The price of trusting Iran If President Obama has a strategy in the Middle East, he should reveal it

  Obama pauses as he speaks about the mall shooting in Munich, Germany,

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES - Tuesday, July 26, 2016
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Barack Obama may be the last man in America who actually trusts the holy men in Iran, and a secret codicil, or amendment, he made to his infamous nuclear agreement with them reveals just what happens when a president has no understanding of “the art of the deal,” or the people he makes deals with.
On the first anniversary of the signing of the agreement, Mr. Obama repeated his claim that the deal he made succeeded in “avoiding further conflict and making us safer.” The president refused to make the deal a treaty, which would have included Congress in the making of it. Almost everything the administration said about the deal is turning out to be false.
The agreement was signed by five countries that joined the United States in trying to keep the mullahs from building a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it. By Mr. Obama’s leave, the mullahs can proceed with various aspects of their bomb-making in a much shorter time than was originally claimed. Iran can begin to replace its crucial and necessary centrifuges to produce fissionable material in 2027, 11 years earlier than the date the president told the public he had established.
These new centrifuges could be up to five times more efficient than the 5,000 machines it is now permitted to use. That would permit Tehran to produce nuclear fuel at twice the current rate. The mullahs and their scientists could produce a weapon in six months, not the earlier estimate of a year as needed for the “break out.”
The U.N. Atomic Energy Agency insists that Tehran is living up to the agreement so far, but this is the same U.N. agency that failed earlier to make an accurate assessment. The clandestine activity at the Iranian installations was reported by Iranian exiles in Iraq and only then confirmed by the U.N. Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran is ranked in the bottom 10 in gender equality around the world

Economists warn that women are not likely to reach economic equality with men until the year 2133

  It will take another 118 years to close the global gender gap, research conducted by the World Economic Forum has revealed.

The annual Global Gender Gap report tracks changes in equality between men and women by analyzing female participation in four key categories: the economy, education, health and politics.
Economists have ranked 145 countries, with Iceland holding on to the top position for the seventh consecutive year. Other Nordic countries – Finland, Sweden and Norway – fill out the top four.
Rwanda ranks sixth and is the highest-rated developing country in the world, achieving a greater level of equality than the UK, the US or Germany. Women are almost equal members of the economy and the labor force, and hold the majority of seats in parliament – the highest proportion in the world.
The UK is ranked 18th, coming in below South Africa, Namibia and Nicaragua. It scores very highly in health and education, but a lack of women in parliament means it scores poorly for political empowerment.
North African and Middle Eastern countries feature heavily at the bottom of the rankings. Iran is ranked in the bottom 10 among 145 countries along with Syria and Yemen.
The current inequalities 'risk being exacerbated' in the future due to technological advancements that eradicate jobs traditionally held by women, Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum told the Daily Telegraph.
'In that context, we need to create a world where women’s contributions and ideals are as valued as those of men,' he urged. 'Gender parity in our thinking and actions will be critical in helping to ensure that the future is served by humanity and not threatened by i

EU companies run the risk of providing the tools for oppression in Iran

suppression in Iran by Mullahs

The following is an article written by Julie Lenarz  and Benjami Weinthal in the Independent on Sunday, August 30th, 2015. Julie Lenarz is the Executive Director of the London-based Human Security Centre. Benjamin Weinthal is a Berlin-based fellow for the Foundation for Defence of Democracies

The UK along with the other world powers reached agreement last month with Iran to curb elements of its nuclear programme. With the gold rush mentality infecting Germany, Italy, Austria, France and Switzerland to secure billion dollar deals, their investments are far from risk-free and may create an unseemly backlash.
The Faustian bargain - a feeble nuclear deal in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions - has pushed the vision of a free and democratic Iran into a dim distance. Put simply, a sizable chunk of the estimated $150 billion in sanctions relief will be used to repress Iran’s civilian population. One of the greatest beneficiaries is the hard-line Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with its extensive tentacles in the economic realm wielding control over strategic industries and black market enterprises.
Take the case of Western technology used to execute Iranians. Just last month, the CEO of the Austrian giant crane manufacturer Palfinger described Iran as a “promising market” with great needs, although it has been alleged that at least one Palfinger crane was used in an execution after being resold to Iran.
Iran is currently murdering prisoners at the rate of more than three people per day. 694 executions have been carried out as of mid-July, approaching the total number of executions in all of 2014. Amnesty International has warned that state-sanctioned deaths could top 1,000 by the end of the year.
There is no shortage of evidence of how in the past Western-supplied goods became tools of repression. This is best illustrated by the salient example of the former Finnish-German venture Nokia Siemens Networks, which supplied censorship and surveillance technology to Iran allowing the IRGC to monitor and disrupt mobile and internet usage of pro-democracy activists during uprising against the officially declared victory of Ahmadinejad in 2009.
Iran’s trade with the EU last year totalled €7.6 billion and officials from different member states have already flocked to Tehran to get a piece of the boom-time pie which could grow by 400 per cent by mid-2018. The EU’s biggest trading giants have wasted no time in gaining a head start in the race to win billions of euros’ worth of business.more