By Martin Love

“The Die is Cast” for the U.S. …

This past week for an evening in North Carolina I had the pleasure of speaking briefly with Medea Benjamin and hearing her opine about Ukraine to an audience at a local church. A petite, elegant, straight talking Jewish lady, now 70, who for decades has been at the forefront of trying to explain to far more “average” and largely perplexed American multitudes and the world at large just what the U.S. government has been doing — criminally — across the globe but especially in the Middle East with its war machine over and over again, especially in the last 30 or so years but beginning primarily elsewhere Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s.

Intensifying bans will fail to create leverage on Iran amid Vienna talks, Tehran tells U.S.

TEHRAN – Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh on Tuesday lambasted the U.S. for its fresh sanctions against a number of the Iranian officials and entities over allegations of human rights violations, suggesting that intensifying anti-Iran measures will fail to create leverage over Tehran amid talks in Vienna to lift sanctions against the Islamic Republic.