Category World News

Tehran, Iran – As the government’s efforts to contain the country’s deteriorating economic situation fail, louder protests are being recorded all over Iran as a result of the government’s growing deployment of armed security personnel.

In the city of Abdanan in the central province of Ilam, where several significant demonstrations have occurred in the past week, footage that was available online showed massive demonstrations on Tuesday night.

While helicopters flew overhead, footage of countless people chanting and walking through the streets of the small city, from children to the elderly. The security forces working to contain them appeared to be far more powerful than the protesters.

Videos of security forces storming the Imam Khomeini Hospital in Ilam, the capital of the province, showed protesters being arrested and detained, which rights group Amnesty International claimed was in violation of international law. This again demonstrates how far the Iranian authorities are willing to go to thwart dissent.

Following earlier this week’s protests in the county of Malekshahi, where several demonstrators were shot dead while gathering at a military base’s entrance, the hospital was targeted. Some protesters received hospital treatment.

People were reportedly sprayed with live fire and thrown to the ground as they fled from the gate, according to several graphic videos that were available online at the time of the shooting. The shooting is being looked into, according to the local governor.

At least three people were killed, according to state-linked media. A police officer was shot dead following armed clashes following the funeral procession of the dead protesters, according to them on Tuesday.

In Tehran, videos of traders and business owners clashing with security forces while using tear gas and batons at the Grand Bazaar were abundant.

In the bazaar, people could be heard yelling “freedom” and yelling “dishonorable” at police. When confronted by security forces, a man yelled, “Execute me if you want, I’m not a rioter,” to the cheers and clapping of the crowd.

“Have no mercy,”

In his first statement following the protests this week, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei remarked that rioters should be “put in their place.”

Chief Justice Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei continued, “We will show no mercy to rioters this time.”

Similar tense events took place in nearby streets and neighbourhoods, where shopkeepers had initially started the protests on December 28. On Tuesday, protests and strikes in a number of Tehran’s other major shopping centers, including Yaftabad, where police were confronted with the words “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran” were loud.

The Iranian government is accused of supporting armed groups in Lebanon and Gaza.

The Tehran University of Medical Science confirmed in a statement that the tear gas canisters filmed inside the hospital compound were not thrown by security forces, despite the fact that more clashes were documented around Tehran’s Sina Hospital.

In addition, protests took place in the cities of Hamedan, Kermanshah in the west, Mashhad in the northeast, Qazvin in the south of the capital, Shahrekord in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari in the southwest, and Lorestan and Kermanshah in the west, and Mashhad in the northeast.

At least 35 people have been killed in the protests so far, according to a foreign-based human rights monitor who is opposed to Iran’s theocracy. Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify any of the Iranian state’s casualty reports.

The price of cooking oil triples.

One of the highest inflation rates in the world is still in place, especially given the constant rising costs of essential food items.

The moderate President Masoud Pezeshkian’s government claims to be carrying out plans to control the economic situation while a rapid decline is roiling.

The rial, the nation’s tense currency, was priced at more than 1.47 million US dollars on Tuesday in Tehran’s open market, breaking a new record-breaking low that demonstrated a lack of public and investor confidence.

The Iranian middle class, which has seen its purchasing power decline since 2018, when the US unilaterally renounced a 2015 nuclear deal and reimposed severe sanctions, has seen its price increase by far the sharpest price increase this week. It has more than tripled and fallen further out of reach of the depressed Iranian middle class.

The development comes after Pezeshkian released a budget for the upcoming Iranian calendar year that eliminated a subsidised currency rate for some imports, including food, in late March.

The decision to eliminate the rent-distributing subsidised currency rate in an effort to combat corruption has been praised by some economists, especially given that the less expensive currency has only been used and has failed to lower food prices.

The decision was anticipated to cause prices to rise in the near future and provoke opposition from establishment interest groups that have profited from the low currency for years. However, it is still to be seen whether the market will listen as the government announces official prices of its own because the oil price spike was so abrupt.

The government has offered to allocate 10 million rials ($7 at the current exchange rate) to help people buy food by using the resources that will be freed from the cheaper, subsidised currency.

Homayoun Shajarian and Alireza Ghorbani, two well-known singers, joined the ranks of numerous online celebrities and people who pledged to end their professional responsibilities, including attending scheduled concerts, in a solemn vigilance and show their support for the protests.

How are our officials supposed to sleep? a video interview that went viral on Tuesday, asked Iranian football legend Ali Daei, who is regarded as a revered national figure among the people.

A case involving President Donald Trump’s tariffs is expected to be decided by the US Supreme Court.

