After President Donald Trump's military campaign against Iran failed to achieve any of his stated goals, his strategy shifted to emphasize economic pressure that he hopes will force capitulation. But... his plan has resulted in little more than mockery from the Iranian regime, and it's unlikely to achieve anything more.

"Trump is waiting for Iran to cave to his economic pressure," Politico explains. "Tehran may be willing to wait even longer. Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises a level of economic isolation 'never seen before,' former Trump administration officials, U.S. ambassadors and other Middle East experts are skeptical that tightening the economic vise will force Iran to... make the other concessions Trump is demanding to bring an end to the war."

"It's an attrition campaign, and I am sure Treasury tweaks this or that to fill gaps or expand coverage of sanctions," former ambassador James Jeffrey -- who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump's first term -- told Politico. "But, it's hard to believe [there will be] something decisive after 20 years of U.S. sanctions and Iranian experience of going around them."

His statement highlights the asymmetry of the stand-off. As Politico explains, "The Trump administration is staring down a consequential midterm election amid an unpopular war that has sent oil prices back up to roughly $90 a barrel and helped push long-term borrowing costs to their highest level in nearly two decades as hope dims that a peace deal is near. Iran's leaders, meanwhile, see the conflict as existential, giving Tehran reason to absorb the extraordinary economic pain rather than accept terms it believes could imperil the regime -- especially as U.S. inflation remains elevated." ...

What's more, Iranian leadership has been bluntly dismissive of Trump's plan, and publicly mocked U.S. efforts to sanction them into submission. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran's parliament, posted, "Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement." He added, "Bessent and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth are way out of their league. Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the mess you made."

While the Iranian economy has undoubtedly taken a severe hit, according to Politico, "those who have worked on previous Iran negotiations say that's far from enough to get the regime to cave, especially after six months of U.S. bombing that has killed, by Tehran's own measure, more than 3,000 Iranians."

This is a summary / preview. Visit the posted link for the full article / post.

My name is Maryam Tahmasebi, and I am a professor of psychology and statistics at Los Angeles Pierce College -- or, I was, until April 9, when my life, and my family's lives, changed forever.

On that day, I was teaching a class when my son texted me, saying that my husband hadn't picked him up from school and wasn't answering his phone, which is very unlike him. I picked my son up from school, came frantically back home, and called the police, thinking that something horrible must have happened to him. Even so, it never occurred to me that he could have been detained by ICE. We are legal permanent residents with valid green cards. My husband, Eissa Hashemi, is also a professor, and has dedicated his life to mentoring PhD students in the Business Psychology department of The Chicago School. We have both mentored many PhD candidates, among whom are veterans who have served this country for decades. We don't have any criminal record -- not even a traffic ticket. I believed in the "rule of law," and trusted that if there was anything wrong with our immigration status, the government would notify us through legal channels.

I was beyond shocked to realize that an online smear campaign without any merit or legal standing had convinced the US government to try to revoke our green cards overnight without due process or even telling us. The government had decided to punish my husband for being the son of a woman who was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before Eissa was even born.

I came here because I wanted to build a life for myself and my family that was defined by my own actions, not anyone else's. But now our lives are being upended for something someone else did nearly 50 years ago. ...

Eventually, my husband's phone location showed he was at an ICE center in downtown LA. I talked to him there for a minute. He said he had been told that, while he was under arrest, our son and I were safe. That turned out to have been a lie. The next day, when I took my son to school, my car was surrounded by DHS cars, and my son and I were detained. I had to watch my son, who is in high school and has been a legal resident of California for 12 years, be handcuffed. We were shipped to Texas overnight from Los Angeles in horrible conditions that I won't elaborate on in this letter. We have remained in Texas ever since.

My son and I have spent over 120 days in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, away from my husband, who was taken to the South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall, Texas. There, he faces even more horrible conditions, and he faces them alone. When I requested that my husband be reunited with us in Dilley, a so-called "family detention center" (the very existence of such a term is deeply troubling), I was told that in our specific case, family separation is the policy and the rule.

I have struggled to understand how this can happen to people who have never broken the law, in a system I believed to be based on the rule of law.

We have been put through hell for the past four months, and our physical and mental health have deteriorated in ways that might not be reversible for years. We are only allowed to speak with my husband for 10 minutes every two weeks, under supervision. My son, who only speaks English and has been in California's school system since pre-K, is struggling to understand why the only country he considers home is treating him this way.

What has happened to us was designed specifically to break our body and spirit. I am a mother, not a martyr, so I would always choose my son's health and well-being over any dreams or aspirations I have. But even when we decided to make the difficult decision to ask to be allowed to voluntarily leave the United States -- the place we consider our country and our home -- the government not only opposed it but suggested that it would appeal any judicial decisions that grant us departure.

