Thursday, January 28, 2016
Taliban taking aim at media targets
Taliban taking aim at media targets: KABUL — It was a cruel twist when many Afghans learned of last week’s deadly Taliban bombing of a bus from watching the Tolo TV network, the country’s largest private broadcaster. The victims were its employees.
Thursday, October 8, 2015
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Thursday, July 2, 2015
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Monday, June 22, 2015
Cuomo losing support with new progressive politics
Gov. Cuomo has lost the support of many wealthy contributors as a result of his accelerating embrace of leftist “progressive” politics and US Attorney Preet Bharara’s ongoing Albany corruption probe, The Post has learned.
Cuomo — dropping in the polls, at odds with many of his fellow Democrats and no longer able to bend the state Legislature to his will — is finding it “increasingly hard, much more difficult, to raise money,” one of Cuomo’s biggest fund-raisers told The Post.
“A lot of people who were big contributors are worried by his policies,” the well-known fund-raiser continued. “He’s not been doing anything for them, he doesn’t seem to care about their interests anymore, and, as a result, it’s hard to raise money for him.”
Bharara’s corruption probe, which led to the indictment of two legislative leaders this year, has also “seriously impacted” the governor’s fund-raising ability by making potential contributors with issues before Cuomo’s office wary that they could be accused of seeking a quid pro quo, the fund-raiser said.
Solicitors working for Cuomo’s campaign committee, responding to the Bharara probe, have also apparently put the brakes on what had once been “a frantic, high-pressure” effort to raise funds for the governor.
“It used to be horrible, the Cuomo people were always pushing, pushing, pushing for money, more money, like crazy men,” said the fund-raiser. “But now they’ve backed off and I think that has a lot to do with Bharara’s investigation.”
Cuomo, under intense pressure from Democratic “progressives” like Mayor de Blasio, has moved sharply to the left on a number of issues including a minimum-wage hike, expanded union and women’s rights, gun control, and the environment.
Cuomo hasn’t in the past had any difficulty raising huge amounts of campaign cash: He took in over $45 million for his reelection last year and entered 2015 with nearly $9 million still in the bank.
Last week Cuomo skipped his own $2,500-a-person fund-raiser at the Plaza Hotel because of the stalled legislative session, but it went ahead without him.
How much money Cuomo has raised this year won’t be known until July 15 when he must file an updated report with the state Board of Elections.
Cuomo, who has dabbled with several foreign-policy issues during recent trips to Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Israel, may be about to get much more deeply involved.
A source with strong ties to Israeli leaders told The Post that Cuomo is preparing to split with President Obama if Obama reaches a nuclear-weapons deal with Iran at the end of the month.
“Cuomo has informed some top Jewish leaders that he’s going to oppose Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, if there is one,” the source said.
A break by Cuomo with Obama over Iran could boost the governor’s standing with traditionally Democratic Jewish voters who, recent Siena College polls show, are increasingly opposed to Obama’s policies.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Anti-West Hard-Liner Gains in Iranian Race
Newsha Tavakolian for The New York Times
Saeed Jalili, waving at a rally in Tehran on Friday, is one of eight candidates in the June election. »
By THOMAS ERDBRINK
Published: May 28, 2013
TEHRAN — At his first presidential campaign rally, Saeed Jalili on Friday welcomed the cheers of thousands of young men as he hauled himself onto the stage. His movements were hampered by a prosthetic leg, a badge of honor from his days as a young Revolutionary Guards member in Iran’s great trench war with Iraq.
“Welcome, living martyr, Jalili,” the audience shouted in unison, most of them too young to have witnessed the bloody conflict themselves but deeply immersed in the national veneration of its veterans. Waving flags belonging to “the resistance” — the military cooperation among Iran, Syria, the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah and some Palestinian groups — the crowd roared the candidate’s election slogan: “No compromise. No submission. Only Jalili.”
Mr. Jalili, known as Iran’s unyielding nuclear negotiator and a protégé of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is emerging as the presumed front-runner in Iran’s presidential election on June 14, an unsettling prospect for future relations with the West. Mr. Jalili, 47, who many analysts say has long been groomed for a top position in Iran, is by far the most outspoken hard-liner among the eight candidates approved to participate in the election.
Opposing “détente a hundred percent” and promising no compromise “whatsoever” with the West over matters like Iran’s nuclear program and involvement in Syria, Mr. Jalili seems set to further escalate Iran’s standoff with the United States and its allies if elected president.
“He seems to be Ahmadinejad Phase 2,” said Rasool Nafisi, an Iran expert based in Virginia, referring to Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “He would probably not be a partner to negotiate for the nuclear issues, as we have seen before when he was heading the delegations.”
