Iranian collaboration with North Korea on a new rocket booster for long-range missiles undermines the deal with Tehran on its nuclear program, key Senate and House Republicans said on Tuesday.
“While the president was undertaking his secret negotiations—which Congress wasn’t informed of—he had to know Iran and North Korea were testing new engines for ballistic missiles to target the United States,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.) chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces.
Rogers said in a statement that despite sharp budget cuts, U.S. space monitoring systems would not miss the development of the new booster engine.
“Every day the president’s deal looks worse and worse,” Rogers said when asked about the Tehran-Pyongyang missile collaboration....(CONTINUED)
A top Iranian military leader announced late Tuesday that Iran has developed “indigenous” ballistic missile technology, which could eventually allow it to fire a nuclear payload over great distances. Brigadier General Hossein Salami, the lieutenant commander of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), made the critical weapons announcement just days after Iran and the West signed a deal aimed at curbing the country’s nuclear activities.
Salami claimed that “Iran is among the only three world countries enjoying an indigenous ballistic missile technology,” according to the state-run Fars News Agency.
“Many countries may have access to cruise missiles technology, but when it comes to ballistic missiles, I am confident that only the U.S. and the [former] Soviet Union could master this technology, and now we can announce that we own this technology as well,” Salami told Fars.
The IRGC leader said that Iran is quickly developing advanced military know-how....(CONTINUED)
The crew of PT 109 (COURTESY FILES OF JOHN FLORES) By John W. Flores The young, skinny Navy officer walked along the dock at a South Pacific base and met his new crewmen for the first time, as they stood on the sun-drenched deck of a nondescript, navy green torpedo boat.
Some of the men on board were crusty old sailors and war veterans, others just young and cocky “swabbies” new to the U.S. Navy’s war against the vaunted and feared Japanese Imperial Navy. Some of the guys aboard heard the scuttlebutt—the rampant rumors—that this new captain of the 80-foot torpedo boat, Lt.(junior grade) John Kennedy, was the son of ultra-wealthy Joe Kennedy of Boston.
When Lt. Kennedy walked on deck, the men dropped their mops and paint brushes and saluted the new skipper, said Gerard Zinser in his last interview a few years ago, prior to his death. That story was printed in the Boston Globe and Navy Times.
by Michael Kelley We already knew that Iran had troops on the ground in Syria last summer and the Islamic Republic is calling the shots, but new footage recorded by a cameraman attached to the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards details just how much Iran is invested in the civil war.
"If Assad falls, Iran's foreign policy objectives would be constrained. So it's doing everything it can to keep Assad in power, " Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies told BBC, which did an investigation based on the footage.....(CONTINUED)
There is good reason why so many Americans remember our 35th president, John F. Kennedy, so fondly.
Throughout his life, as a young man in college, war hero, U.S. representative, senator, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, and president, Kennedy fully embraced the American spirit and called on us to do the same. It’s fitting that his first words to the nation, in his inaugural address as president, were “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Today, on the 50th anniversary of his untimely death, let’s reflect on all he did.
In 1940, the year young Kennedy graduated from college, the nation was in the throes of World War II. He could have done anything, but he wanted nothing more than to fight for his country, ultimately earning the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for acts of heroism and, owing to related injuries, the Purple Heart.....(CONTINUED)
Part 3 of the Assets of the Ayatollah (scroll down for Parts 2 & 1): On the supreme leader’s watch, Iran conducted a systematic campaign to legalize and safeguard the seizure of assets on which Setad’s wealth was built.
Two months before his death in 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini tried to solve a problem unleashed by the revolution he led a decade earlier.
Land and other assets were being seized en masse from purported enemies of the young theocratic state. Khomeini issued a two-paragraph order asking two trusted aides to ensure that much of the proceeds from the sale of the properties would go to charity.
The result was a new organization - known as Setad, or "The Headquarters" - that reported to Iran's supreme leader. As one of the aides later recounted, Setad was intended to oversee the confiscations and then wind down after two years.
Twenty-four years later, Setad is an economic giant. Khomeini's successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has used it to amass assets worth tens of billions of dollars, rivaling the holdings of the late shah. Setad's portfolio includes banks, farms, cement companies, a licensed contraceptives maker, apartments seized from Iranians living abroad and much more....(CONTINUED)...
