Globe Trot: Concerns over Obama’s Iran prisoner swap

IRAN: In a prisoner swap under the Iran deal that returned to the United States civilians like Iranian-American pastor Saeed Abedini, the Obama administration handed off high-level Iranian operatives under investigation for national security concerns. Politico’s Josh Meyer reports:

“In his Sunday [Jan. 17, 2016] morning address to the American people, Obama portrayed the seven men he freed as ‘civilians.’ The senior official described them as businessmen convicted of or awaiting trial for mere ‘sanctions-related offenses, violations of the trade embargo.’

“In reality, some of them were accused by Obama’s own Justice Department of posing threats to national security. Three allegedly were part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like the kind Tehran test-fired recently, prompting a still-escalating exchange of threats with the Trump administration. Another was serving an eight-year sentence for conspiring to supply Iran with satellite technology and hardware. As part of the deal, U.S. officials even dropped their demand for $10 million that a jury said the aerospace engineer illegally received from Tehran.”

The cases are well documented, and Politico’s investigative piece is an important read, all of which raises the question: Where were we journalists?

Just for the record, the U.S. government made Abedini buy his own ticket home.

FRANCE: Emmanuel Macron, a centrist candidate, and Marine Le Pen, of the far-right-wing National Front, will advance to a May 7 runoff in the French presidential election after finishing in the top two positions in a first-round vote on Sunday. Pundits are casting this as a brand-new political face-off in European elections, between the far right and the “extreme center” (The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum calls Le Pen a “national socialist,” while The New York Times identifies “right-wing” as ranging from populist and nationalist to far-right neofascist), but actually both finalists tried to fashion their campaigns to capture centrist votes. Macron is a member of the Socialist Party and served as deputy-general in François Hollande’s first government. He already has won key centrist endorsements, reflecting perhaps how the French reflex is to lean left.

ISLAM: Inside the fraying world of Islamic order: Harvard student journalist Shireen Younus on why she is “not a moderate Muslim,” while college journalist Omar Mahmood highlights the recent mob killing of a 23-year-old Pakistani journalism student, saying he too would be considered an apostate were it not for life in these United States.

KENYA: Armed herders shot and wounded Italian conservationist Kuki Gallmann, author of the memoir I Dreamed of Africa, after they invaded her property and torched a building, allegedly in search of pasture in east Africa’s drought.

THAILAND: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that sign languages are the final frontier of Bible translation,” and with 400 of them around the world (and 70 million deaf people), leading Bible translator Wycliffe is making inroads with sign language Bible translations.