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Republicans plan votes on new Tehran sanctions as Obama moves to lock up support to implement accord

WASHINGTON—Capitol Hill opponents of the landmark Iranian nuclear accord are devising a Plan B to ratchet up pressure on Iran as President Barack Obama moves closer to locking up the support needed to implement the deal.

Critics of the agreement in both parties haven’t yet conceded defeat in the congressional battle next month, where they will push to derail the deal.

But as their chances dim, they are preparing to push a rash of new legislation for the fall to increase sanctions on Tehran for its role in supporting terrorist organizations and militant groups active across the Mideast, which could cause Iran to back out of the deal. These politicians also are devising new ways to target the finances of Tehran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The migrants found dead in Austria aboard a midsize truck once used to transport chickens had been crammed so tightly inside its hold that, at first, authorities didn’t think it could possibly contain more than 50 corpses.

But when police extracted their bodies on Friday they found 71, including those of four children, and uncovered fresh details of the desperate journey of those aboard. Hundreds of miles to the south, rescue workers were recovering dozens of bodies from two shipwrecks off the Libyan coast—tragedies shedding light on the brutal tactics of the people-smuggling operations that stretch from across the Mediterranean to deep within Europe’s borders.

Many of the corpses found in the truck in Austria were so decomposed that officials say they likely had died up to two days earlier, before they ever crossed into Western Europe. The truck’s cargo hold had no openings for ventilation on its sides, suggesting they suffocated, police said. Austrian authorities said an expert would examine the truck, including whether damage on its side pointed to a desperate struggle to get out.

Iran is on its way in a few years to having nuclear weapons capability. The breakout time, according to President Obama, would effectively be “zero.” Iran could then make as many bombs as it would like, along with intercontinental ballistic missiles to delver them to major American cities, directly from Iran, from South America, or — making identification and retaliation impossible — from submarines submerged off the U.S. coast.

Obama with one hand allows Iran to glide to nuclear capability and encourage the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula — while with the other hand, he claims to support Israel.

Qatar’s role is duplicitous. It plays host to U.S. military bases at the same time that it funds and supports ISIS.

Hillary Clinton ruffled Republican feathers Thursday after she compared terrorists’ and Republicans’ views on women during a campaign rally in Ohio.

Clinton made the remarks while condemning GOP efforts to defund Planned Parenthood during a rally at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “Extreme views about women — we expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world,” she said.

Of all the Republican candidates, Florida Senator Marco Rubio has been most forceful in pushing back against the cynical attack.

“It’s par for the course with her,” Rubio said on the Hugh Hewitt Show. “She’s a failing candidate, has no credibility, being exposed for being deceitful on the whole issue of her server, compromised the national security of the United States. And, quite frankly, she’s going to be chasing Bernie Sanders and others in her party to the extreme left.”

“So obviously she’s going to go around saying outrageous things, and I expect more of in the months to come,” Rubio said.

The Clinton camp has been insisting for weeks that the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s secret email server is just a minor “civil investigation,” but according to a Fox News report Friday afternoon, the ”extremely serious” investigation is being led by an “FBI A-team” and centers on a section of the Espionage Act known as 18 US Code 793.

A separate source, who also was not authorized to speak on the record, said the FBI will further determine whether Clinton should have known, based on the quality and detail of the material, that emails passing through her server contained classified information regardless of the markings. The campaign’s standard defense and that of Clinton is that she “never sent nor received any email that was marked classified” at the time.

It is not clear how the FBI team’s findings will impact the probe itself. But the details offer a window into what investigators are looking for — as the Clinton campaign itself downplays the controversy.

“Foreign policy doesn’t have the salience in Canada as it does in the United States,” Liberal MP Irwin Cotler told The Algemeiner on Wednesday. “And the Iran deal does not have the same priority of concern as domestic issues, like health care and the environment.”

Coming from Cotler, who divides his time between sessions in the Canadian Parliament and trotting the globe promoting human rights, combating antisemitism and defending Israel, this kind of statement might sound peculiar. But, says Cotler, ranked by The Algemeiner among “The Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life, 2014,” this is reflected in the polls and conduct of the party leaders ahead of the October 19 Canadian general election, less than two months away.”

