Challenging Opinions >>

Maxim A. Suchkov is a PhD political analyst, Russia Editor at Al Monitor, and a fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies.

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A little more than a year ago, on 27 December 2017, a woman

climbed on top of a utility cabinet, one of those boxes you see in the street

for telecom equipment, she took off the headscarf that she was wearing, she tied

it to the end of a stick and she waved it like a flag.

That might not seem noteworthy, just a little strange,

except for the fact that the woman who did it was Vida Movahed, and the utility

cabinet she stood on was on Enghelab Street, which means Revolution Street, in

Teheran, the capital of Iran.

Vida Movahed

Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, wearing a hijab, a

headscarf covering the hair and neck, is required by law for all women in Iran.

Vida was arrested almost immediately and is currently on bail awaiting trial.

Within a couple of days, several women posted images on

social media of them doing the same thing. One of them, Narges Hosseini, was

arrested and charged with openly

committing a sinful act which carries a penalty of 10 years in prison and

up to 74 lashes; she is also on bail pending trial. Since then many other girls

and women have followed Vida’s example, despite dozens of them being arrested

and some beaten by police.

Reports indicate that Iran’s hardline Islamic government is

unsure whether to crack down hard on these protests, or turn a blind eye – they

fear that either strategy could lead to them spreading. Some of their attempts

to prevent the protests have been pathetic, such as fixing obstacles on top of

utility boxes.

Iran is different to Saudi Arabia, where women were only recently

given the right to get a driving licence, and still can only go to university,

or even go shopping, with the permission of a male guardian.

The place of women in Iranian society is complex. There are

female members of the Iranian parliament, some of whom have expressed something

Michael Pento is a president and founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies. Michael is a well-established specialist in the Austrian School of economic theory.

His steadfast advocacy of free markets has been broadcast on radio programs throughout the country, and he is a regular guest on CNBC and FOX Business News and Bloomberg, and his writing has been published in Forbes, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others.

Rob Fein is the legal director for FreeSpeechforPeople.org. He is a constitutional lawyer who previously served as Assistant Regional Counsel in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where he received the National Gold Medal for exceptional service. He is the Co-Author of The Constitution Demands It: The case for impeachment of Donald Trump.

Bill Warner is an author and the editor of Political Islam.

Bill, as he promised in the podcast sent me his sources for some of the claims that he made, including this about attitudes to Sharia Law, He also sent this link from the Gatestone Institute, an organisation that claims to be a think tank, but in reality is just a fake news mill, cranking out stories that are either gross misrepresentations of the facts, or just plain false.

I actually covered one of their claims on podcast 66 and it’s notable that one of the sources that the Gatestone Institute cite is, in fact, from a BBC journalist, Ruth Alexander, who produced a piece with a whole slew of statistics, and she’s saying the exact opposite of what the Gatestone Institute claimed she was saying.

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As I’m recording this, the UK government is preparing fora vote on Theresa May’s deal with the EU to do Brexit in an orderly way. She is certain to be defeated, most likely by a huge margin. What happens next is almost impossible to say, because the House of Commons is split into multiple factions, with MPs of various parties wanting to stay in the EU, take May’s deal and leave, or leave the EU with no deal.

There is a large majority against every possible outcome,and a very real chance that May, or her entire government will fall out of office, and there is no obvious successor who can do any better at uniting either the MPs or the population, so there is sure to be instability. The UK has long since given up on trying to pursue any other policy goals, they have been preoccupied by this for nearly three years, and there is no end in sight.

Across the Atlantic, President Trump seems to be staring down the barrel of Robert Mueller’s prosecution for campaign finance violations and possible more serious charges. Observers of the White House have various opinions of Trump, Mueller and any possible charges, but nobody disagrees that this is the sole focu...

Graham Elwood is a comedian, actor, podcaster, and writer.

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So here’s a bit of what I said at the top of the podcast a little over a year ago.

Yeah, so I guess that MBS is getting a bit more name recognition now than he was a year or so ago.

There are a couple of things to remember about Saudi Arabia. It’s not a country in the normal sense. It is the only place on earth without a constitution or basic law of any type. The will of the prince, literally, is law. Its name, ludicrously, is that of the al-Saud ruling family. It is literally a personal fiefdom.

And they make extensive use of capital punishment, beheading people whenever the mood strikes them, and they’re not too picky about due process. So it’s not too much of a stretch to think that a troublesome journalist, who would be dispatched without a second thought while in the country, would be a target while outside the country.

So, yes, I still think that Mohammad Bin Salman will be much more of an influence on Saudi Arabia than his recent predecessors. Exactly how that will work out, I really don’t know, but he was high-fiving and bear-hugging Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires last week, so I’m not holding my breath for liberal democracy any time soon.

And speaking of democracy, in July, I talked about an electoral system that the state of Maine confirmed by popular ballot, and I gave a brief explanation of how it would work in a piece that I recorded outdoors on holidays.

So this system was tested in the elections in November, particularly in Maine’s second district. Maine has two House members. The race was very close, Bruce Poliquin the incumbent Republican member, in the first round polled very slightly more than Jared Golden, the Democratic challenger. But, as I said it was very close, there was less than a one per cent margin, both got around 46 per cent of the vote. The rest of the votes went to two minor independents.

Because nobody got more than 50 per cent of the vote, those two minor candidates were eliminated, and counters went to look at the votes of those minor candidates. There were about 23,000 of them, and of those 23,000 voters over 10,000 had given their second-preference vote to Golden,...

