It was at 11 pm on Halloween, 31 October, that Iraqi security forces made their latest menacing incursion into Camp Ashraf. Thirty military vehicles accompanied by 10 police cars entered the camp northeast of Baghdad where 3,400 Iranian dissidents live, intimidating residents with glaring lights and deafening noise and conducting exercises around their homes.

 Simultaneously, the 300 loudspeakers placed around Ashraf to pile on the psychological pressure stepped up their barrage of threats and insults.

This bullying show of force followed a press conference in Baghdad earlier in the day at which Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's foreign minister, promised his visiting Iranian counterpart, Ali Akbar Salehi, that Iraq would keep its promise of closing Camp Ashraf by 31 December, which is also the date that the last US soldier is due to leave Iraq. The world now has less than two months in which to stop this closure turning into a possible massacre. After two armed assaults by the Iraqi Army on the camp in 2009 and last April - when 36 people, including eight women, were killed and 300 were injured by soldiers carrying US-made weapons - there are no grounds for believing that the December closure will be carried out peacefully and humanely.

A House panel on Wednesday unanimously approved harsher penalties against Iran, arguing that an economically weak Tehran will struggle in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

By voice vote, Republicans and Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee pushed forward two bills that would strengthen current sanctions while expanding the list of companies and individuals subject to penalties. Lawmakers cited recent allegations of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States and insisted that such brazen behavior demands consequences.

The legislation builds on sanctions that Congress overwhelmingly passed — and President Barack Obama signed — last year. Those penalties targeted exports of gasoline and other refined petroleum products to Iran and banned U.S. banks from doing business with foreign banks providing services to Iran's Revolutionary Guard. The United Nations and the European Union have also imposed sanctions on Iran.

 European parliamentarians issued a fresh warning Monday of a looming "humanitarian catastrophe" at an Iranian exiles' camp in Iraq and urged the UN to provide protection for its 3,400 residents.

MEP Struan Stevenson, who heads the parliament's delegation for relations with Iraq, said in an e-mail that 180 lawmakers from the main political groups had signed a petition urging the postponement of a December 31 deadline set by Baghdad to close the camp.

If disinformation is defined as deliberate and covert efforts to plant false information to bias media reporting and intelligence collection, the UN’s Durban conferences constitute a prime example. Although organized around an “anti-racist” agenda, they focus on ways to delegitimize Israel and are an icon of intolerance [3].

A participant in the Durban conferences is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just as it tries to delegitimize Israel, Iran does the same to its opposition while portraying [4] itself as defender of human rights. By releasing American hostages [5] as a “humanitarian” gesture to “improve” [6] the standing of the regime as President Ahmadinejad arrived at the UN, Tehran shows it is a past master of propaganda.