Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian stated on Sunday that any attack on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would lead to an “all-out war.” “If the people of Iran face hardship and difficulties in their lives, one of the main reasons for it is the longstanding enmity and inhumane sanctions imposed by the United States government and its allies,” Pezeshkian said in a post on X. “Any aggression against the Supreme Leader of our country is tantamount to all-out war against the Iranian nation,” he added. The Iranian president’s comments follow remarks from US President Donald Trump, who said that Khamenei is a “sick man” and that it is time to “look for new leadership in Iran.
Venezuela oil exports down as much as 75%
Venezuela’s oil exports have plunged 75% since the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro early this month, the Wall Street Journal reported based on data from trade intelligence company Kpler. Most of the oil shipments in the following days headed to the US or were used in domestic refineries. According to Kpler, almost 48 million barrels worth of oil from Venezuela are in tankers outside Venezuelan territorial waters and could be subject to sanctions and forced to turn back. The country reportedly experienced a “sharp halt” in exports to Asia, particularly China, while no Venezuelan oil has reached Cuba in January.
NN: I am convinced that the drop in production will last for years
US warns Iran against attacks on its bases
The United States State Department on Saturday warned Iran against striking American military bases, saying Washington is tracking reports of possible attacks. “As President [Donald] Trump has repeatedly emphasized, all options remain on the table, and if the Islamic Republic attacks American assets, it will face ‘very, very powerful force’,” the department wrote in a message posted on its Persian-language account on X. “We have said this before and we say it again, do not play games with President Trump,” the statement added. The warning comes amid rising tensions between Tehran and Washington.
Khamenei says Iran considers Trump a ‘criminal’……Iran’s Supreme Leader Acknowledges Thousands Killed In Unrest
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday accused United States President Donald Trump of being responsible for casualties during recent demonstrations, describing him as a “criminal.” “We consider the American president a criminal because of the losses, damages and accusations directed at the Iranian people,” the message, written in Arabic, said. The protests have intensified scrutiny of Iran’s government, while relations between Tehran and Washington have grown more hostile. Trump had threatened to hit Iran “hard” if more demonstrators were executed, but recently thanked the country for halting over 800 hangings.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Acknowledges Thousands Killed In Unrest
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday said “several thousand people” died in this month’s anti-government demonstrations, his first acknowledgment of the deadly scale of the unrest. Some of those were killed “brutally and inhumanely,” Khamenei said without offering detail in a public meeting broadcast on state TV. He accused the US and Israel of aiding the killings and said the Islamic Republic has evidence to support the claim. Iran doesn’t intend to push the country toward war, but won’t allow either domestic or international criminals to go unpunished, Khamenei said. He said US President Donald Trump was culpable for “deaths, damage, and accusations he has inflicted on the Iranian people,” and that Washington’s broader policy goal was to place Iran under military, political, and economic domination. The toll suggested by Khamenei was in line with estimates from human rights groups and others that some 3,500 people had perished. The groups estimate that more than 22,000 people have been detained. The protests have taken place during a record long internet blackout for Iran’s population of about 92 million people. Earlier, local media reported that internet connectivity had been partially restored, even as most residents appeared to remain largely cut off from the outside world for a ninth day. Iran’s government shut down internet and mobile phone services on Jan. 8 to quell rising unrest sparked by a currency crisis late last month. Bloomberg’s Rosalind Mathieson explains what’s behind the protests in Iran and what’s at stake for the world. “Internet access has now been restored for some subscribers,” the semi-official Mehr news agency said without specifying which restrictions had been lifted or whether users had regained access to international platforms and services. The semi-official Fars news agency also reported that mobile text messages had been reactivated after being blocked earlier. The internet traffic monitoring group NetBlocks said there had been a “very slight rise” in connectivity on Saturday, adding that overall access remained at about 2% of normal levels, with “no indication of a significant return.” Users in Iran appeared largely offline as of early Saturday afternoon local time, with few signs of activity evident on platforms such as Telegram, Instagram, and X — services they previously accessed via virtual private networks (VPNs). Near‑total communications blackouts have become a familiar tool for Islamic Republic authorities during critical situations, from this month’s nationwide protests to the June conflict with Israel. That’s cut off much of the population from the global internet, and diverted users onto a government‑controlled domestic network that operates independently of the wider web. NetBlocks on Friday said the current blackout had surpassed the internet shutdown imposed during the country’s 2019 protests. Earlier on Saturday, Fars cited authorities who weren’t identified as saying that internet and other communications services were being gradually restored, but that some restrictions would remain in place “as long as security conditions require.”
NN: It’s ridiculous the Ayatollah of massive world wide terrier carnage has the audacity of calling Trump a criminal. It’s a outrage that Trump has not ended his regime of terror yet!
Trump Keeps Oil Traders Guessing on Iran
Oil markets are trapped in a Trump-driven guessing game, with Iran fears lifting prices one moment and calming signals pulling them back the next. Will Donald Trump attack Iran again or not? That has been the multi-billion-dollar question of this week, with the initial price rally seeming to suggest an emphatic ‘yes’, only for Trump to pour cold water on the war hysteria by claiming there’s no executions in Iran. With news on Venezuela lacking real market impact lately, ICE Brent’s seesawing around the $65 per barrel could very well continue into next week, as market participants guess the US President’s next move.