MARKET MOVER: Khamenei's image and stock-price displays at the Tehran Stock Exchange in 2010. Setad now owns stakes in companies worth billions of dollars. REUTERS/Stringer
Part 2: An organization controlled by Iran’s supreme leader generates billions of dollars a year, helping to solidify his control over a country hobbled by sanctions. Seven years ago, the United Nations and Western powers began subjecting Tehran to steadily harsher economic sanctions. Around the same time, an organization controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei started to study how some developing economies managed to grow fast.
Setad, as the organization is known, had amassed billions of dollars in property seized from Iranian citizens. What Iran lacked and needed, Setad decided, was conglomerates on a par with those of South Korea, Japan, Brazil and the United States.
According to an account this year by a senior official in the unit that oversees Setad's financial investments, Ali Ashraf Afkhami, the organization also picked the perfect candidate to create an Iranian national champion: Setad itself.
The ayatollah's organization would go on to acquire stakes in a major bank by 2007 and in Iran's largest telecommunications company in 2009. Among dozens of other investments, it took over a giant holding company in 2010.
An organizational chart labeled "SETAD at a Glance," prepared in 2010 by one of Setad's companies and seen by Reuters, illustrates how big it had grown. The document shows holdings in major banks, a brokerage, an insurance company, power plants, energy and construction firms, a refinery, a cement company and soft drinks manufacturing......
SUPREME LEADER: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, shown at a 2009 clerical gathering, oversees an organization called Setad that has assets estimated at about $95 billion. REUTERS/Khamenei.ir/Handout
Part 1: A Reuters investigation details a key to the supreme leader’s power: a little-known organization created to help the poor that morphed into a business juggernaut worth tens of billions of dollars.
The 82-year-old Iranian woman keeps the documents that upended her life in an old suitcase near her bed. She removes them carefully and peers at the tiny Persian script.
There's the court order authorizing the takeover of her children's three Tehran apartments in a multi-story building the family had owned for years. There's the letter announcing the sale of one of the units. And there's the notice demanding she pay rent on her own apartment on the top floor.
Pari Vahdat-e-Hagh ultimately lost her property. It was taken by an organization that is controlled by the most powerful man in Iran: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. She now lives alone in a cramped, three-room apartment in Europe, thousands of miles from Tehran....(CONTINUED)
Why aren't civilized countries demanding an end to this? Do they just stop with chemical weapons and walk away?
Human Rights Watch: "All nations should urge Syria to immediately stop using incendiary weapons and should work to strengthen international law on these weapons."
Starving children in the Ukraine during the Holodomor, 1932-33
‘We
went to a field. We had nothing to eat. Everything was taken from us.
So my mother decided we would go to the field, find some half-frozen
potatoes, some kind of vegetables, to make a soup. At that time the
Soviet Union was teaching people to report on each other, to spy on each
other. Somebody saw that we came with some vegetables, half-frozen, and
they arrested my mother. That was the last time I saw her.”
So
Eugenia Dallas, originally Eugenia Sakevych, began her story to me.
Born in Ukraine around 1925 (she does not know her exact age), Eugenia
lived through the Holodomor — genocide by famine — as a young girl.
Shortly before her mother was taken, her father was sent to Siberia,
deemed a criminal because he owned a few acres of land........(CONTINUED)...
Good news is hard to come by in Congo, so no one should be surprised to see Congolese citizens dancing in the streets these days, overjoyed by their government’s rare battlefield victory over the reviled M23 rebellion. For the last year and a half, the M23 has destabilized wide swathes of eastern Congo, committing horrific atrocities in the areas it controlled. A huge opportunity exists now to build on the momentum of the M23’s demise by pivoting to inclusive regional and internal processes aimed at addressing the core drivers of violence that have condemned Congo to being the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II.
A surrendered M23 rebel, center, is transported from the frontline by Congolese soldiers near the village of Kibati, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sept. 25, 2013. (Pete Muller/The New York Times, via Redux)
Only a year ago, the M23 took control of the largest town in eastern Congo and had the clear upper hand in the conflict. What changed since then? Three variables were decisive, and lessons can be derived from all three for what remains to be done for lasting peace to have a chance............
A Syrian nun who critics say is disseminating propaganda for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is currently on a U.S. speaking tour.
Mother Agnes Mariam of the Cross, a 61-year-old Lebanese-born nun, has said videos depicting hundreds of Syrians choking and dying from poison gas attacks near Damascus on Aug. 21 were fabricated ahead of time in an attempt to provoke foreign intervention. The United States and several Western nations have attributed the attacks that they say killed 1,400 people to Assad’s forces, pointing to a September United Nations report confirming the use of sarin nerve gas against civilians in the rebel-held suburb of Ghouta.