An analyst based in Iran, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, said Mr. Jalili was “the perfect follower of Khamenei.”
“If he gets elected I foresee even more isolation and conflict, as he doesn’t care about foreign relations, the economy or anything,” the analyst said.
In recent weeks, Mr. Jalili has garnered the open support of Iran’s governing establishment, a coalition of conservative clerics and Revolutionary Guards commanders known as the traditionalists. High-ranking Shiite Muslim clerics have begun speaking out in his favor, and a nationwide network of paramilitary volunteers, the basij, is now helping to organize his election campaign.
He has been featured in flattering terms in recent weeks in the semiofficial Fars news agency, which is connected to the Revolutionary Guards, as well as in dozens of Web sites and other news outlets. By contrast, the other candidates now sometimes discover their campaign appearances canceled for unclear reasons and often find themselves under sharp attack in interviews on state TV, while Mr. Jalili gets softball questions.
“He’ll easily get 30 percent of the vote,” said Amir Mohebbian, an analyst close to Iran’s leaders, pointing to the well-organized groups supporting Mr. Jalili. “The remainder will be divided between the other candidates.”
That would lead to a runoff election that Mr. Jalili would be heavily favored to win, since under Iranian law the president must receive at least half of the vote.
Iran’s presidential elections, lacking independent opinion polls and subject to manipulation, are notoriously unpredictable. In 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad came out of nowhere to win. In 2009, millions of people took to the streets to protest what they said was widespread fraud in the voting that returned Mr. Ahmadinejad to office over the more popular opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi.
But the major threats to Mr. Jalili’s candidacy were apparently eliminated when the representatives of two influential political factions, one led by Mr. Ahmadinejad and the other by a former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, were disqualified from the election by the conservative-dominated Guardian Council. That decision underscored not just the determination of the traditionalists to consolidate power, but their ability to ensure the result.
In a recent opinion article, Mr. Mohebbian said that while Mr. Jalili’s relative inexperience in domestic politics might make him appear as an outsider, the support of Iran’s governing establishment made it likely that “the conditions of the day will create an atmosphere which will put Mr. Jalili in a leadership position.”
While Ayatollah Khamenei is officially neutral, Mr. Jalili’s speeches and viewpoints closely resemble the leader’s worldview of an Iran engaged in a multifaceted battle with the West.
“The best president,” Mr. Khamenei said on Monday, speaking to students at a military academy, “is the one who powerfully resists the enemy and will turn the Islamic republic into an international example for the oppressed people of the world.”
Mr. Jalili, who sports a gray beard and prefers collarless shirts, headed Ayatollah Khamenei’s office for four years, starting in 2001, before emerging in recent years as the chief nuclear negotiator. But little is known about his views on other issues.
“Mr. Jalili is like a watermelon,” said Mohammad Khoshchehreh, an economist and professor at Tehran University. “He looks ripe on the outside, but we don’t know what color he is inside.”
Partly because of Western sanctions, Iran’s economy is reeling from high inflation and a battered currency, but Mr. Jalili has addressed the problems only obliquely. During a televised interview on Sunday he said that Iran should cut its dependency on oil revenues and establish a “resistance economy in order to foil the conspiracies against Iran.”
Such talk has left economists baffled. “His theory of resistance economy doesn’t mean anything,” Mr. Khoshchehreh said. “If it is based on looking at our weak points, that can be good, but we have no idea if he has a deep knowledge. We are worried about him.”
On Friday, during the campaign event in Tehran, Mr. Jalili chose to explain his policies by citing the first imam of the Shiites, the martyr Ali.
“All across the region we can hear our battle cry, ‘Ya Ali,’ ” said Mr. Jalili, who wrote a dissertation on the Prophet Muhammad’s foreign policy. “We heard it in Lebanon with the victory of Hezbollah. We hear it in our resistance against the Zionist regime. Time and time again we have proved our strength through this slogan.”
As songs played memorializing the battles in the border town of Shalamcheh during the Iran-Iraq war, men punched their fists in the air and shouted, “The blood in our veins belongs to our leader.”
The goal of Iran and its allies, Mr. Jalili said, is to “uproot capitalism, Zionism and Communism, and promote the discourse of pure Islam in the world.”
He did not directly mention the Western sanctions that were imposed over the country’s nuclear program — which Iran insists is for peaceful purposes but the West says is a cover for developing nuclear weapons — or the possibility that they will be tightened in response to Tehran’s intransigence. Nor did he speak about the potential for deeper involvement in the Syrian civil war, where Tehran’s proxy, Hezbollah, has recently intervened in support of the Syrian government.
If his supporters harbored worries over what these policies might mean for the Iranian economy, they kept them to themselves. “We are fighting an ideological war — nobody cares about the economy,” said Amir Qoroqchi, 25, a smiling electrical engineering student from the holy city of Qum. “The only thing that matters is resistance.”