Mossad chief said to be in US for Iran talks
Israeli intelligence agency Mossad’s Director David Barnea (pictured) arrived in the United States earlier this morning for talks regarding the crisis in Iran, Axios reported on Friday, citing an Israeli official and another source with knowledge of the matter. Barnea will reportedly meet with US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff in Miami, while it remains unclear whether US President Donald Trump will join the discussions. Barnea’s alleged trip follows the earlier phone call between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reportedly asked the US President to delay any action against Iran, fearing broader regional conflict.
NN; It seems to me a coordinated attack on Iran is in the cards
Trump said to have told Iran he will not attack
United States President Donald Trump told Iran he would not launch an attack against the country, Al Jazeera reported on Thursday, quoting Iran’s Ambassador to Pakistan Reza Amiri Moghadam. Moghadam told Pakistani media he received a message yesterday that Trump did not want war and had also asked Tehran not to strike US assets in the Middle East. At the same time, the envoy stressed that the Iranian people have a legitimate right to protest, while noting that “armed groups” were responsible for killings and burning mosques during the demonstrations. On Wednesday, Trump seemed to tone down his rhetoric toward the Middle Eastern country, revealing he learned that the “killing” was “stopping.” Iran, on the other hand, closed its airspace early on Thursday local time, while the US and other countries warned their citizens to leave the country and withdrew some of their military assets from Qatar. Earlier today, however, Trump said an Iranian protester won’t be sentenced to death because of his warnings, calling it “good news.”
NN: Can Trump be so easily fooled?
Alito presses trans female athlete’s lawyer on definition of woman during SCOTUS hearing
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito grilled an attorney representing a biological male athlete in the case of Little v. Hecox on Tuesday about the definitions of a woman and girl. Alito asked Kathleen R. Hartnett, who is arguing on behalf of the Idaho student in the Supreme Court case, what it meant to be a “boy or a girl or a man or a woman” when it came to equal protection purposes. Hartnett agreed that a school may have separate teams for students “classified as boys and a category of students classified as girls.” Hartnett also agreed there needed to be “an understanding of what it means to be a boy or a girl and a man or a woman.” “Sorry, I misunderstood your question. I think the underlying enactment, whatever it was, the policy, the law, we’d have to have an understanding of how the state or the government was understanding that term to figure out whether someone was excluded,” Hartnett said. “We do not have a definition for the court. We’re not disputing the definition here. “What we’re saying is the way it implies in practice is to exclude birth-sex males categorically from women’s teams and there is a subset of those birth-sex males where it doesn’t make sense to do so according to the state’s own interest.”
Alito then asked, “How can a court determine whether there’s discrimination on the basis of sex without knowing what sex means for equal protection purposes?” NB if it has or had a dick its a boy. and if it has a pussy weather its turned inside out or not its a gril
“I think here we just know, we basically know that they’ve identified pursuant to their own statute, Lindsay qualifies as a birth-sex male and she is being excluded categorically from the women’s teams as the statute,” Hartnett responded. “So, we’re taking the statute’s definitions as we find them and we don’t dispute them. We’re just trying to figure out, do they create an equal protection problem?” Alito then posed a hypothetical question to Hartnett about a boy who has never taken any kind of puberty blockers or other medication but believed they were a girl and whether a school can say the boy cannot participate on a girls’ sports team. The issue at hand is whether laws in Idaho, and West Virginia, that prohibit transgender athletes who identify as women from playing on teams that match their gender identity, discriminate based on sex. In the case of Little v. Hecox, a biological man who sought to compete on the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University, contended that Idaho’s law, the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, violated the equal protection clause by excluding transgender women. Lawyers for the states defending the bans maintain that separating sports based on biological sex preserves fairness and safety for female athletes and is consistent with Title IX’s definition of sex.
Trump says will ‘act accordingly’ once briefed on Iran
- The Iranian government continued its crackdown on protests despite US President Donald Trump’s threat of action over mounting fatalities.
- The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported that 2,571 people had been killed from late December through Wednesday, and demonstrations remain difficult to track amid an internet shutdown in Iran.
- Iran has warned it could strike US and Israeli assets if it’s attacked, and oil prices have risen on the heightened tensions, with Brent crude up for a fifth day to over $66 a barrel.
United States President Donald Trump said his administration will determine the appropriate course of action once it gets a clearer picture of the casualties from the ongoing anti-government protests in Iran. “I’m going back to the White House now. We’re going to look at the whole situation that’s going on in Iran. It’s really bad stuff,” Trump told reporters after landing at Joint Base Andrews. “We’ll get some accurate numbers as to what’s happening with regard to the killing,” he added.” The killing looks like it’s significant, but we don’t know yet for certain. I’ll know within 20 minutes, and we’ll act accordingly,” Trump stressed.
NN: Its frustrating… What is Trump waiting for?
Trump: Good idea if Americans evacuate Iran
United States President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday that it would be a “good idea if Americans evacuated from Iran.” When asked what he meant by his “help is on its way” comment in relation to protests in Iran, Trump simply answered that the public will have to “figure it out,” without giving any further details. The US head of state previously threatened to take action against Iran over the killing of protesters. Meanwhile, Tehran’s officials warned Washington that its actions against the country would “fail.”