Obama Admin Pressed for Lifting Sanctions on Iranian Broadcaster Involved in Human Rights Abuses

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Photo Credit: AlgemeinerWatchdog group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) on Tuesday called on the Obama Administration to reconsider its decision to lift sanctions on Iran’s state broadcaster, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), which had been punished for its involvement in the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses. Among other offenses IRIB has jammed foreign broadcasts, televised forced confessions and broadcast show trials of political prisoners.

UANI said that while the U.S. and world powers agreed in November to lift sanctions tied to Iran’s economy in exchange for the regime allowing increased access to its nuclear facilities, they also agreed to maintain sanctions on areas tied to human rights abuses, and should stay that course.

“We urge the Obama administration to reconsider its decision to waive sanctions on IRIB,” said Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, UANI’s CEO. “The administration repeatedly pledged that the sanctions relief it granted Iran would not include those sanctions related to human rights. It must now uphold those promises, and maintain sanctions on IRIB given IRIB’s continued role in facilitating human rights abuses in Iran.”

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Iran Test-Fires Long-Range Missile

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Denis BalibouseIran’s military has successfully test-fired two new domestically made missiles, the defense minister said on Monday according to state television, ahead of talks with world powers to try to reach an agreement on curbing Tehran’s nuclear program.

Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said one of them was a long-range ballistic missile with radar-evading capabilities.

“The new generation of long-range ground-to-ground ballistic missile with a fragmentation warhead and the laser-guided air-to-surface and surface-to-surface missile dubbed Bina (Insightful) have been successfully test-fired,” state television quoted him as saying.

“The Bina missile is capable of striking important targets such as bridges, tanks and enemy command centers with great precision.”

Iran already has long-range surface-to-surface Shahab missiles with a range of about 2,000 km (1,250 miles) that are capable of reaching Israel and U.S. military bases in the Middle East. However, analysts have challenged some of Iran’s military assertions, saying it often exaggerates its capabilities.

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Silent Death from Above: Sudan Steps Up Use of Parachute Bombs on People

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Photo Credit: NUBAREPORTS.ORGThe people of war-torn Sudan learned long ago to take cover when planes roared overhead, but the latest tactic being used on them — parachute bombs — is raining silent death down on innocent villagers, say alarmed activists.

The country’s extremist Islamic regime in Khartoum has stepped up the practice in the Nuba Mountains, dropping deadly bombs by parachute from high altitudes as president and accused international war criminal Omar al-Bashir seeks to rout rebel forces opposed to his brand of radical Islam.

In recent years, the Nuba Mountains, where Christians and Muslims live side by side, have become a battleground for the forces of al-Bashir’s forces and the Sudanese People Liberation Army.

Caught in the crossfire are innocent civilians, especially children, who live in the mountainous region just north of the border of Sudan and South Sudan, the nation carved out of Sudan in 2011.

“Children living in the Nuba Mountains grew up amid almost daily aerial bombardment,” Akshaya Kumar, a Sudan and South Sudan policy analyst with the Center for American Progress, told FoxNews.com. “They have learned how to quickly duck into makeshift bomb shelters when they hear a bomb dropping.

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Cold War Echoes: Sochi Not Thawing US-Russian Relations

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Photo Credit: APThe Olympic Games, created to bring countries together around sports, appear to be having the opposite effect on U.S.-Russia relations.

Rising animosity between the former Cold War powers was on full display Friday when Russia chose a former figure skater who tweeted out a racially charged picture of President Obama for the symbolic lighting of the Olympic cauldron…

To be sure, there are hard feelings in Russia toward the U.S. and the Obama administration, too.

Russian President Vladimir Putin hoped hosting the first Games since the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which the U.S. boycotted, would showcase a “new Russia” emerging from the ashes of the Soviet Union as he enters his 15th year in power.

Instead the U.S. and its western allies have consistently painted the picture of a corrupt autocracy.

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Gunman Kills Nun, Parishioner, Wounds 6 in Russian Cathedral

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/ Dmitriy SindyakovRussian investigators say a gunman opened fire in a cathedral on Sakhalin Island off the Pacific coast, killing a nun and a parishioner and wounding six others.

The federal Investigative Committee said law enforcement officers detained the man, who works as a security guard.

A man employed as a private security guard opened fire Sunday in a cathedral on Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the Pacific, killing a nun and a parishioner and wounding six others, investigators said.

Law enforcement officers detained the 24-year-old man at the scene and were trying to determine why he had attacked the Russian Orthodox cathedral in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the federal Investigative Committee said in a statement. The man worked for a private security firm in the city and was armed with a rifle. His name was not released.

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Iran Says Warships Headed Close to US Borders for First Time

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Photo Credit: Free Beacon By Associated Press.

Iranian warships dispatched to the Atlantic Ocean will travel close to U.S. maritime borders for the first time, a senior Iranian naval commander said Saturday.

