The United States has accused Iran of purchasing prohibited materials for its heavy water reactor according to a report today in Foreign Policy written by longtime United Nations correspondent Colum Lynch. The U.S. allegations were detailed in a confidential Nov. 7 report by an eight-member panel of experts that advises a...

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Arab commentators believe that recent attacks attributed to Iran against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) positions in Iraq show a significant strengthening of Tehran’s efforts to help its allies in Baghdad and Damascus and maintain its regional influence through the fight against the threat of radical Islamists....

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In a tweet Friday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared, “we strengthened our brothers’ fists in Gaza; West Bank will be armed.” The quote was from a speech Khamenei delivered (embedded below) on November 25, to the International Congress on Takfirism. In the section of the speech devoted to threatening Israel,...

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On Thursday, the House of Representatives approved a measure that would require the White House to report to Congress on Iranian compliance with regards to its nuclear program. The measure, included in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and co-authored by Reps. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.),...

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Saudi Arabia has suspended most of the aid it sends to its southern neighbor, Yemen, in response to the hold the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have over the capital city of Sanaa, according to a Reuters report yesterday. Yemen, which is battling an al Qaeda insurgency, a southern secessionist movement, endemic corruption and...

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Iran’s Supreme Court has upheld the death penalty for 30 year-old Soheil Arabi, who was convicted of insulting the prophet Mohammed in a Facebook post, according to a report at Al-Monitor on Tuesday. According to Arabi’s lawyer, Vahid Moshkani Farahani, the Tehran court had originally sought the death penalty for Arabi...

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The West must reestablish a credible threat of force in order to restore eroded leverage with Iran according Amos Yadlin, former head of Israel’s military intelligence and director at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), and INSS researcher Avner Golov. In an article published Wednesday, Yadlin and Golov argued...

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In testimony (.pdf) yesterday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Michael Doran, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, recommended new sanctions against Iran to ensure that the United States has sufficient leverage ahead of the June deadline to conclude negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Such leverage has been diminished, Doran argued,...

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Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) on Tuesday called for additional sanctions on Iran in the event that efforts for Iran and the P5+1 to reach a framework agreement by March 2015 are unsuccessful. Menendez’s comments, delivered at the Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO council meeting, come just after...

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New details are emerging about the report released yesterday by the American cyber security firm Cylance, concerning Iran’s aggressive global cyber-attacks. Cylance has dubbed the Iranian campaign “Operation Cleaver.” Computerworld reports: The attackers used publicly available attack tools and exploits, as well as specialized malware programs they created themselves. Cylance believes...

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