“The overall orientation – and motto of all three parties — involves ‘what’s good for the middle class,’” he says.

Guilio Haas is the Swiss Ambassador to Iran

Switzerland has been in a great hurry to get the other nations of the world to join it in treating Iran as if it is an upstanding member of the world community. The Swiss began lifting sanctions on Iran earlier this month.

In accordance with this position, Ambassador Haas revealed Switzerland’s true progressive nature at a meeting attended by hundreds of Swiss and Iranian businesspeople at a Zurich hotel on Thursday, Aug. 27.

Haas was encouraging the businesspeople to invest in Iran, referring to the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism as a “pole of stability in the Middle East,” and that in his two years in Iran, while he has seen gray-haired men in turbans, “there aren’t a lot of them” and that Western perceptions of Iran as a belligerent nation was about to change as soon as sanctions are lifted. This is what the World Tribune reported about the event.

What the World Tribune did not report was that as part of his effort to encourage the businesspeople to invest in Iran, the Swiss Ambassador projected a cartoon on a huge screen. The cartoon was titled “Iran: now or never.”

In an age of victimology, moral relativism and a supreme lack of confidence in Western Civilization, you get comments like this from senior military officials:

“In testimony on Capitol Hill this year, Lt. Gen. Vincent R. Stewart, the [Defense Intelligence] agency’s director, said sending ground troops back into Iraq risked transforming the conflict into one between the West and ISIS, which would be ‘the best propaganda victory that we could give.’”

Lt. Gen. Stewart’s statement fittingly comes from the Times’ exposé on the alleged politicization of intelligence estimates regarding our nation’s supposed military campaign against ISIS in Iraq.

The half-hearted effort against ISIS as dictated by President Obama — more political than substantive in nature — is a symptom of which Stewart’s demoralized mindset is part of the cause.

We are in a war in which Islamic supremacists are and have been fighting infidels worldwide for multiple decades, while the infidels cower.

“The world must not belong to those who slander the prophets of Global Warming, Climate Change, or Climate Disruption.”So said Democratic U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in a fatwa issued in the Washington Post.

OK — perhaps that was not what he said verbatim, but it might as well have been.

Whitehouse intimated that racketeering charges be considered regarding Big Oil’s support of research challenging the supposed climate change consensus.

Without a hint of irony given the nature and activities of the climate change movement, Whitehouse compared the oil industry – which after the American people will be most harmed by regulations putatively relating to climate — to the RICO-violating tobacco business:

The Big Tobacco playbook looked something like this: (1) pay scientists to produce studies defending your product; (2) develop an intricate web of PR experts and front groups to spread doubt about the real science; (3) relentlessly attack your opponents.

In a point almost beyond parody, Whitehouse relies on a report by a Drexel University professor whose “environmental justice” work has been funded by federal grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. A nakedly partisan voice, the “Culture and Communication” department professor lists as areas of research and teaching “Critical Theory,” “Social Movements” and “Social Change,” to go along with the more relevant “Environmental Sociology.”

The professor writes that the “climate denial network”

span[s] a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts that aim at undermining climate science.

None of these activities are illegal, or even unethical – though if Whitehouse gets his way the thought crime of challenging global warming may soon be.

The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) has produced a letter promoting the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) signed by “73 prominent International Relations and Middle East scholars.” Among the latter are Richard Bulliet, John Esposito, Fawaz Gerges, Rashid Khalidi, Hamid Dabashi, William O. Beeman, Juan Cole, and Reza Aslan.

A recent Campus Watch article on Middle East studies academics toeing Teheran’s line in support of this deal includes the last four and clearly, they have company. The fact that NIAC is an Iran lobby group whose advisory board includes both Aslan and Cole demonstrates the willingness of these academics to further state-sponsored propaganda. It’s also proof of the Iranian regime’s ability—as with other Islamist lobbies—to infiltrate American university life. NIAC received funds from the Alavi Foundation (which funneled $345,000 to Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies) until Alavi was closed for being a front-group for Tehran’s mullahs.