle...

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