Category: World News

by Frank Gormlie

The next day in Iran is very critical. The country is at the breaking point. This morning in his prayer-speech, the chief cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, came out swinging at the opposition movement that has been in the streets for the last week in support of their reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

TEHRAN, Iran – Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi issued a direct challenge Wednesday to the country’s supreme leader and cleric-led system, calling for a mass rally to protest disputed election results and violence against his followers.

A crackdown on dissent continued, with more arrests of opposition figures reported, and the country’s most powerful military force _ the Revolutionary Guard _ saying that Iranian Web sites and bloggers must remove any materials that “create tension” or face legal action

I cannot stop watching history unfolding rapidly in Iran these last couple of days. I have skimmed and searched through several reports and websites and offer below a compilation:

Today, Tuesday, June 16th, supporters of the reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, staged another massive rally in Tehran, the capital.

Could this be the beginning of the Second Iranian Revolution? Today, Monday, June 15th – 100,000, 200,000 or perhaps 1 million people mobilized in the streets of Tehran, the capital, in a show of support for the reformist candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who allegedly lost the recent election for president.

Some call it the “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” others say the “Tiananmen Square Crackdown,” and in China it is known merely as an “incident,” the “June 4th Incident,” or as the Chinese say, “liù-sì shìjiàn”.

No matter how you refer to the 1989 democracy protests in Beijing and the brutal response by China’s military, on Thursday, June 4th, the world marks the event’s 20th anniversary.

by Ken Secor

May 1st is observed as International Labor Day by most of the countries of the world. The reason most people believe that May Day is a communist holiday is because corporate America doesn’t want you to even wonder why that day was chosen.

By Ali Soufan

FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.

In case you missed it, a thirty-year ban on public viewing of the hilarious comedy “Life of Brian” made by the English comedy team, Monty Python, was finally lifted in a Welsh town. The town is Aberystwyth – which I have no idea of how to pronounce. But the movie had been considered “blasphemous” by some Christians who perceived it as a mockery of Jesus Christ. Most of the rest of the planet considered it one of the funniest films ever produced.

Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. government and they’ll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota (March 10), legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

It is now a commonplace — as a lead article in the New York Times’s Week in Review pointed out recently — that Afghanistan is “the graveyard of empires.” Given Barack Obama’s call for a greater focus on the Afghan War (“we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq…”), and given indications that a “surge” of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan’s dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation, and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration’s policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into “Obama’s War.”