Mother Agnes also recently helped “evacuate” civilians from the town of Moadamiyah, a suburb in Ghouta hit by the sarin gas attacks that has been surrounded by regime forces for close to a year. Residents of the town, denied food and humanitarian aid, subsisted on tree leaves, olives, and grass.
However, there are reports that hundreds of male residents ushered out of the town were subsequently arrested. Some were reportedly conscripted into the Syrian army or mercenary gangs.....(CONTINUED)
As part of the Assad regime's propaganda war to mislead and misinform, Mother Agnes is embarking on a speaking tour of the US and Canada. The Vancouver Syrian-American community succeeded in canceling Mother Agnes-Mariam’s speaking engagement at the Unitarian Church in Vancouver on November 11th. Please help us get the remaining events cancelled by signing our petition and calling the listed phone numbers below.
The petition will be sent out to Mother Agnes-Mariam's following speaking engagements:
Nov 1-2: Alliance for Justice (Tuscon, AZ) Phone: (202) 540-8336
Nov 3: St Thomas More Church (San Francicso, CA) Phone: (415) 452-9634 Nov 4: Rebuilding Alliance (San Mateo, CA) Phone: (650) 325-4663
Nov 5: Creekside Hall (Walnut Creek, CA) Phone: (925) 935-1811
Nov 6: Our Lady of Grace Church (Castro Valley, CA) Phone: (510) 537-0806 Nov 7: First Christian Church of Oakland (Oakland, CA) Phone: (510) 451-8822
Posted October 31, 2013
Created by yabeytia@yahoo.com, United States of America
Petition statement: We wanted to make sure you know that Mother Agnes has connections to the Assad government which has killed over 100,000 Syrian people, and she defends this government and fabricates evidence to support her claims. Syrian Christians for Peace has already strongly condemned Mother Agnes and exposed many of her lies, as have the New York Times and Human Rights Watch. Among her lies, Mother Agnes denies the use of chemical weapons that gassed hundreds of children, women, and men to death and was confirmed by the UN, US, UK, France, and other intelligence services. She also denies other massacres and associates herself with war criminals. We can send you a document proving everything I just told you. As someone that supports truth & justice, we ask that you cancel Mother Agnes’s event.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who lost the 2012 presidential race to President Barack Obama, accused the president Sunday of "fundamental dishonesty" when he repeatedly promised Americans they would be able to keep their existing insurance plans under Obamacare.
“He wasn’t telling the truth,” Romney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“That fundamental dishonesty has really -- has really put in peril the whole foundation of his second term,” Romney said. “I think it is rotting it away.”.......(CONTINUED)
NEW YORK — Some people would prefer to keep the past buried. This understandable human characteristic is made literal in Władysław Pasikowski’s new film “Aftermath.” It is a meditative look at collective guilt, lingering prejudice and the dark ramifications that sometimes come when bringing the truth to light. After a controversial run in its native Poland (more on this in a bit) it is poised to make its US bow.....
Authors: Unless root causes are addressed, violence will intensify in Congo
They say the key is to focus on Rwanda's role in the war
Agreement that involves Rwanda would go far to bring peace, aid economies, they say
Editor's note: John Prendergast and Sasha Lezhnev are co-founder and senior policy analyst at the Enough Project, part of the Center for American Progress.
(CNN) -- The escalation in recent days of eastern Congo's brutal war demonstrates that unless its root causes are addressed in a broader peace process, violence could intensify and Rwanda could be drawn more directly into the fray, regionalizing the war.
Over the past week, Congo's army has nearly militarily defeated the most powerful rebel group, the M23. Rwanda has threatened to strike Congo in retaliation for what it claims was shelling on its territory by Congo's army.
M23 may soon be a spent force militarily, but many other armed groups are still active and could replace it as major destabilizers of eastern Congo unless the root causes of the war are addressed........(CONTINUED)
‘We went to a field. We had nothing to eat. Everything was taken from us. So my mother decided we would go to the field, find some half-frozen potatoes, some kind of vegetables, to make a soup. At that time the Soviet Union was teaching people to report on each other, to spy on each other. Somebody saw that we came with some vegetables, half-frozen, and they arrested my mother. That was the last time I saw her.”