Total:31
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2025-10-26 20:19
By Garsha Vazirian
The family business: Drones, crypto, and Trump’s corruption machine
TEHRAN – The U.S. War Department’s recent purchase of 3,500 drone motors and related components from Unusual Machines — a company in which Donald Trump Jr. holds roughly a $4 million stake and served as an adviser — has intensified scrutiny over what critics call an administration increasingly comfortable turning policy into personal profit.
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2025-10-24 19:30
By Garsha Vazirian
Maritime strikes, mainland threats: U.S. military shadows Venezuela amid regime change whispers
TEHRAN – A concentrated U.S. military presence in the Caribbean — warships, patrol planes, MQ-9 drones, an F-35 squadron, and bomber flights — has sharply narrowed the political and diplomatic space around Venezuela.
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2025-10-18 19:58
By Garsha Vazirian
Israel’s forced retreat marketed as ‘victory’
When ‘winning’ becomes losing ground — legally, diplomatically, and morally
TEHRAN – “Israel has won all they can by force of arms. You’ve won. I mean, you’ve won.”
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2025/10/15
By Garsha Vazirian
'Let him die'
Palestinian survivors recount systematic torture inside Israel’s prisons
TEHRAN – They emerged from the buses beneath a pale, indifferent sky, their bodies reduced to shadows of the men they once were. Roughly 2,000 Palestinians — released in the first phase of the October captive exchange — returned as specters.
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2025-10-13 21:45
By Garsha Vazirian
A Victim of the Banality of Evil
Saleh al-Jaafarawi: Who he was, and why Israel silenced his voice in Gaza
TEHRAN – Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” describes the terrible ordinariness of a system that makes atrocity routine. In Gaza this October, the phrase revealed itself in flesh and blood.
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2025-10-12 20:11
By Garsha Vazirian
Echoes of the Durand Line: Afghanistan and Pakistan at a crossroads
Old borders, new battles, and escalating mistrust
TEHRAN – On the night of October 9, explosions in Kabul — widely reported as strikes aimed at Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) figures — triggered a rapid chain of violence that by 11–12 October had become the sharpest Afghanistan–Pakistan confrontation in years.
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2025/10/11
By Garsha Vazirian
Gaza truce’s fault lines: Disarmament, sovereignty, and power
TEHRAN – As tens of thousands of Palestinians returned to northern Gaza on Friday, the fragile relief of the ceasefire was burdened by political ultimatums—a reminder that even a pause in violence cannot erase the deeper struggle over power and sovereignty.
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2025-10-10 21:08
By Garsha Vazirian
Bloodied hands, misplaced laurels: Why neither Trump nor Machado deserves praise
Sponsoring war, sanctions, and regime change is not a résumé for peace
TEHRAN – In a move that pleased Washington’s propaganda machinery, the Norwegian Nobel Committee chose Venezuelan opponent María Corina Machado over a president who spent months begging for a medal.
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2025/10/08
By Garsha Vazirian
You can’t unring the bell: The Israeli offensive that lost its grip
When genocide went viral and propaganda struggled to hold sway
TEHRAN — Picture a hush in a room. A nervous voice leans into a mic and admits what everyone has felt: “We have a major, major, major generational problem.” That leaked fragment was less an accusation than a diagnosis: the old pipelines of influence were cracking as short, brutal images poured into young people’s feeds.
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2025-10-07 20:28
By Garsha Vazirian
‘Unprecedented Arab abandonment:’ What Hamas means, and why Gaza calls it betrayal
TEHRAN – On the second anniversary of October 7’s Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, Hamas issued a statement that landed like a verdict, denouncing what it called “shameful international silence and complicity, and unprecedented Arab abandonment.”
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2025-10-06 20:36
By Garsha Vazirian
Rubble’s grim ledger: Two years of devastation and reckoning in Gaza
THERAN – On October 7, 2023, Hamas and allied Palestinian groups launched an unprecedented multi-directional operation — known as the Al-Aqsa Storm — breaching the Gaza–Israel boundary, killing roughly 1,200 people in Israel, and carrying about 251 captives into Gaza.
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2025-10-04 22:57
By Garsha Vazirian
Israel’s Sumud seizure reignites global campaign against Gaza blockade
TEHRAN – International fury erupted this week after Israeli naval commandos intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla — a 42-vessel convoy carrying volunteers and small consignments of food and medicine — detaining roughly 400–450 activists in a sweep that organizers and rights groups call unlawful.
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2025-10-03 19:39
By Garsha Vazirian
Steadfast in defiance, activists detained after Israel intercepts Gaza flotilla
TEHRAN – Israeli naval forces intercepted and boarded the Polish-flagged Marinette on Friday, the last vessel of the Global Sumud flotilla, taking control roughly 42.5 nautical miles off Gaza and towing the boat to Ashdod while detaining its six crew.
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2025-09-29 19:35
By Garsha Vazirian
From Tel Aviv to Eilat: How Yemen pierces Israeli illusions of security
TEHRAN – Yemen’s Ansarullah declared on Monday that its forces had carried out a new operation against Israel, unveiling the use of a Palestine-2 hypersonic ballistic missile in a strike on “sensitive targets” in Tel Aviv.
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2025/09/27
By Garsha Vazirian
A foreign blueprint for Lebanon’s disarmament
How Washington and Tel Aviv are pressing Beirut to surrender a guarantor of deterrence — and why that project risks national collapse
TEHRAN – On the eve of a year since the assassination of the Lebanese resistance leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah — a shock that reoriented Lebanon’s politics and public mood — a new campaign to “restore a state monopoly on weapons” has moved from the drawing board into government corridors.
