In case you were wondering, this is what an economy dying looks like. More specifically, it’s what a currency dying looks like. It turns out the latter implies the former, as Iran is quickly finding out. The chart below compares the official and black market exchange rates between the Iranian rial and the U.S. dollar. […]
Since his election for the country’s top post last June, Egyptian President Mohammad Mursi has been sending mixed messages as to whether he seeks to normalise relations with Iran after more than three decades of bitter animosity. In the wake of the Egyptian revolution, pro-Iran analysts expected that the new Islamist government in Cairo would […]
The first outbreak of public anger over Iran’s collapsing currency and other economic maladies jolted the heart of the capital on Wednesday, with the riot police violently clamping down on black-market money changers, hundreds of citizens marching to demand relief and merchants in the sprawling bazaar closing their shops in protest. Read Here _ The New […]
If you want to know what Russia, China or Iran will do next, don’t read their newspapers or ask what our spies have dug up—consult a map. Geography can reveal as much about a government’s aims as its secret councils. More than ideology or domestic politics, what fundamentally defines a state is its place on […]
While no one in the Barack Obama administration knows whether Israel will strike Iran’s nuclear program, America’s war planners are preparing for a wide array of potential Israeli military options — while also trying to limit the chances of the United States being drawn into a potentially bloody conflict in the Persian Gulf. Read Here […]
They say a good news story is like an onion. The more one peels it, the newer and fresher are the layers that surface. If depth and longevity are the gold standards for a news story, then the assassinations of four Iranian opposition members at the Mykonos Restaurant in Berlin in September 1992 surpasses that […]
The most important facts about Iran go unstated because they are so obvious. Any glance at a map would tell us what they are. And these facts explain how regime change or evolution in Tehran — when, not if, it comes — will dramatically alter geopolitics from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent and beyond. […]
FEWER dictators means better timekeeping at the UN General Assembly. In past years delegates braced themselves for the rambling rants of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi (record: 90 minutes in 2009). This year’s meeting of the UN’s big representative body featured only a handful of long-winded speakers. Iran‘s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad managed just under 40 minutes, bemusing some delegates […]
Islamists of various political shades are now in power in a growing number of Arab states. They are a new reality that everyone will have to deal with, and therefore seek to understand. The challenge is that most of these parties have been in opposition for decades under long-established military presidencies, and during these years […]
President Obama challenged the Arab world to use its newfound embrace of democracy to ensure protection for freedom of religion and speech and even life, using the last address of his first term to the General Assembly on Tuesday to call for a renewed focus on the “painstaking work of reform.” Read Here – New York […]
looking beyond borders 