The commander of Iran’s Northern Navy Fleet, Admiral Afshin Rezayee Haddad, said the vessels have already entered the Atlantic Ocean via waters near South Africa, the official IRNA news agency reported.

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Tehran sending ‘message’ as warships approach US

By JPOST.COM STAFF, REUTERS.

Iranian naval fleets were on their way across the Atlantic Ocean and headed toward the US, the Fars news agency reported on Saturday.

“Iran’s military fleet is approaching the United States’ maritime borders, and this move has a message,” Adm. Afshin Rezayee Haddad of Iran’s Northern Navy Fleet was quoted as saying.

According to Fars, Iran had first warned the US of its plans to deploy its naval forces along US marine borders “in the next few years” in September 2012.

Then, Iran’s Navy Commander R.-Adm. Habibollah Sayyari said the move would counter US presence in its waters in the Persian Gulf.

Fars first reported on an Iranian Navy fleet of warships making its way across the Atlantic Ocean in January 2014. At the time, they reported that the ships would sail for at least three months.

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China Decries U.S. Comments on South China Sea as ‘Not Constructive’

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/DAVID GRAYChina has accused the United States of undermining peace and development in the Asia-Pacific after a senior U.S. official said concern was mounting over China’s claims in the South China Sea.

“These actions are not constructive”, Hong Lei, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a statement issued late on Saturday.

“We urge the U.S. to hold a rational and fair attitude, so as to have a constructive role in the peace and development of the region, and not the opposite,” Lei said.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Danny Russel told a congressional testimony on Wednesday the United States had “growing concerns” that China’s maritime claims were an effort to gain creeping control of oceans in the region.

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At Pakistan’s ‘Taliban U,’ Jihadists Major in Anti-Americanism

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Photo Credit: Fox News A 90-minute drive northwest of Islamabad is an Islamic seminary that is considered the ivory tower of terrorism, a jihadist factory that has produced prominent Taliban fighters and its leadership for decades.

Unofficially dubbed “University of Jihad,” Dar ul Uloom Haqqania [House of Knowledge and Truthfulness] counts Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the dreaded Haqqani Network, among its alumni. Names of most of more than 8,000 former students who have passed through the seminary are encased in glass-covered wooden frames that hang on the walls inside the main building.

“The Haqqanis got their surname from Haqqania, this madrassa” “Ammanullah,” a proud member of the Class of 2007, told FoxNews.com during a recent tour, a rare look inside the seminary along the Grand Trunk Road in Akora Khattak.

The campus is the size of four football fields, encompassing several buildings guarded by one police gunman. About 3,500 students currently live and study at the compound, which has churned out generations of freedom fighters stretching back to the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Closely aligned with the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is at violent odds with the current governments of both nations.

Founded by Maulana Abdul Haq just after Pakistan gained independence in 1947, the seminary propagates Deobandi, a revivalist and anti-imperialist movement of Sunni Islam formed in reaction to the Britain’s colonization of India.

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UN: ‘Unspeakable Suffering’ for Syria’s Children

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Manu BraboChildren in Syria have been tortured, sexually abused and subjected to “indiscriminate” attacks by President Bashar Assad’s forces, and recruited for combat and terror operations by the rebels fighting to topple him during the country’s nearly 3-year-old conflict, a new United Nations report said.

The report to the U.N. Security Council by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon highlights the plight of children in the conflict from the beginning of the uprising against Assad in March 2011 until Nov. 15, 2013. It was given to the council this week and posted on the U.N. website Tuesday.

Ban said Syrian children have been subjected to “unspeakable and unacceptable” suffering during that time. “Violations must come to an end now,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Syrian government missed another deadline for destroying its chemical weapons Wednesday, but pledged to complete the process by June 30 as promised.

Under a timetable set up by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Syria was to have given up its entire stockpile of chemical weapons by Wednesday. Last week, a U.S. diplomat said Syria had only removed 4 percent of its most deadly chemicals so far. All should have been removed by Dec. 31 under the framework.

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Israeli Settlers Mock Kerry’s Peacemaking with Spoof Video

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Photo Credit: YouTubeIsrael’s Yesha [settlers] Council has posted online a deliberately disrespectful spoof depicting America’s top diplomat – played by an actor resembling John Kerry – riding a camel and making a series of preposterous statements that belittle his understanding of the region’s complexities.

At one point, the Mr Kerry character is seen down-playing the importance of the Western Wall, one of the holiest sites in Judaism, in Jerusalem’s old city.

“Dividing Jerusalem is not an easy thing,” the actor says. “We must realise it is holy to all religions – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Klingons and Hobbits. But what I’m saying is: ‘why fight over an old wall?’

I’ll build you a brand new wall, close to the beach.”

A woman with an American accent is then seen telling him: “I think you should go home, where you belong, and stay there.”

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