Last week the United States granted a rare waiver allowing a U.S.-based Iranian American lobbying group to set up shop here in what some people consider a gesture of diplomatic outreach. But Iranian officials, who also must grant permission for the American-Iranian Council to open a branch, have responded coolly to the modest olive branch.
The council announced last week that the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control had granted it permission to open an office in Tehran, something ordinarily forbidden because of a stiff embargo on conducting all but a few types of business with the Islamic Republic.
The New Jersey-based organization, which describes itself as a think tank, advocates friendly ties between Iran and America. Its Iranian American president and founder, Hooshang Amirahmadi, a scholar at Rutgers University, travels frequently to Tehran, the Iranian capital, and met Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was at the United Nations last month.
No joint European strategy on banks
The leaders of Europe's four largest economic powers vowed Saturday to protect their banks from the continuing reverberations of the increasingly global financial crisis but could not agree on a common Europe-wide strategy.
Unlike the United States, which last week committed $700 billion in government money to shoring up Wall Street, Europe plans to continue dealing with its financial problems on a case-by-case basis. That approach, which has involved tens of billions of dollars at a step, is complicated by the transnational presence of so many large European financial institutions.
But the European leaders did call for a global economic summit by year's end aimed at revamping the international financial system, which is a legacy of a conference held at Bretton Woods, N.H., in the waning months of World War II.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Europe's most vocal advocate of a continent-wide response, announced that for now, he and the leaders of Britain, Germany and Italy agreed in four hours of discussions only that each country would use "its own means" to safeguard banks from collapse but would do so "in a coordinated way."
U.S. fiscal crisis seems to have altered political map
The faltering economy has left Sen. John McCain on the political defensive, altering the landscape in many of the most important battleground states and providing a series of avenues for Sen. Barack Obama to claim the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House in November, according to political strategists in both parties.
Over the past two weeks, Obama has opened up leads both nationally and in the states likely to decide the outcome of the presidential election. A combination of factors -
the tumult in the financial and credit markets, the performance of the two candidates in responding to it, and increased doubts about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin - have contributed.
McCain's abrupt decision last week to take down his television ads in Michigan and to shift staff to other states highlighted the increasingly challenging environment in which the Republican nominee now finds himself.
The McCain campaign once saw Michigan as a prime target for shifting a big industrial state to the Republican column in what would have been a major blow to Obama. But strategists said the economic downturn, which has hit Michigan especially hard, appeared to be too much for McCain to overcome.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
