CTV National News: Concern for safety amid ongoing airstrikes
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The death toll in Iran and Israel continues to rise as both countries launch airstrikes. Kamil Karamali on the concerns for civilians.
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Globe and Mail
29 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
For Iranian-Americans, a potential U.S. attack on the regime brings complex feelings
Nearly 20 years ago, Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani set out with other entertainers on an Axis of Evil comedy tour, hoping laughs could subvert stereotypes. Being Iranian, he jokes, is like a Facebook relationship status: It's complicated. Perhaps never more than in the past week, as Israeli munitions have pounded the country where he was born, where 90 million people live as inheritors of a proud history – but under the rule of an authoritarian Islamic regime. 'We love our land. We love our history and we don't want that destroyed. We don't want our people destroyed, either,' Mr. Jobrani said in an interview Friday. Born in Tehran, he knows how people have suffered under what he calls 'a brutal dictatorship.' His own cousins are among those who have fled the Iranian capital in recent days, seeking safety in more distant places. Still, he has little hope that bombs and missiles will win their liberty from oppression. 'War has never helped solve anything – not in the 21st century,' he said. 'We haven't really come out of a war, especially in the Middle East, and gone: 'See? It worked!'' Roughly a half-million Iranian-Americans live in the U.S., a population whose largest concentration lies in Los Angeles – 'Tehrangeles' – but whose numbers reach across the country. Turmoil in the country of their birth has accustomed them to anxiety. 'I had a bit where I said, I just wish I was Swedish, life would be so much easier,' Mr. Jobrani said. 'Being Iranian, it's constant – they're always in the news and always the enemy.' Analysis: Collapse of Iranian regime could have unintended consequences for U.S. and Israel Yet many, like Mr. Jobrani, see little gain in using military force to attack the regime that has ruled the country since 1979. In the days before Israel launched strikes against Iran last week, the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, commissioned a poll that showed 53 per cent of Iranian-Americans opposed U.S. military action against Iran, while nearly one in two said diplomacy represents the best path to preventing the country from obtaining nuclear weapons. Only 22 per cent said military operations are the best hope to forestall a nuclear-armed Iran. 'The strong outcry in the Iranian community is, 'Don't get involved in this. Stop the war. Stop the bombing. Let the Iranian people breathe and give them a chance to chart their own future,' said Ryan Costello, a policy director with NIAC. 'The movement for democracy in Iran has to be one that's led by Iranians, not a hostile government.' For others, however, the attacks on Iran have also brought a flourish of hope. In the NIAC poll, 36 per cent of respondents said they supported U.S. military action against Iran. Now, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordering military strikes against the country where she lived until her late 20s, Farnoush Davis cannot suppress a feeling of hope. 'It's very exciting,' she said. Opinion: Iranians deserve a path to freedom that is also free from violence Ms. Davis grew up with little love for the ruling authorities who demanded she cover her head, made Western music illegal and lay U.S. flags on doorsteps for people to tread on. As a young woman, she rejected the hijab, stepped carefully around the flags, developed a fondness for Michael Jackson – and ultimately left for the U.S., where she now lives as a citizen in Idaho. For people in Iran, the downpour of Israeli munitions, offers a fresh chance 'to take down the Islamic republic, get their lives back and go for freedom,' she believes. For nearly a half-century, she added every attempt to demand change from within has failed. 'We need to have some help from outside,' she said. 'I appreciate what Netanyahu is doing.' For those whose lives are intertwined with Iran, the past two years have given even greater cause for fear. Professor Persis Karim, the Neda Nobari Chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, said she can only imagine how terrified people in Iran must feel because they have watched Israel's military campaign in Gaza. Analysis: Trump's two-week pause on Iran puts him at centre of world's biggest drama She has family members in Tehran and spoke with a cousin after the first night of bombing. Her cousin lives with her elderly mother and didn't want to leave. 'Two days later, I got a text and she said: 'We're leaving,'' Prof. Karim said, speaking Friday from a hotel room in Los Angeles after a Thursday night screening of a film she co-directed and executive produced about Iranian-Americans. Sadly, she says, few people attended, likely because they are worried, sick and anxious. Prof. Karim said she is 'ashamed' of the U.S.'s behaviour and that of President Donald Trump especially. 'I think the whole thing is absolutely disgusting in terms of international leadership,' she said. She also criticized Israel for suggesting it is time for Iranian people to rise up, calling it 'completely nonsense.' 'People cannot rise up and liberate themselves from an oppressive government when bombs are being lobbed at them, especially at civilians and civilian sites,' she said. 'I think what it's doing, it's going to harden the Islamic Republic.' Mr. Jobrani, meanwhile, has found himself placing his hopes for a better Iranian future not in Mr. Netanyahu or Mr. Trump, but in others who he sees as more determined to seek peace – perhaps European diplomats, perhaps Chinese negotiators, perhaps even Russia's Vladimir Putin or U.S. conservatives like Steven Bannon and Tucker Carlson, who have publicly opposed U.S. entry into war with Iran. 'Maybe these other ideologues from his party can convince him not to escalate,' Mr. Jobrani said. It is, he said, 'a surreal time and situation.'
