"Iran MPs draft bill on 60% uranium enrichment" (PressTV)

Funny that I saw this first at PressTV:

Iranian lawmakers have drafted a bill that would oblige the government to produce 60-percent enriched uranium in line with the requirements of the nation’s civilian nuclear program.

Signed by 100 legislators, the draft was presented to the Presiding Board of Majlis on Wednesday.

“If the bill is approved, the government will be obliged to complete nuclear infrastructure at Fordo and Natanz [facilities] if sanctions [against Iran] are ratcheted up, new sanctions are imposed, the country’s nuclear rights are violated and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s peaceful nuclear rights are ignored by members of P5+1,” Iranian lawmaker Seyyed Mehdi Mousavinejad said on Wednesday.

The bill would oblige the government to put the Arak heavy water reactor into operation and enrich uranium to the 60-percent purity level in order to provide fuel for submarine engines if the sanctions are tightened and Iran’s nuclear rights are ignored, the MP underscored.

The draft bill comes as key members of the US Congress introduced a bill last week, which proposes boycotting Iranian oil exports within a year and the blacklisting of Iran's mining, engineering and construction industries.

The Senate bill also calls for "diplomatic, military and economic support" for Israel should Tel Aviv decide to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.

Moreover, the administration of US President Barack Obama on December 12 issued new sanctions against more than a dozen companies and individuals for “providing support for” Iran’s nuclear energy program.

The US Treasury Department said it was freezing assets and banning transactions of entities that attempt to evade the sanctions against Iran.

This is while under a nuclear agreement reached in Geneva last month, the United States should not impose fresh economic sanctions against Iran over the next six months.

Meanwhile, US National Security Adviser Susan Rice said on December 23 that Washington seeks to include "triggers" in any final nuclear deal with Iran to automatically re-impose sanctions if Tehran violates the terms of the agreement.

"We will not construct a deal or accept a deal in which we cannot verify exactly what they are doing. And if they're caught, we will ensure that the pressure is re-imposed on them," Rice said on CBS news program "60 Minutes."

"Activists in Fisheries Visit Statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il"

Now that the nasty business of the well-deserved demise of Traitor Jang Song Thaek is starting to fade from memory, things can get back to, um, normal:

The participants in the meeting of activists in fisheries of the Korean People's Army Sunday laid a floral basket before the statues of President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il in the compound of the Ministry of the People's Armed Forces.

They lined up in front of the statues with deep reverence for the great men of Mt. Paektu before placing the floral basket and bouquets before the statues.

They made a bow to the statues with great pride of achieving signal successes in carrying out the behests of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and the policy of the Workers' Party of Korea by conducting a dynamic fishing drive as intended by supreme leader Kim Jong Un.

"Traitor Jang Song Thaek Executed"

Someone from the list of Commie Goyim just got executed. Some of the news coverage noted the vituperative language of this press release, but it isn't that remarkable. The language routinely used to refer to whoever is in power in South Korea at any given time is quite similar:

Upon hearing the report on the enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, the service personnel and people throughout the country broke into angry shouts that a stern judgment of the revolution should be meted out to the anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional elements. Against the backdrop of these shouts rocking the country, a special military tribunal of the DPRK Ministry of State Security was held on December 12 against traitor for all ages Jang Song Thaek.

The accused Jang brought together undesirable forces and formed a faction as the boss of a modern day factional group for a long time and thus committed such hideous crime as attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our party and state.

The tribunal examined Jang's crimes.

All the crimes committed by the accused were proved in the course of hearing and were admitted by him.

A decision of the special military tribunal of the Ministry of State Security of the DPRK was read out at the trial.

Every sentence of the decision served as sledge-hammer blow brought down by our angry service personnel and people on the head of Jang, an anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional element and despicable political careerist and trickster.

The accused is a traitor to the nation for all ages who perpetrated anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts in a bid to overthrow the leadership of our party and state and the socialist system.

Jang was appointed to responsible posts of the party and state thanks to the deep political trust of President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il and received benevolence from them more than any others from long ago.

