Iran

There are unsubstantiated claims that Israel has attacked Syrian government forces and weapons stockpiles.

Foreign Policy reports on the awkwardness of this news for the opposition and inconvenient for the anti-Israel left who have been calling for intervention on the side of the Syrian opposition:

Syrian Facebook pages are reporting a series of massive explosions in Damascus, as are the Syrian regime’s media outlets. A video claiming to be of these explosions can be seen here:

Read more »

An Iranian official has endorsed the superiority of Jewish magicians…at least that is what I think he said when he accused them of using sorcery against Iran. From the sounds of it they are the best magicians in the world bar none.

An official close to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused Jews of using sorcery against the Islamic Republic, according to a report on the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

“The Jews have the greatest powers of sorcery, and they make use of this tool,” Mehdi Taeb told students at a religious seminary in Ahwaz on April 20.  Read more »

Julian Hattem at The Atlantic asks “Why Do We Laugh at North Korea But Fear Iran?”

I reckon it is his silly haircut and dumb photo opportunities, but Iran does seem to share a secret weaponised photoshop capability.

Of course Iran is Islamic as well:

In the United States, we make fun of Kim Jong Un and the North Korean regime’s over-the-top propaganda machine. The regime may have launched a massive cyberattack on South Korean banks and TV stations last month, but we were circumspect that they were capable of such a thing. When former basketball player Dennis Rodman visited the country in February we giggled. How silly, we thought. Kim Jong Un is a Dennis Rodman fan – how out of touch! Soon after, a video emerged from North Korean state television showing Kim welcomed by jubilant masses of soldiers sprinting to welcome him as he visited a posting from whence rockets were launched in a brief 2010 skirmish with South Korea.  Read more »

Iran is dogged with controversy and ineptness. There was their space monkey swap out then the fake fighter, then the fake fighter flying thorough the marvels of photoshop.

Now their inept spy agency is in the headlines for the all the wrong reasons:

Created to advanceIran’s interests clandestinely overseas, the Quds Force has lately provided mostly embarrassment, stumbling in Azerbaijan, Georgia, India, Kenya and most spectacularly in Thailand, where before accidentally blowing up their Bangkok safe house, Iran’s secret agents were photographed in the sex-tourism mecca of Pattaya, one arm around a hookah, the other around a hooker. In its ongoing shadow war with Israel, the Iranian side’s lone “success” was the July 18 bombing of a Bulgarian bus carrying Israeli tourists — though European investigators last week officially attributed that attack to Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hizballah. That leaves the Islamic Republic itself with a failure rate hovering near 100% abroad and an operational tempo — nine overseas plots uncovered in nine months — that carries a whiff of desperation. A Tehran government long branded by U.S. officials as the globe’s leading exporter of terrorism may be cornering the market on haplessness.  Read more »

Hot on the heels of changing one space faring monkey into another, and launching a brand new stealth fighter jet made of plastic, Iran has been caught out again with another Photoshop Fail

Alexander Abad-Santos at The Atlantic Wire reports

Iran’s homegrown, radar-evading stealth fighter jet is flying the very cinematic skies, according to state news agency/Iranian propaganda machine Khouz News, as the nation’s defense minister continues to fend off the non-believers as false news/Western propaganda. Well, we’ve got news for him: The only technological miracle in this alleged flight of the Qahar 313 fighter over Mount Damavand is that someone at the Iranian defense ministry appears to have upgraded to Photoshop CS6 since the last copy-and-paste job went viral:

Impressive stuff.  But is it real?   Read more »

Instead of an arms race, Iran could in fact be gearing up to take on Hollywood.

Hot on the heels of trying to convince the world that Iran achieved monkeyed space flight by swapping in a different monkey after the original perished, Iran is now putting on a big show about their new Stealth Fighter Jet.

One problem:  It appears to be a scale model made of plastic.   Read more »

Via: The Telegraph

The Washington post reports

“I’m ready to be the first Iranian to sacrifice myself for our country’s scientists,” the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying in an address to space scientists in Tehran.   Read more »

Yesterday I published an article about the Iranian missile test.  In it were two photos of monkeys, one before the flight, and one after.

The monkeys in the photos were clearly not the same.

I, like many others in the international news media, jumped to the obvious conclusion that the monkey didn’t survive the space flight.

Overnight, new information has come to light, and with that in mind, I would like to apologise for misleading my readers.

The monkey has passed its post-flight medical checks, and is absolutely fine.   Read more »

What went up alive, appears to not have come down that way.  In the post-flight press conference, the monkey that went up appears to be different from the one shown to “prove” the success.

via: The Independent

On January 28, Iran captured the world’s attention by sending a monkey into space. The international community largely interpreted this move as a way for Iran to show it is making scientific progress, despite economic sanctions imposed by the West in an effort to impede the development of an Iranian nuclear program.   Read more »

An Iranian scientist holds a live monkey at an unknown location in Iran on January 28, 2013. Iranian state media reported that it lauched the monkey in a suborbital flight and returned it safely to Earth.

via: UPI

Not so funny now, is it?  The thing looks terrified.