For decades, Iran’s presidents have staked out an alternative power center, frequently in conflict with the supreme leader and the more conservative elements in the government. With the rise of Mr. Jalili and the apparent elimination of serious opposition candidates, those on the losing end of Iran’s political spectrum fear a developing imbalance.
The republican and authoritarian religious parts of the government “have been in conflict from Day 1,” Mr. Nafisi, the Iran expert, said.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
May 21, 2013 1:45 PM
Ex-Gillibrand Aide Signs With Anthony Weiner
Another campaign staffer has joined Team Weiner.
Our Jonathan Lemire reports:
Camille Joseph, a former aide to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and a veteran of President Obama’s campaigns, has been hired as political director of Anthony Weiner’s still-to-be-announced mayoral bid.
Joseph is the second major hire made by the former congressman in recent days. Last week, he brought aboard Danny Kedem, a veteran of several House races, as his new campaign manager.
Weiner, who blew up his career in a 2011 sexting and coverup scandal, has yet to announce his run for City Hall, though rumors are swirling that it could happen any minute.
Joseph was described by a former co-worker as “young and smart” who worked tirelessly during her three years on Gillibrand’s staff.
She had several titles there, including director of intergovernmental affairs, director of public engagement and policy and special advisor.
Joseph also worked on both Obama presidential campaigns, holding the title of National African-American Vote Deputy Director last year.
Her hiring was first reported by Capital New York. An email to Weiner was not immediately returned.
Neither Joseph nor Kedem have experience in a grueling five-borough mayoral campaign. Kedem did helm a successful mayoral campaign in New Haven, Conn. and worked on Democrat Mark Murphy's failed challenge to Staten Island Rep. Michael Grimm.
Many former Weiner staffers have moved on or signed with other Democratic hopefuls
Our Jonathan Lemire reports:
Camille Joseph, a former aide to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and a veteran of President Obama’s campaigns, has been hired as political director of Anthony Weiner’s still-to-be-announced mayoral bid.Joseph is the second major hire made by the former congressman in recent days. Last week, he brought aboard Danny Kedem, a veteran of several House races, as his new campaign manager.
Weiner, who blew up his career in a 2011 sexting and coverup scandal, has yet to announce his run for City Hall, though rumors are swirling that it could happen any minute.
Joseph was described by a former co-worker as “young and smart” who worked tirelessly during her three years on Gillibrand’s staff.
She had several titles there, including director of intergovernmental affairs, director of public engagement and policy and special advisor.
Joseph also worked on both Obama presidential campaigns, holding the title of National African-American Vote Deputy Director last year.
Her hiring was first reported by Capital New York. An email to Weiner was not immediately returned.
Neither Joseph nor Kedem have experience in a grueling five-borough mayoral campaign. Kedem did helm a successful mayoral campaign in New Haven, Conn. and worked on Democrat Mark Murphy's failed challenge to Staten Island Rep. Michael Grimm.
Many former Weiner staffers have moved on or signed with other Democratic hopefuls
Man kills himself at Notre Dame Cathedral
updated 2:38 PM EDT, Tue May 21, 2013
Policemen outside Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral, on May 21, 2013.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- A man committed suicide in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, police say
- The site was evacuated
- The man, identified as Dominique Venner, regularly lashed out against same-sex marriage and Islamists
- Right-wing politician Marine Le Pen expressed respect for him
About 1,500 people at the cathedral were evacuated, CNN affiliate BFM reported. The site is one of the world's most prominent churches and a huge tourist attraction in the French capital.
BFM identified the man as Dominique Venner, 78.
Le Monde newspaper quoted a rector at the cathedral, who said the man placed a letter on the altar and then shot himself
On his blog, Venner has lashed out against same-sex marriage and what he called a future Islamist takeover of France.
In a post published Tuesday, he wrote, "The essence of a man is in his existence and not in another world. It's here and now that you have to play out your destiny until the last second. And this last second has as much importance as the rest of the life."
In the blog, Venner voiced his support for those expected to take part in a massive demonstration in Paris May 26 against same-sex marriage. But he said their fight should not be limited to that issue, and they must also denounce what he predicted would be the replacement of the French and European population with Muslims.
"There certainly have to be new actions, spectacular and symbolic, to shake up the sleepiness, to shake the numbed consciences and wake up the memory of our origins," the blog said. "We're entering into a time when words must be authenticated by actions."
Right-wing politician Marine Le Pen tweeted about her "respect" for him. His "last gesture, which was highly political, was to try to wake up the people of France," she wrote.
Some took to Twitter to slam Le Pen for the remark.
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