The high court added a non-argument/conference date to its website on Tuesday, indicating that it may make its decision. The court does not specify which decisions it will publish in advance.

Given its wider impact on the global economy, Trump’s tariff challenge has been one of the court’s most closely watched cases.

Trump claimed in a social media post on Friday that a decision would be a “terrible blow” to the US.

Trump stated in a different post on Monday that “our country is financially, and from a NATIONAL SECURITY STANDPOINT, FAR STRONGER AND MORE RESPECTED THAN EVER BEFORE” and that this is because of tariffs.

However, this information is ambiguous. The third quarter of 2025 saw the largest increase in two years for the US’s gross domestic product (GDP). While US job growth has slowed, with sectors that are particularly vulnerable to tariffs seeing little to no job growth.

Jobs in industries with higher import exposure increased more slowly than jobs in those with lower import exposure, according to a study conducted in December by the Federal Reserve’s Kansas City branch’s senior economist, Johannes Matschke.

Arguments in court

In order to address what he called a national emergency relating to US trade deficits, Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in February 2025.

In November, arguments began to challenge the decision’s legality. The liberal and some conservative justices on the court at the time were skeptical about the use of the 1977 Act.

Among those skeptical was Justice Neil Gorsuch, who Trump had appointed during his first term.

According to Gorsuch, “Congress can’t, in reality, give this power back once it’s been given to the president.”

According to Chief Justice John Roberts, the administration’s representative, “the main power of Congress has always been to impose tariffs and taxes.”

In the event of a national emergency, the act grants broad executive authority.

Following a lower court’s ruling, the Trump administration was able to appeal the ruling, finding that the use of the law constituted an overreach of the administration’s authority.

The Court of International Trade ruled in opposition to the White House. The New York court stated in May that Congress has “exclusive authority to regulate commerce,” rather than the executive branch. In August, an appeals court in Washington, D.C. upheld this ruling.

According to legal experts, lower court decisions are likely to be upheld by the high court.

According to Greg Shaffer, a law professor at Georgetown University, “my sense is that the Supreme Court will decide that IEEPA does not allow the Trump administration to adopt the tariffs,” he told Al Jazeera.

The US would need to pay some of the tariffs if the Trump administration lost the case.

The administration would be required to pay back those who paid illegal tariffs, according to the ruling. Shaffer continued, “I would assume that’s what would happen.”

On NBC’s Meet the Press in September, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that the US would “must give a refund on about half the tariffs.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has expressed his desire to see Nicolas Maduro overthrown in Washington, DC.

Infamously, the former Florida senator even posted a series of photos of slain deposed leaders, including a bloodied former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, as tensions with the US and Maduro’s government spiked in 2019.

But it wasn’t until the second administration of US President Donald Trump that Rubio’s vision of a hardline approach to Latin America and his longtime pressure campaign against leftist leaders was realised – culminating on Saturday with the illegal abduction of longtime Venezuelan leader Maduro.

Even though his wider ideological objectives, including the ousting of Cuba’s communist government, are likely to remain constrained by the administration’s competing ambitions, experts claim Rubio relied on an ability to capitalize on the overlapping interests of opposing actors in the Trump administration to accomplish this.

It required a lot of political acumen on his part to marginalize other administration and other voices who were claiming, “This is not our conflict. This is not what we stand for. This is going to upset our base, according to New York University associate professor of history Alejandro Velasco.

Among those agendas were Stephen Miller’s fixation on mass deportation, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s desire for a more pugilistic military approach abroad, and US President Donald Trump’s obsession with opening Venezuela’s nationalized oil industry.

“So that’s the way that Rubio was able to bring into line not quite competing, but really divergent agendas, all of them to focus on Venezuela as a way to advance a particular end”, Velasco said.

A hawk in “America First”

A traditionalist hawk who has regularly supported US military intervention in the name of spreading Western democracy and human rights abroad, Rubio initially appeared to be an awkward fit to be Trump’s top diplomat in his second term.

Trump’s campaign season was defined by his pledge to end international wars, reject US-backed regime change, and support a wider “America First” transition.

However, Trump’s actual foreign policy bears little resemblance to that vision, with the administration adopting a so-called “Peace Through Strength” doctrine, according to observers, which has given the president more room for military adventurism. That has, to date, seen the Trump administration launch bombing campaigns against Yemen and Iran, strike armed groups in Nigeria and Somalia, and attack alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean.

Trump 2.0’s strategy more closely complies with Rubio’s vision of Washington’s role abroad, which has long supported US intervention and high-pressure sanctions campaigns.

