Irony Alert: Iran Launches Human Rights News Agency

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Message to the Mac McClellands and Nick Kristofs of the world. You will soon have some new competition. As will The Onion:

A senior Iranian lawmaker says the country will soon launch an English-language news agency to report on human rights conditions in the West.

Member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Parliament (Majlis), Mohammad Karim Abedi, told Fars News Agency on Monday that the new news agency would seek to assert human rights in the US and Britain.

Called The Human Rights News Agency, Abedi said that the new agency would report on instances of rights violation in Europe and the US. He said such abuses have gone unnoticed over the years by the world media.

Thanks to its focus on the West, the news agency can conveniently ignore the situation back home. Say, for instance, the Ahmadinejad regime’s stifling censorship of the press, its penchant for juvenile executions, and its bloody crackdowns on political dissidents and religious minorities.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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