The road to Iran’s freedom is paved with well-intentioned U.S. grants — but intent alone has never toppled a dictatorship. The Trump administration’s broad pause on foreign assistance includes a hold on funding distributed by the Near East Regional Democracy (NERD) program, which is aimed at supporting democracy in Iran. …

For months, US President Donald Trump and allies such as Senator Lindsey Graham have stated that if Russian President Vladimir Putin rejects peace efforts, the United States will impose new sanctions to bring Russia to the negotiating table. So far, however, the Kremlin has refused to join Ukraine in accepting …

A new type of Russian bureaucrat has emerged in recent years: those appointed by President Vladimir Putin to oversee certain agencies or sectors, and keep an eye on the officials formally in charge—even those who ostensibly enjoy the Kremlin’s trust. These “auditors” can now be found everywhere: from the Russian …

Russia and Ukraine have been at full-scale war for more than three years. Throughout this time, the Ukrainians have mounted a fierce resistance to Russia’s aggression, but their strength appears to be waning. Shura Burtin, a journalist from the Swiss publication Reportagen, spent two months in Ukraine, traveling to Kyiv …

Top Iranian officials reportedly authorized Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Abbas Araghchi to “advance any diplomatic initiative in relation to the United States,” according to an Iranian expert close to the regime.[1] It is not clear who precisely authorized Araghchi to begin “any diplomatic initiative,” but Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would …

US, Ukrainian, and Russian officials reached some agreements for temporary ceasefires on strikes against energy infrastructure and in the Black Sea. The details of these ceasefires remain unclear and evaluating the ceasefires’ specifics in the absence of officially published joint texts of the agreements signed by Russia and Ukraine remains …

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Self-determination movements of former colonies often advanced together toward independence. The ideological backing of socialist states in the Eastern Bloc and various Asian and Islamic countries fueled many anti-colonial movements. However, this left-Islamist alliance has adopted starkly different stances on the Kurdish and Palestinian struggles. This disparity has led to …

Hundreds of Democrat party political hacks who happen to have attended law school for a couple of years have been rewarded for their hackism with appointments as federal district court judges. Armed with lifetime tenure and dressed in spooky looking black robes, they behave like an army of some 700 …

It was only a matter of time until the Haya’t Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) gunmen of Syria’s post-Bashar al-Assad interim government took violence against non-Sunni Muslims into their own hands. Reports emerged early on March 9 about large-scale round-ups, home invasions and subsequent street executions of Alawite Syrians in the Alawi …