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2025-09-27 17:51
By Garsha Vazirian
Hezbollah's invisible commander: The man who mastered the machinery of Resistance
While others focused on military operations, Safieddine built the infrastructure that sustained the struggle
TEHRAN – In the intricate tapestry of Lebanese resistance, few figures have wielded influence as quietly yet decisively as Sayyed Hashem Safieddine.
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2025-09-22 21:15
By Garsha Vazirian
Wave of Palestine recognition: A symbolic rupture wrapped in political interest
TEHRAN – Paris formally recognized the State of Palestine on Monday, a move unveiled in the context of the Franco-Saudi summit on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, and immediately folded into a wave of declarations from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Portugal.
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2025-09-21 21:03
By Garsha Vazirian
As Gaza bleeds, protests reveal Israel's fractured leadership and moral decay
TEHRAN – Once again, Israelis have taken to the streets in protest, driven by the military’s strategic failures in Gaza and the collapse of government policies.
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2025-09-19 19:22
By Garsha Vazirian
Gaza offensive reaches ‘cataclysmic’ scale as US shields Israel at UN
TEHRAN – Israeli forces have intensified their offensive on Gaza City, unleashing a combination of airstrikes, drone attacks, and ground assaults that have left neighborhoods in ruins.
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2025-09-14 20:25
By Garsha Vazirian
Between occupation and brutality: Israeli advances and Syria’s brutal new order
TEHRAN — Israel’s recent ground operation into southern Syria — reported under the codename “Green-White” and said to have advanced roughly 38 kilometers into Syrian territory, reaching within about 10 km of Damascus — represents the deepest Israeli penetration since the wars of the 1970s and a significant escalation in a campaign that has become systematic since the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
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2025-09-12 20:35
By Garsha Vazirian
The widening gyre: Charlie Kirk's assassination and America's spiral into political violence
TEHRAN – In the shattered aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination, America stares into a mirror cracked by its own hand. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” William Butler Yeats intoned in “The Second Coming,” evoking a world where order dissolves into chaos.
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2025-09-08 20:15
By Garsha Vazirian
Al-Quds shooting leaves six dead, exposes Israel’s security vulnerabilities
TEHRAN – At least six Israeli settlers were killed and 17 others injured on Monday after two Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a bus at the Ramot settlement junction, north of occupied Jerusalem (al-Quds).
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2025-09-06 20:21
By Garsha Vazirian
How Trump’s ‘drug war’ masks his drive for war against Venezuela
TEHRAN – In the choppy seas of international intrigue, truth can sink faster than a targeted vessel. When the U.S. military destroyed a 12-meter “flipper” speedboat off Venezuela, killing all 11 aboard, President Trump hailed it as a strike against “a Venezuelan criminal organization tied to Maduro.” Scratch the surface, though, and it looks less like justice than premeditated aggression.
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2025-09-02 20:10
By Garsha Vazirian
Over 250 media outlets unite as Israel makes Gaza’s journalists its frontline targets
TEHRAN – On September 1, more than 250 news outlets in over 70 countries staged a coordinated blackout—blank front pages, darkened homepages, and interrupted broadcasts—in an unprecedented act of solidarity.
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2025-08-29 20:03
By Garsha Vazirian
Israel's chilling assault on Gaza City
TEHRAN – The Israeli military on Friday declared Gaza City a “dangerous combat zone,” ending the so-called “tactical pauses” that had allowed limited food deliveries into the besieged north. The move has heightened fears of another mass displacement as Israel prepares what appears to be a major ground assault.
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2025-08-25 19:55
By Garsha Vazirian
Six things to know about Dutch cabinet walkout over Israeli crimes in Gaza
TEHRAN - In a dramatic political development exposing deep divisions within Europe over Israel's military actions in Gaza, the Netherlands' caretaker government has been thrown into crisis following the resignation of multiple ministers in protest at its failure to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel.
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2025-08-08 20:02
By Garsha Vazirian
Blood-inked pens
The stories of four Iranian journalists killed by Israel
TEHRAN – August 8 marks Journalist’s Day in Iran, a solemn tribute to those who spilled blood for truth. Rooted in the 1998 martyrdom of Mahmoud Saremi—an Iranian reporter killed by alongside eight Iranian diplomats in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan—this day now mourns a new generation of media martyrs.
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2025-06-07 20:25
By Garsha Vazirian
Tucker Carlson warns: Neoconservative push for Iran war risks ‘world war, US defeat’
TEHRAN – Prominent conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has issued a stark warning against escalating tensions with Iran, describing a potential conflict as a catastrophic betrayal of President Donald Trump's core supporters and a reckless gamble with global stability.
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2025/05/03
By Garsha Vazirian
Iran’s Araghchi defends country’s right to ‘possess full nuclear fuel cycle’
TEHRAN – Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi took to social media on Friday to reaffirm Tehran’s right to pursue a civilian nuclear program under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), directly countering recent U.S. demands for Iran to halt uranium enrichment.
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2025/04/26
By Garsha Vazirian
The Myth of Iran’s ‘collapse’: How Western media misreads Tehran’s strategic resolve in Oman talks
TEHRAN – In the last days of April, as Oman prepared to host the third round of indirect nuclear talks between Iran and the United States, the Washington Post published an article titled “Iranian Elite Grows Supportive of Nuclear Talks as Economic Fears Spike,” which disingenuously insists that Tehran entered the nuclear talks “because it faces the prospect of economic collapse.”