The United Nation’s special rapporteur on human rights in Iran has told the U.N. General Assembly that there have been no fundamental improvements in Iran’s human rights situation despite token but welcome gestures undertaken since the election of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Ahmed Shaheed, the UN special rapporteur on human...

• Kindle

Saudi Arabia intends to scale back the degree to which it cooperates with the United States in arming and training Syrian rebels, a decision that comes amid what the Wall Street Journal describes as “a growing dispute between the U.S. and one of its closest Arab allies over Syria, Iran and Egypt...

• Kindle

There has been some confusion over the degree to which the Iranian regime has moderated its rhetoric in the aftermath of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s election. On October 1st there was something of a media dust-up regarding the possibility that some top Iranian officials had ceased publicly denigrating Israel as...

• Kindle

The Washington Post on Thursday brushed off repeated Iranian assertions that the Islamic republic has an absolute “right” to enrich uranium, matter-of-factly noting that “no ‘right’ to enrich uranium exists in the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” that enrichment is not “needed for a nuclear program,” that “many countries using nuclear power do...

• Kindle

At least 59 people were killed in what Reuters describes as a “spate of attacks” on mainly Shiite communities across Iraq on Thursday, the latest in a spike in violence driven both directly and indirectly by fighting in neighboring Syria. The conflict, which has gone on for more than two...

• Kindle

Palestinian diplomats last year launched a diplomatic campaign to gain non-member statehood status via the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), brushing aside calls from President Barack Obama to put aside the campaign and triggering automatic U.S. sanctions that endangered the financial viability of the organization. U.S. lawmakers specifically expressed concerns...

• Kindle

U.S. lawmakers have already made clear what they consider to be the broad outlines of any meaningful deal surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, which is widely believed to include a clandestine weaponization component. Reflecting an emerging bipartisan consensus, Rep. Eliot Engel, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, recently...

• Kindle

Celebrated claims made by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani asserting that he has “full authority” to negotiate deals on behalf of Tehran may come under renewed scrutiny, after an even more celebrated phone call between Rouhani and President Barack Obama was criticized by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as “not appropriate.” Khamenei went on...

• Kindle

Iranian state media is crowing that it has been elected by a vote of the United Nations General Assembly to be the rapporteur of the U.N.’s Disarmament and International Security Committee. The election, according to Iran’s state-linked Fars news agency, was a defeat for the “Zionist regime representative” who had...

• Kindle

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) seemed set Friday night to adopt a resolution aimed at dismantling Syria’s vast arsenal of chemical weapons. For weeks the UNSC’s Western nations – the United States, Britain, and France – had been demanding that the measure include some means of automatic enforcement if...

• Kindle