On Saturday night the UK ambassador to Iran, Robert Macaire, was arrested during demonstrations in front of Amir Kabir University in Tehran for “inciting” protesters. The Iranian Tasnim news agency said he was released after a few hours.

Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary, said: “The arrest of our ambassador in Tehran without grounds or explanation is a flagrant violation of international law.”

“It’s the Chernobyl of the Islamic Republic,” Saeed Leylaz, an economist and onetime adviser to Iran’s only reformist president, Ali Mohammad Khatami, said of Saturday’s revelations. He was referring to the 1986 nuclear disaster in the then Soviet republic of Ukraine, which cratered faith in the Communist Party and is widely seen to have contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

On Saturday, anti-government sentiments re-emerged on the streets of Tehran. Crowds that assembled outside Sharif University and Amir Kabir University of Technology to mourn fellow students who lost their lives in the crash quickly turned into protests, with calls for the Supreme Leader to resign and for an Iran without the Revolutionary Guard.

“Death to the dictator,” the crowds chanted, according to video recorded at the scene.

DONALD TRUMP’S IMPEACHMENT trial is already unfolding as a Mitch McConnell-coordinated farce. This week on Intercepted: The charges against Trump are serious, but they raise the question of why Congress has never impeached a president for war crimes. None of the three Senate trials of a president was for imperial crimes committed in plain sight, despite a long history of presidents invading countries, killing civilians, and torturing prisoners. Constitutional and international law scholar Marjorie Cohn discusses the trial of Trump, the refusal of lawmakers to prosecute war crimes, and presents the case that Trump should be impeached for assassinating Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad. This month marks 29 straight years that the U.S. has been bombing Iraq. Joe Biden, who proactively aided and abetted the Bush administration’s drive for war, has been openly lying about his record, but Bernie Sanders also has some serious questions he needs to answer about his own support for regime change, missile strikes and deadly economic sanctions. Jeremy Scahill and Sam Husseini, of the Institute for Public Accuracy, present a thorough history of both candidates’ records on Iraq over the past three decades.

https://wtop.com/asia/2020/02/us-set-to-sign-peace-deal-with-afghanistans-taliban/


Hopefully some of the [Tweet] posters can explain why this is bad

https://wtop.com/asia/2020/02/us-set-to-sign-peace-deal-with-afghanistans-taliban/


Hopefully some of the [Tweet] posters can explain why this is bad

a deal with the devil. this may mean fourteen months of peace, but then whose to say it won’t get worse once the military presence leaves?

What’s the alternative? Forever occupation?

A more carefully crafted plan that isn’t rushed out in order to win headlines and doesn’t subsequently fall apart in the first 24 hours?

Oh, well if it’s the plot of a tv show, then there you go.

Saudi Arabia plans to increase oil output next month, going well above 10 million barrels a day, as the kingdom responds aggressively to the collapse of its OPEC+ alliance with Russia.

The world’s largest oil exporter started a price war on Saturday by slashing the prices it sells crude into foreign markets by the most in at least 20 years, offering unprecedented discounts in Europe, the Far East and the U.S. to entice refiners to purchase Saudi crude at the expense of other suppliers.

[...]

“That’s the oil market equivalent of a declaration of war,” said a commodities hedge fund manager, asking not to be named due to the sensitivity of the situation.

[...]

“This is going to get nasty,” said Doug King, a hedge fund investor who co-founded the Merchant Commodity Fund. “OPEC+ is going to pump more, and the world is facing a demand shock. $30 oil is possible.”