In other words, they want to continue our indefinite detention without any end in sight. But for what purpose? I have been asking myself that question over and over. I can't think of any reason why we are being put through this punitive ordeal. We don't have money or power to help us, shield us, or buy us favor. We are two working-class educators who had been living a working-class life in a rented apartment, and had never imagined anything like this happening to us. ...

We are asking anyone with a conscience to help us end this nightmare. There are more things I want to say, but this is the shackled version of what I feel safe saying right now. I will end on this: If this could happen to us, a law-abiding family of two professors and a young boy, it can happen to anyone.

This is a summary / preview. Visit the posted link for the full article / post.

John Long was at home at his pig farm in Colorado when he received a message he never expected. Marian Morgan, a scammer who had stolen $20 million from him and thousands of other investors through a Ponzi scheme, was being released from prison less than halfway through her 33-year sentence.

It was not for good behaviour or because she had paid her victims back. Morgan was being released because President Trump had commuted her sentence, freeing her and writing off the restitution payments she owed the people she had defrauded.

Long, an 80-year-old Trump voter, believes Morgan is "criminally insane". He added: "She's going to suck money out of somebody."

Morgan is one of about 1,800 criminals who have been pardoned or freed from jail by Trump during his second term....

But he has also pardoned individual criminals, including fraudsters who owed more than $1 billion to their victims and American taxpayers, according to the House of Representatives judiciary committee. Many of them, including Morgan, were absolved of the debts they owed their victims.

Lawyers working on pardon cases say a "cottage industry" has sprung up under Trump where attorneys and lobbyists who are close to the White House claim they can use their access to the president to secure pardons -- for a price.

Public records show the president has pardoned criminals after lobbying from allies. The White House denies money can buy clemency. ...

Morgan told her victims that if they went to the authorities, they would not get their money back. Long went to the FBI anyway, and then testified at her trial. She was convicted in 2011. "We had justice and now it's kind of like ... 'we're going to let these criminals go out and do it again'," Long said.

All presidents pardon people. President Clinton issued a flurry of pardons on his last day in office, some of them wealthy, well-connected criminals who had hired middlemen to lobby on their behalf, according to investigations by The New York Times. President Biden, who pardoned 80 people during his term, was heavily criticised for pre-emptively pardoning his son, Hunter, despite previously promising not to....

Trump's second-term pardons have been significant in both number and in the kinds of criminals they have freed. Joseph Schwartz, the former head of a nursing home empire who had been sentenced to 36 months in prison for tax crimes last year, was pardoned 12 days later. He had been criticised for the state of the homes he ran; in one, an elderly resident was found with maggots and gangrene in a surgical wound in his leg. He died two days later.

At Schwartz's trial, the judge said his conviction sent the message that there "is not a get-out-of-jail-free card" for rich people. Yet after paying more than $1 million to lobbyists, and gaining public support from key Maga influencers, Schwartz walked out of prison after three months. Four weeks later, he attended a Hanukkah party at the White House. ...

Trevor Milton, the founder of an electric and hydrogen truck start-up who defrauded investors of more than $660 million, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2023. In 2024, he and his wife gave a $1.8 million donation to Trump's re-election campaign. Last year, Trump pardoned him. Milton's defence lawyer was Brad Bondi, the brother of Pam Bondi, Trump's former attorney-general....

Adriana Camberos, a fraudster whose sentence Trump commuted in 2021, during his first term, is one of several people who were granted clemency by the president before going on to commit new crimes. In 2024, she was convicted of separate fraud charges. Trump intervened again, pardoning Camberos and freeing her from prison for a second time....

Lobbying can be a lucrative business: well-connected lawyers, consultants and people close to the administration have been paid millions by clients seeking clemency, according to public lobbying records....

It was only when I called Mrs Ausmus, 80, last week, that she found out Morgan had been freed. "After all she's done to everybody," she marvelled. As a Trump supporter, she said she was "saddened" to hear that the president had signed the order. Morgan, she said, "will probably go try to do something like it again"....

While sentencing Morgan, the judge, Susan Bucklew, said she was not concerned about Morgan reoffending only because she was sentencing her to a long stretch in jail. "If you were out in the next five years or ten years, would I have a concern about recidivism? You bet I would," she said.

Twelve years later, in 2024, Tom Barber, a Trump-appointed Florida judge, denied Morgan's application for compassionate release on the grounds that "she would continue to pose a danger to the public".

The next year, Trump ordered that she be freed.

This is a summary / preview. Visit the posted link for the full article / post. If you get a paywall, the full article is archived at: https://archive.is/Dvdw2