INTERNATIONAL

It’s a relief to know that President Obama’s “preferred” solution to dealing with disagreements with Iran is diplomacy, as he said yesterday in an interview on NBC TV, but at the same time, it’s profoundly disturbing that he is simultaneously saying that, as an AP report on the interview put it: he would “not take options off the table to stop Iran …

Engineering Consent For An Attack On Iran – Presstitute Alert Israeli facilities in North America — and around the world — are on high alert, according to an internal security document obtained by ABC News that predicted the threat from Iran against Jewish targets will increase. "We predict that the threat on our sites around the world will increase … …

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 2, 2012 (IPS) – The political heavy hitters were all there at a key Security Council meeting early this week to decide on the future of beleaguered Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The lineup included U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber bin Muhammad Al Thani, the Secretary-General of …

Washington's enemy is not "terrorism" but the principle of free speech and voices of conscience within its militarist state.    This month's Supreme Court hearing in the Julian Assange case has profound meaning for the preservation of basic freedoms in western democracies. This is Assange's final appeal against his extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct that were …

  From its birth more than 60 years ago, Israel has always presented itself as “an oasis of democracy in a sea of despotism,” an outpost of pluralism surrounded by tyranny. While that equality never fully applied to the country’s Arab citizens, Israel was, for the most part an open society. But today political rights are under siege by right-wing …

Tensions in the Gulf could reach a breaking point as a senior Iranian official said Iran would “definitely” close the Strait of Hormuz if an EU oil embargo disrupted the export of crude oil. Mohammad Kossari, deputy head of parliament's foreign affairs and national security committee, issued the warning in respone to a decision by the European Union on Monday …