The Strait of Hormuzm a 21 mile-wide passage between Iran and Oman, supports 20% of the world’s oil supply. The oil chokepoint is center of conflict between the US and Iran. A Vox video.
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Chris Wallace interviewed former Vice President and unindicted war criminal Dick Cheney on “Fox News Sunday.”
Chris Wallace: “You and President Bush, the Bush-Cheney administration, dealt with Iran for eight years. Iran went from zero known [nuclear] centrifuges in operation to more than 5,000. So in fairness, didn’t you leave — the Bush-Cheney administration — leave President Obama with a mess?”
Dick Cheney: “Well, I don’t think of it that way ….
Chris Wallace: “But the centrifuges went from zero to 5,000.”
Dick Cheney: “Well, they may well have gone but that happened on Obama’s watch, not on our watch.”
Chris Wallace: “No, no, no. By 2009, they were at 5,000.”
Dick Cheney: “Right, But I think we did a lot to deal with the arms control problem in the Middle East.”
More:
“Dick Cheney faces surprise accusation on his own foreign policy,” Tony Dokoupil, MSNBC
In office for a couple of months, young freshman Senator Tom Cotton (AR-R) wrote an open letter to the leaders of Iran, saying that any nuclear agreement they sign with the current administration won’t be worth a bucket of warm spit in two years when the Tea Party takes over the White House. That’s misleading, but 46 other GOP senators signed on anyway, some of them older guys who really don’t know what they’re signing. These political pen pals are being hailed as … traitors, reckless, dumb, dangerous and irresponsible, trolls, saboteurs, and so on.
Secretaries of State past and present denounced the letter as a dangerous political stunt. Iran blew it off, but there’s been a strong, substantial public backlash in the USA. Now the GOP letter writers claim it was all a joke, that they were just being “cheeky.” After all, what’s more fun than jeopardizing a critical nuclear weapons agreement?
In the name of science and cultural identity, Iran’s space program is considering blasting a fluffy Persian Cat into space early next year, maybe around Nowruz 2573 (Persian New Year March 20, 2014). They claim this will prepare them for human spaceflight, but we think it will delay the program. Honestly, have you ever just tried to drive a big fluffy kitty to the vet? What’s the Farsi word for “”Fuhgeddaboudit?”
More:
“Iran mulls sending Persian cat to space,” Faine Greenwood, GlobalPost
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Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Iran’s space agency, Sázmán e Fazái e Irán, strapped a gray-tufted monkey in an infant’s car seat and shot the poor thing into space. The critter is said to look unhappy after its 72-mile vertical voyage, perhaps because it landed back in Iran. The unnamed beastie joins a menagerie of critter cosmonauts who’ve rocketed into the void over the past half-century:
NotionsCapital 