News by Stephen Drill
Premium Content  It was the ultimate betrayal. Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert spent 804 days in Iranian prisons, mostly in solitary confinement in a 3m x 2m cell with not enough warm clothes or blankets for the freezing temperatures. She also went through psychological torture, with other prisoners at the same jails saying that they were regularly forced into fake executions. But back in Australia, her Russian-Israeli husband Ruslan Hodorov was having an affair with her University of Melbourne colleague and PhD supervisor Dr Kylie Baxter. Despite sources revealing some other people were aware of the affair, Dr Moore-Gilbert would only learn of the betrayal after arriving back in Australia in November last year.
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China Snubs Washington With Big Oil Deals In South Iraq By Simon Watkins - Jan 21, 2021, 6:00 PM CST
There are three major troubling factors for new U.S. President Joe Biden. In the recently agreed US$2 billion five–year prepayment oil supply deal between the Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) in Baghdad and China’s Zhenhua Oil. First, is that the deal is straight out of the playbook that Russia used to gain control over Iraq’s semi-autonomous northern region of Kurdistan in 2017. Second, according to various sources close to Iraq’s Oil Ministry spoken to by
OilPrice.com last week, this deal between Russia’s Rosneft and the government of Kurdistan (the KRG) meant that Moscow was able to cause such disruption in the budget payments-for-oil deal between Kurdistan and Baghdad that the resulting financial crunch for the FGI pre-disposed Baghdad to look beneficially at the China proposal in the first place. This implies clearly that Russia and China
Updated: 3 Jan 2021, 18:52
IRAN’S military leader has vowed to turn US aircraft carriers in to “sinking submarines”.
The threat was made one year after a US drone strike killed Iran s revered commander Qasem Soleimani and his Iraqi lieutenant Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
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Commander-in-chief of Iran s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi threatened to attack the US NavyCredit: AP:Associated Press
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USS Nimitz and the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea in formation during a Strait of Hormuz transit on September 18, 2020Credit: AFP
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Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in 2020Credit: AFP
The US has been conducting B-52 bomber flyovers and sent a nuclear submarine into the Persian Gulf.
Alireza Tivasolii, A Qom seminary graduate and commander of the Fatemiyoun Brigade killed in Syria, with Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force (File)
Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran’s clerical establishment has used religious organizations to expand its clout abroad.
Key among them is the Al-Mustafa International University, a network of religious seminaries based in the Shi’ite holy city of Qom that has branches in some 50 countries.
The university claims to teach Shi’ite Muslim theology, Islamic science, and Iran’s national language, Persian, to tens of thousands of foreign students across Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.