Within days of each other, revealing portraits of the United States and China have been unveiled. In Washington, the Biden administration released its national security strategy. It says much about American psychology at a critical juncture. And Beijing witnessed the opening of the 20th Party Congress on 16 October that will see Xi Jinping confirmed as president for a record third term.
While whispers of the current emerging market debt crisis, the result of the rapidly strengthening dollar, could be heard throughout the summer, virtually no one predicted the blow the dollar’s rise would deal to some other developed economies. But with the dollar reaching levels not seen in a generation, a battering is precisely what several are being unexpectedly dealt.
Iran’s continuous nationwide uprising continued for the 35th day Thursday as anti-regime protests escalated in the form of night rallies in several cities.
Protests in Iran have to this day expanded to 193 cities. Over 400 people have been killed and more than 20,000 are arrested by the regime’s forces, according to sources of Iranian opposition People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). The names of 241 killed protesters have been published by the PMOI/MEK.
Iran’s military is conducting large-scale military drills on its border with Azerbaijan, including practicing crossings of the Aras River, which defines a large part of the border between the two states.
The exercises, called “Mighty Iran,” began on October 17. The exact location has not been specified, but Iranian media placed them in between Iran’s provinces of Ardabil and East Azerbaijan, the part of Iran across the Aras from Azerbaijan’s Fuzuli region.
Following a month of nationwide protests, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s notorious morality police, there is growing belief that the militant clerical regime, in place since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, is living on borrowed time.
The young people who took to the streets in 1979 as part of the Iranian revolution are now in their sixties. They haven’t quite aged out of politics, but they’re getting close. It’s a dangerous time for any revolution when the generation that transformed society prepares to exit the stage. The rising generation often has the same urge to transform that the now Old Guard once had, but of course toward a different end.
Since the beginning of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine on February 24, the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) have not been able to demonstrate success, despite the huge modernization and rearmament efforts of the previous 12 years. The main causes here are not the mistakes of a single individual, but rather the structural problems and challenges that the VKS has faced for years.
The media have been hyping inflation pretty much non-stop for the last year and a half. They tell us that this the only thing people care about. They don’t care about whether they have a job, how much the job pays, whether they have health care, or any other economic issue. People care about inflation: full stop.
Some of the attacks by Iranian Revolutionary Guards on Iranian opposition party offices in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in late September struck towns and villages where the parties were not carrying out any military activity, according to local residents, Human Rights Watch said today. According to media reports, the attacks killed at least 16 people, injured dozens more, and displaced hundreds of families.
Who benefits from the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines which connect Germany to natural gas in Russia? The U.S. has the means, motive, and opportunity and was publicly opposed to the project for many years. Yet the crime victims are strangely silent about identifying the probable perpetrator.“