by Charles Naas
At last the Obama Administration has found a reasonable Syria policy. The critics will continue to insist that the US provide arms to the rebels, but it will be difficult to get more traction for this while the initiative with the Russians holds out hopes, although slender, for the beginning of [...]
by Jim Lobe
via IPS News
The surprise accord reached by the U.S. and Russia in Moscow Tuesday to try to convene an international conference to resolve the two-year-old civil war in Syria as soon as the end of this month has been greeted with equal measures of hope and scepticism.
If nothing [...]
by Peter Jenkins
Readers who recall that four years ago a new US President seemed eager to defuse the West’s quarrel with Iran over its nuclear activities may wonder why we are all still waiting for white smoke. I am not sure I know the answer, but I have a hunch it has something to [...]
via Lobe Log
by Charles Naas
The second round of talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan between the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) and Iran ended just about where they started — no advance from the March talks and the glimmer of hope that perhaps some kind of momentum could be established. Unlike Almaty [...]
via Lobe Log
by Jasmin Ramsey
It’s not unusual for evidence supposedly indicating an Iranian nuclear weapons program to be leaked to the press, but how credible is that evidence and how should the press be handling it? For example, late last year, the Associated Press reported on a graph, allegedly from [...]
By Ebrahim Mahdawi
Ebrahim Mahdawi writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan.
In this testimony, Seventy-year-old Abdul Husain from Deh Afghan remembers a [...]
via Lobe Log
by Farideh Farhi
Much about various Iranian and non-Iranian narratives and reporting on the assassination of General Hassan Shateri (aka Khoshnevis) is unclear or contradictory. Let’s just say that reports cannot even agree on the date he died on. So I leave it to others to practice the art of speculation [...]
via Lobe Log
by Wayne White
Sen. John McCain’s berating of former Sen. Chuck Hagel for “yes or no” answers as to whether the latter would support intervention in Syria or providing arms to anti-regime fighters reveals just how little McCain understands about how agonizingly complex these issues have been — and remain — [...]
via Lobe Log
By Erich C. Ferrari and Samuel Cutler
Contained in the Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2013, and signed into law by President Obama on January 2, are sweeping new sanctions targeting Iran over its disputed nuclear program. The new measures target foreign entities engaging in a wide array of transactions with [...]
via Lobe Log
By Robin Yassin-Kassab
In August 2012 Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi attended a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran. His presence at the conference was something of a diplomatic victory for the Iranian leadership, whose relations with Egypt, the pivotal Arab state, had been at the lowest of ebbs since [...]
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