A quick message to everyone asking where the podcast is, and where I am and whether I’m still alive.

Unfortunately I got swamped by work commitments and I nearly caught up, and then some other things caught up on me. But I’m getting on top of it all, so I’ll be back shortly with lots more guests and podcasts. So if you are subscribed to the podcast, that will show up in your feed soon – but if you not and you want to be informed, you can subscribe to the podcast by email – just enter your name and email address to the right.

Back soon!

Owen Poindexter is a freelance writer and a presenter of the Basic Income podcast. He’s also a former Democratic candidate for the California Assembly. We talked about his article 18 Reasons to Support Basic Income.

Larry Atkins is a journalist, university professor, columnist, lawyer, and author of the book Skewed: A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Media Bias published by Prometheus Books.

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Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are two journalists with Reuters, and I apologize for what I’m sure is my terrible pronunciation of their names, but I think that’s the least of their problems at the movement.

As I talk to you, they are in a Burmese prison. Being in prison isn’t fun anywhere, but I think Burma is one of the places where it’s most difficult. Being a journalist in Burma is a challenging job, even outside prison.

They were sent to prison for supposedly breaking Burma’s Official Secrets Act, they both got seven-year sentences earlier this month. Also in prison is a Burmese police captain who testified in court that the two journalists had been framed. He said in court that his senior officer ordered the entrapment of the two journalists, who were pursuing a story about the summary executions of Rohingya people.

The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic group who live in mostly-Buddhist Burma, but the Burmese authorities say are illegal immigrants, despite having lived there since long before Burma got its independence from Britain.

The Burmese military has been running a violent campaign against the Rohingya, burning villages, forcing them to flee and killing anyone who doesn’t. In dreadful circumstances, more than half of them have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, itself desperately poor.

There are lots of journalists who are imprisoned or murdered for their work around the world. Worse still, many of these abuses go unremarked. There are people who speak out for human rights, but there are only so many abuses that can be highlighted.

One abuse that was highlighted was that of the long imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi. She was held under house arrest for more than 15 years, during which time she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her campaigning to bring democracy to Burma. Time Magazine called her one of the ‘Children of Gandhi’ and said she was his spiritual heir to the cause of non-violence. Her face looked out from a million Amnesty International posters,

Lori Price is the editor in chief of Legitgov.org, Citizens for a Legitimate Government.

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Vladimir Putin is either very stupid or very clever.

Yes, I’m talking about the Russian affair again. No, not that one, the other one – try to keep track.

A nerve agent easily traceable to a Russian laboratory was used Salisbury, England to try to murder a Russian defector to the UK. The Russian apologists, hearing hooves, immediately cried zebras. Why would they use something so obvious? Somebody must be setting the Russians up.

Not quite. The KGB and its successors have a long history of committing spectacular murders of people they regard as traitors. Yes, they want to kill them, but they want to do so in a way that, even when they deny it, everyone knows that it was them, particularly anyone in their own ranks who was thinking of changing sides. It serves as a warning.

I should say they’re not the only ones to use this tactic. Gareth Williams, a young British spy was found dead in August 2010 in his bath, inside a holdall bag, that was padlocked closed from the outside. He was naked, but there were no fingerprints on the bag or the lock or the bath. There was no evident cause of death. Two experts tried 400 times to lock themselves into a bag in the same way, but failed. British police, in cooperation with MI6, concluded that Williams probably locked himself in accidentally.

But this wasn’t purely internal for the Russians. Sergei Skripal lived in the UK because he was swapped for Russian spies caught in the west. Going after him violated the rules that spy agencies normally stick to – he wasn’t theirs to kill.

The British have been investigating furiously, in every sense, and they were helped by the fact that the UK is the most highly videoed nation on earth. One fifth of all surveillance cameras on earth are in the UK, there’s one for about ever ten Brits, so it wasn’t too hard for them to find a pair of suspicious-looking Russians,

Greta Zarro describes herself as a vegetarian sociologist-environmentalist, and she is the organizing director of World Beyond War. We talked about this article she wrote, and in the podcast I also mentioned the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, UK, and the Haska Meyna wedding party airstrike.

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I was looking through the Reddit politics subreddit thinking about what I would talk about at the top of the show, and it sure wasn’t giving me much inspiration. It’s all Trump Trump Russia Trump Kavanaugh Trump impeachment Trump. I realised something quite depressing.

I’ve said before on the podcast that, to the extent that Putin supported Trump’s election, he didn’t support Trump, that’s to say the candidate or his ideals, he supported Trump as an agent of disruption. He didn’t support what Trump wanted to do, he supported Trump as a way of paralysing an enemy, or a rival at any rate. The same could be said with his support of Brexit in the UK.

Now, you might believe that or not, that’s up to you, we may get more evidence in the future of the extent to which Putin actually succeeded in influencing the election. But regardless of the truth of that, if you look at any political forum, either online or offline, there are a thousand issues that could be the focus of discussion, there’s climate change, Isis, Syria, Iran, the economy, the rise of China, Brexit, the migration crisis and many more. And of course there is Putin.

But they aren’t being discussed, not properly anyway. Scroll down the politics subReddit or any other political forum and, as I said, it’s all Trump Trump Russia Trump Kavanaugh Trump impeachment Trump Trump Trump. Political discussion in the United States, and in the UK for that matter, is totally paralysed. There is no progress being made on any issue.

If our rivals weren’t trying to do that, they sure struck lucky.