He held higher posts than before and received deeper trust from supreme leader Kim Jong Un, in particular.

The political trust and benevolence shown by the peerlessly great men of Mt. Paektu were something he hardly deserved.

It is an elementary obligation of a human being to repay trust with sense of obligation and benevolence with loyalty.

However, despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him.

From long ago, Jang had a dirty political ambition. He dared not raise his head when Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were alive. But, reading their faces, Jang had an axe to grind and involved himself in double-dealing. He began revealing his true colors, thinking that it was just the time for him to realize his wild ambition in the period of historic turn when the generation of the revolution was replaced.

Jang committed such an unpardonable thrice-cursed treason as overtly and covertly standing in the way of settling the issue of succession to the leadership with an axe to grind when a very important issue was under discussion to hold respected Kim Jong Un in high esteem as the only successor to Kim Jong Il in reflection of the unanimous desire and will of the entire party and army and all people.

When his cunning move proved futile and the decision that Kim Jong Un was elected vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea at the Third Conference of the WPK in reflection of the unanimous will of all party members, service personnel and people was proclaimed, making all participants break into enthusiastic cheers that shook the conference hall, he behaved so arrogantly and insolently as unwillingly standing up from his seat and half-heartedly clapping, touching off towering resentment of our service personnel and people. [...]

And rightly so!

Meet the new Iran, same as the old Iran--PressTV makes David Duke look subtle

You may recall that one of the Ahmadinejad pronouncements reported last year in English at the website of IRNA, Iran's most official news agency, is that somebody called "Zionists" "have been inflicting very heavy damage and suffering on the whole humanity for over two thousand years." That sort of thinking lives on in an article that appeared today at PressTV under the title "World War Z and wrath of Netanyahu":

[...] There are not, or rather-should not be-any "surprises" associated with the rise of Jewish power, the creation of the "Jewish state" and the present World War Z that mankind faces these days. Indeed, everything that has taken place, particularly over the course of the last century viz-a-viz the wars, the bloodshed and the nearly complete meltdown of established world order was/is as predictable as the proverbial slaughter at the henhouse after the jackals were put in charge of security.

The sad truth is that everything mankind needs to know about the deadly, radioactive nature of this political, social and cultural "element" on the periodic table of human ideas has been sitting there, screaming out to civilized man for literally thousands of years. Jewish power and violence, Jewish power and genocide, Jewish power and economic despoliation, Jewish power and corruption, none of this began in 1948 with the creation of Israel. It did not begin in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve, as some like to imagine.

It did not even begin with the writing of a literary abomination known as the Babylonian Talmud.

It--the criminal, barbaric nature of Jewish power--has been there from the beginning, congenital from its birth, the moment a penniless nomad begins hearing voices in his head promising him kingdoms, riches and power beyond his wildest dreams, accompanied by the moral justification for doing whatever needs to be done in attaining these items, including lying, genocide, and theft. [...]

That's a fairly small part of a long article. It all sounds as Nazi as the above excerpt does. Anyone with a serious interest in the Middle East should read it all.

"Arafat widow to challenge French forensic probe" (Ma'an)

This story has ceased to be useful to the Mondoweiss agenda, but it keeps getting better for irony fans:

The widow of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat pledged Friday to challenge a French inquiry which found his death to have been from natural causes, rather than poison as Palestinians suspect.

"A request for further expert opinion will be submitted in the next few days to investigating judges in (the Paris suburb of) Nanterre," Suha Arafat's French lawyer Pierre-Olivier Sur told AFP.

Suha Arafat lodged a murder complaint in Nanterre in July last year after an Al-Jazeera television documentary linked Arafat's 2004 death at a military hospital near Paris to polonium poisoning.

"After consultations with many legal experts and with the Swiss institute which examined samples from the martyr Arafat's remains, and having compared the French and Swiss reports, we have decided to turn to the French legal system to challenge the findings in the French medical report," she told AFP by phone.

How do you use a "legal system" to "challenge" scientific conclusions? This should be interesting for some time to come although many of the people who saw articles such as this one will miss out on the fun.