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Middle East

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Iran Arrests Cartoonist as Crackdown on Free Expression Continues

This week, Iran arrested cartoonist Hadi Heidari and sent him to Evin – the Islamic Republic’s most notorious prison – to complete a suspended jail sentence stemming from a conviction he had received two years ago. Heidari’s arrest arrives on the heels of an aggressive crackdown by Iran’s hardliners on journalists, artists, and U.S. citizens.

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Senate Democrats Block Ted Cruz Refugee Bills

Democrat senators today sided with President Barack Obama in the growing conflict between the president and other federal and state officials on how to deal with Syrian refugees in the aftermath of ISIS’s terrorist attacks in Paris.

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Def Sec Ashton Carter: We Are At War with ISIS

Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter acknowledged to co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that the United States is indeed at war with ISIS. Partial transcript as follows: BRZEZINSKI: How can you assure the American public

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Venezuela Goes All in for Assad: ‘He Is the Only One Who Can Guarantee Stability’

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro blamed the terror attacks in Paris this week on the “irresponsibility” of the United States in the Middle East, asserting that supporting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is more important now than ever because “if he is taken down, what happened in Paris will be nothing in comparison to what will happen around the world.”

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Dem Rep Ellison: ISIS Neither Islamic Nor a State

Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) said he prefers to use the Arabic acronym Daesh when referring to to ISIS because he said it “stands for Islamic state. They are neither Islamic nor are they a

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Paris Terror Attack Mastermind Killed In Police Raid

The man believed to be the mastermind behind Friday’s Paris terror attacks that resulted in the deaths of over one-hundred people and wounded hundreds more has been killed in a police raid on his location, according to senior European intelligence officials.

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Reflections on the Slaughter in Paris, Part 2: What Can We Learn from Napoleon Bonaparte, Arnold Toynbee, and Other Dead White European Males?

So now we’re launching airstrikes aimed at really hurting ISIS? Fox News reported on Monday that the US military had destroyed 116 ISIS fuel trucks near the Syrian-Iraq border. Considering that oil is the only valuable export that the Flintstones economy of the Islamic State possesses, that’s a devastating blow.