The US secretary of state’s personal ideology dates back to his South Florida roots, where his family settled in the 1960s after moving from Cuba three years before Fidel Castro’s rise, in what Velasco called an “acerbally anti-communist” political climate.

“I think for him, it started as a question of finally making real the hopes and dreams of Cubans in Florida and elsewhere to return to their homeland under a capitalist government”, Velasco explained.

If we consider it more hemispherically, it changed from that to what this might represent, which would increase US hegemony in the region for the 21st century.

Vacuum was the place he needed to fill.

After tangling with Trump in the 2016 presidential election, in which the future president deridingly dubbed his opponent “Little Marco” while Rubio decried him as a “con man”, the pair forged a pragmatic working relationship.

Rubio eventually helped deliver Florida by backing Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election. Rubio’s role as the president’s “shadow secretary” for Latin America in Trump’s first term was unusual because it influenced the president’s choice to recognize Juan Guaido as the interim leader in opposition to Maduro.

Analysts note Rubio’s approach to Venezuela has always been directly aimed at undermining the economic support it provides to Cuba, with the end goal of toppling the island’s 67-year-old Communist government. Rubio quickly returned to the island nation after Maduro was kidnapped on Saturday, telling reporters: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I would be concerned.”

Rubio continued to appear largely marginalized in the first few months of Trump’s second term, with the president favoring close friends and family members to lead the way toward major ceasefire negotiations in Ukraine and Gaza.

During this time, Rubio was slowly amassing a sizeable portfolio. Rubio also served as the acting director of the newly-dissolved US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the acting director of the US National Archives. He became the acting director of National Security, making him the first top US diplomat to hold a significant White House position since Henry Kissinger, most notable of all.

According to Adam Isacson, the director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), Rubio eventually found himself in a White House power vacuum.

Isacson compared Trump’s special envoys Richard Grenell and Steve Witkoff to Rubio, who “knows Washington better than the Grenells and Witkoffs of the world.”

“At the same time, other powerful figures inside the White House, like Stephen Miller and]Director of the Office of Management and Budget] Russ Vought haven’t cared as much about foreign policy”, he said, “so the vacuum was his to fill”.

Rubio also demonstrated his ability to be an “ideological weather vane,” according to Isacson. That approach was exemplified by the White House’s National Security Strategy, which was released in December.

The document, which is drafted by the National Security adviser with final approval from the president, offered little in tough language towards Russia, despite Rubio’s previous hard lines on the war in Ukraine. Despite Rubio’s years-long support for the system, it backed the elimination of US foreign aid. It lacked the human rights language that Rubio had earlier used to express his own appeal.

It did, however, include a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which dovetailed with Rubio’s worldview by calling for the restoration of US “preeminence” over the Western Hemisphere.

A victory in the pyrrhic?

Although Maduro’s toppling has far fared far short of the radical change he has long favored, it has so far been a partial, if not pyrrhic victory for Rubio.

In a news conference immediately following Maduro’s abduction, Trump doused support for exiled opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who has hewed close to Rubio’s vision for a future Venezuela. Since then, several news outlets have reported that US intelligence had determined that installing an opposition figure would cause a lot of unrest in the nation.

Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s former deputy and replacement, has long been a steadfast supporter of the Hugo Chavez-founded Chavismo movement, which Rubio has long criticized. Elections remain a far-off prospect, with Trump emphasising working with the government to open the oil industry to the US.

The secretary of state has been referred to as the “viceroy of Venezuela” in some US media, but he has not been officially given a position in the country.

Rubio has been given the task of refuting Trump’s claim that the US would “run” the South American nation while conveying the administration’s oft-contradicted claim that Maduro’s abduction was a law enforcement action, not a war, or a bid for the country’s oil on news programs.

“I think he’s sort of lying through his teeth”, Lee Schlenker, a research associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Al Jazeera.

Even so, he said, “He doesn’t seem to believe a lot of the rhetorical and discursive pretexts that have been used in the context of a Department of Justice indictment,” he said.

According to Schlenker, working with Rodriguez and reportedly Venezuela’s security czar and minister of interior Diosdado Cabello has been “a bucket of cold water on Rubio’s broader illusions,” noting that Rubio’s ultimate goal still stands at “the end of the Chavista project.”

Rubio is also likely to face further reality checks when it comes to his expected attempts to pitch the overthrow of what he will likely argue is a weakened Cuba.

Trump and many of his supporters don’t seem to be as interested in the island because it lacks Venezuela’s economic resources and a known drug trade.