Winnipeg Free Press
34 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Vance blames California Dems for violent immigration protests and calls Sen. Alex Padilla ‘Jose'
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Vice President JD Vance on Friday accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of encouraging violent immigration protests as he used his appearance in Los Angeles to rebut criticism from state and local officials that the Trump administration fueled the unrest by sending in federal officers. Vance also referred to U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, the state's first Latino senator, as 'Jose Padilla,' a week after the Democrat was forcibly taken to the ground by officers and handcuffed after speaking out during a Los Angeles news conference by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on immigration raids. 'I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question,' Vance said, in an apparent reference to the altercation at Noem's event. 'I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn't a theater. And that's all it is.' 'They want to be able to go back to their far-left groups and to say, 'Look, me, I stood up against border enforcement. I stood up against Donald Trump,'' Vance added. A spokesperson for Padilla, Tess Oswald, noted in a social media post that Padilla and Vance were formerly colleagues in the Senate and said that Vance should know better. 'He should be more focused on demilitarizing our city than taking cheap shots,' Oswald said. Vance's visit to Los Angeles to tour a multiagency Federal Joint Operations Center and a mobile command center came as demonstrations calmed down in the city and a curfew was lifted this week. That followed over a week of sometimes-violent clashes between protesters and police and outbreaks of vandalism and looting that followed immigration raids across Southern California. Trump's dispatching of his top emissary to Los Angeles at a time of turmoil surrounding the Israel-Iran war and the U.S.'s future role in it signals the political importance Trump places on his hard-line immigration policies. Vance echoed the president's harsh rhetoric toward California Democrats as he sought to blame them for the protests in the city. 'Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, by treating the city as a sanctuary city, have basically said that this is open season on federal law enforcement,' Vance said after he toured federal immigration enforcement offices. 'What happened here was a tragedy,' Vance added. 'You had people who were doing the simple job of enforcing the law and they had rioters egged on by the governor and the mayor, making it harder for them to do their job. That is disgraceful. And it is why the president has responded so forcefully.' Newsom's spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement, 'The Vice President's claim is categorically false. The governor has consistently condemned violence and has made his stance clear.' In a statement on X, Newsom responded to Vance's reference to 'Jose Padilla,' saying the comment was no accident. Jose Padilla also is the name of a convicted al-Qaida terrorism plotter during President George W. Bush's administration, who was sentenced to two decades in prison. Padilla was arrested in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport during the tense months after the 9/11 attacks and accused of the 'dirty bomb' mission. It later emerged through U.S. interrogation of other al-Qaida suspects that the 'mission' was only a sketchy idea, and those claims never surfaced in the South Florida terrorism case. Responding to the outrage, Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, said of the vice president: 'He must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.' Federal immigration authorities have been ramping up arrests across the country to fulfill Trump's promise of mass deportations. Todd Lyons, the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has defended his tactics against criticism that authorities are being too heavy-handed. The friction in Los Angeles began June 6, when federal agents conducted a series of immigration sweeps in the region that have continued since. Amid the protests and over the objections of state and local officials, Trump ordered the deployment of roughly 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to the second-largest U.S. city, home to 3.8 million people. Trump has said that without the military's involvement, Los Angeles 'would be a crime scene like we haven't seen in years.' Newsom has depicted the military intervention as the onset of a much broader effort by Trump to overturn political and cultural norms at the heart of the nation's democracy. Earlier Friday, Newsom urged Vance to visit victims of the deadly January wildfires while in Southern California and talk with Trump, who earlier this week suggested his feud with the governor might influence his consideration of $40 billion in federal wildfire aid for California. 'I hope we get that back on track,' Newsom wrote on X. 'We are counting on you, Mr. Vice President.' Vance did not mention either request during his appearance on Friday. ___ Associated Press writers Julie Watson and Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles and Tran Nguyen in Sacramento contributed to this report.
Globe and Mail
2 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
Putin says all of Ukraine is ‘ours' as he eyes capture of Sumy
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that in his view the whole of Ukraine was 'ours' and cautioned that advancing Russian forces could take the Ukrainian city of Sumy as part of a bid to carve out a buffer zone along the border. Ukraine's foreign minister denounced the statements as evidence of Russian 'disdain' for U.S. peace efforts and said Moscow was bent on seizing more territory and killing more Ukrainians. Russia currently controls about a fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, more than 99 per cent of the Luhansk region, over 70 per cent of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Asked about fresh Russian advances, Putin told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that he considered Russians and Ukrainians to be one people and 'in that sense the whole of Ukraine is ours.' Kyiv and its Western allies say Moscow's claims to four Ukrainian regions and Crimea are illegal, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly rejected the notion that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. He has also said that Putin's terms for peace are akin to capitulation. Putin, who ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, said on Friday he was not questioning Ukraine's independence or its people's striving for sovereignty, but he underscored that when Ukraine declared independence as the Soviet Union fell in 1991 it had also declared its neutrality. Putin said Moscow wanted Ukraine to accept the reality on the ground if there was to be a chance of peace – Russia's shorthand for the reality of Russia's control over a chunk of Ukrainian territory bigger than the U.S. state of Virginia. 'We have a saying, or a parable,' Putin said. 'Where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours.' Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, writing in English on the X social media platform, said: 'Putin's cynical statements demonstrate complete disdain for U.S. peace efforts.' 'While the United States and the rest of the world have called for an immediate end to the killing, Russia's top war criminal discusses plans to seize more Ukrainian territory and kill more Ukrainians.' Wherever a Russian soldier sets foot, 'he brings along only death, destruction, and devastation,' Sybiha said. Zelensky, in his nightly video address, said Russia had shown 'openly and utterly cynically that they 'don't feel like' agreeing to a ceasefire. Russia wants to continue the war.' Zelensky said commanders had discussed action in Ukraine's northern Sumy region and that Russia had 'various plans and intentions, completely mad as always. We are holding them back and eliminating these killers, defending our Sumy region.' Putin said Russian forces were carving out a buffer zone in the Sumy region in order to protect Russian territory. 'Next is the city of Sumy, the regional centre. We don't have the task of taking it, but in principle I don't rule it out,' he said.
