Critics of the Iranian nuclear deal charged that the Obama administration was not sufficiently concerned with how Iran would spend the money from its post-sanctions windfall. Evidently, departing President Obama and his team thought domestic political pressures would oblige the Iranian government to invest more heavily in constructive economic pursuits.
Reuters reports that, on the contrary, Iran is looking forward to more military spending, including more funding for ballistic missile tests that were supposed to be banned by the nuclear deal.
Iranian media announced that lawmakers voted for a five-year development plan that “requires government to increase Iran’s defense capabilities as a regional power and preserve the country’s national security and interests by allocating at least five percent of annual budget” to military spending.
The plan includes funding for “long-range missiles, armed drones, and cyber-war capabilities.”
Also still a spending priority for Tehran: arms for terrorists. Despite the nuclear deal, an arms embargo from the United Nations is still nominally in effect, but outgoing Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “expressed concern that Iran may have violated the embargo by supplying weapons and missiles to Hezbollah,” according to Reuters.
Ban’s concerns are based, in part, by senior Hezbollah officials loudly boasting in public that all of their expenses, including weapons, are paid by Iran. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah also spent the weekend praising recently-deceased Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani as a “great supporter and backer” of his movement.
Hezbollah has benefited greatly from Iran’s patronage. Newsweek pronounced Hezbollah the “real winner of the Battle of Aleppo” because fighting for Iran in Syria has enormously increased its prestige.
“Not only did Hezbollah gain valuable battlefield experience; it also preserved its pipeline of weaponry coming from Iran through Syria, which is likely the main reason the group entered the war,” Newsweek noted.
Jewish community centers in a widespread number of American states were evacuated due to bomb threats on Monday morning, while across the ocean, the same phenomenon was taking place in London, England as well.
Jewish schools across the United Kingdom were placed on alert after bomb threats were called into metro London Jewish schools in Roehampton, Ilford and Brent on Monday morning. The schools were “warned” that explosive devices had been planted on the premises. Thorough searches were conducted at all three sites and other schools were placed on precautionary lock-downs until the “all clear” was received.
Bomb threats were also called in to a few non-Jewish schools as well, according to the British Jewish Chronicle news site.
Meanwhile, in the United States, bomb threats were called into Jewish Community Centers (JCC)s in Delaware, Tenafly, New Jersey; Miami Beach and Jacksonville, Florida; in Rockville, Maryland; in West Nashville, Tennessee, and Columbia, South Carolina.
This is a developing story.
US, EU media and political establishments want to decide what global audiences can or cannot read by lavishing funds on homegrown media while trying to undercut alternative news sources, RT news channel's Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said.
In an email to the Guardian, excerpts from which were published on Monday by the UK newspaper, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan lashed out at US intelligence agencies that claimed the channel had meddled in the US election by criticizing Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
"The agencies’ only charge against RT is that we were critical of Clinton in reporting actual facts about her. This is our supposed crime! What a resounding endorsement of journalism and freedom of speech," Simonyan wrote.
Dear Self-Proclaimed "Progressives"... You're As Evil As The Neocon-Neoliberal Empire You've Enabled
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