Iran is back with a bang. And what a bang. The simplistic Western narrative rules that after the end of UN, US and EU sanctions - in fact a few still remain in place - Iran is rejoining global markets.

That may be the case - from Tehran clinching a deal to buy 114 planes from Airbus to Iranian oil soon hitting Western markets. But the key question is actually how, at what pace, and with what partners Tehran plans to rejoin global markets.

All the commotion, at the moment, predictably revolves around oil. Iran's Deputy Oil Minister for Commerce and International Affairs, Amir Hossein Zamaninia, said the new oil export target is an extra 500,000 barrels a day within a few months. Tehran may indeed boost production by 600,000 barrels a day in six months, and add up to 800,000 barrels a day in output before the end of 2016.

Americans are in near-panic over the danger posed by Islamic terrorists. That danger, however, pales beside an emerging new one. President Obama has proposed a frighteningly wrongheaded plan to "modernize" our nuclear arsenal at the unfathomable cost of about $1 trillion over the next 30 years. Terror will never reach even 1 percent of our population. Nuclear "modernization" increases the prospect of true devastation.

The nuclear threat seems diffuse and faraway, while the prospect of a deranged fanatic shooting up a cinema is as vivid as today's news. Perhaps we have been lulled into security by the fact that no nuclear weapon has been used since 1945. Voices trying to alert us to the true threat are drowned out in a frenzy of over-the-top campaign speeches and TV rants about crazed Muslims.

The most sobering of these voices belongs to William Perry, who during the 1970s and '80s directed the development of air-launched nuclear cruise missiles and later became secretary of defense. Now Perry is campaigning against Obama's plan to develop and buy 1,000 new missiles with adjustable nuclear capacity, 100 new long-range bombers, and a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines. He warns that if the plan becomes real, disputes among nations will be "more likely to erupt in nuclear conflict than during the Cold War."

A case can be made that for Moscow it would be a tremendous waste of hard-earned foreign exchange - to try to counter a rig against their currency they simply cannot beat, as the entire fiat financial power of the US is against them.

Russia's Central Bank by now should be all-out selling rubles for gold, and building Russia's gold reserves.

Well, it is happening, somewhat. Last week, Russia's Central Bank estimated gold reserves to have reached 1,415 metric tons in 2015 - over 17 percent more than 2014, valued at almost $48.6 billion. The share of monetary gold in Russia's foreign currency reserves rose from 11.96 percent to 13.18 percent.

That's still not good enough. Why? A harsh answer would be that the Russian Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance, as some analysts argue, are in effect run by saboteurs and vassals of the US financial elite, a.k.a. the Masters of the Universe.

Still, the Russian Central Bank did not intervene to prop up the ruble. And they should not. The best course of action would be to let the ruble go, ending almost all imports, thus forcing self-sufficiency. Or introduce capital controls, with only approved transactions involving foreign currencies. It did work for Malaysia, for instance, after the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

The U.S. Senate is poised to give President Obama and the next president unprecedented war powers that amount to declaring martial law upon the entire world. Majority leader Mitch McConnell surprised almost everyone last week by saying he has a war resolution ready to be voted on at any time.

The resolution is a new authorization for use of military force (AUMF) for declaring war on ISIS. It would give the president even more power than the AUMF granted to Bush after 9/11, which is still in place today.

The AUMF put forward by McConnell would not restrict the president's use of ground troops, nor have any limits related to time or geography. Nor would it touch on the issue of what to do with the 2001 AUMF, which the Obama administration has used to attack ISIS despite that authorization's instructions to use force against those who planned the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Combat aircraft from the Russian air group in Syria carried out some 170 sorties in the last three days hitting over 480 terrorist targets, the Russian General Staff said Monday.

After losing the initiative in the western regions of Syria, the Daesh leadership decided to focus its efforts on capturing the city of Deir ez-Zor that has already been besieged by terrorists for quite some time, Rudskoy explained.

"From January 22 to January 24, the aircraft from the air group deployed in Syria caried out 169 combat sorties hitting a total of 484 terrorist targets," Lt. Gen. Sergey Rudskoy, chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, told reporters.

Iran's Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has called on member states of the Islamic Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) to deliver relief aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip.

In a Monday meeting with Iraqi Parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri on the side lines of the 11th session of Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (PUIC) in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, Larijani expressed regret that Muslims have so far failed to fulfill their responsibility with regard to Palestinians in Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade for more than eight years.

"Under these circumstances, it is necessary that a group [of member countries] of the Islamic Inter-Parliamentary Union travel to Gaza and deliver Muslim countries' humanitarian aid to the Palestinians," said Larijani.

Gaza Strip has been under Israel's blockade since June 2007. The crippling siege has caused a decline in living standards as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty.

The U.S. and its NATO slaughter forces have already taken a thriving, peaceful country, destroyed it, and turned it into a feeding ground for terrorism. Readers won't be surprised to learn therefore that it looks like the same U.S. and NATO forces are beating the drum for even more war on Libya and its people.

Two top U.S. military commanders have recently expressed grave concern about Daesh/IS/ISIS/ISIL using Libya as a stronghold for their expansion. General Joseph Votel, head of the U.S. Special Forces Command, announced that his command was looking for ways to keep the Islamic State from growing more powerful in Libya. Yesterday, Sputnik reported:

Military commanders have intensified their warnings recently regarding a threat coming from members of the Daesh extremist group in Libya. The head of US Special Forces Command, General Joseph Votel, said there have long been concerns that the militants were expanding their presence in the country.

"There is a concern about Libya," he said at a conference in Washington this week, adding that, "It can't all be about Iraq and Syria."

In October, a Defense Intelligence Agency expert said that Libya has become a new target for Daesh, and is intended to be used as "the hub to project themselves across all of North Africa."

There have been reports that Daesh sent its key leader in Iraq, Abu Omar, to Libya to enhance the terrorist group's influence in the town of Sirte as well as to prepare a potential asylum for Daesh leaders currently in Syria and Iraq. Recruits have reportedly been pouring into the country weekly since Turkey tightened its border with Syria.

Votel, who has been nominated to take over US Central Command, said at the conference that American special operators will continue conducting reconnaissance missions and collecting data, as part of an effort to keep Daesh from growing more powerful in the region.

"In order to address this threat holistically, we do have to do activities and pursue objectives that allow us to tamp down on it," he said, including to, "prevent it, and destroy it in areas where it is not wholly grown or beginning to metastasize so that we can bring that area back to legitimate local control."

Turkey is capable of taking the flood of refugees into Europe under control, Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka said Sunday on state TV.

It would certainly be more efficient to stop vessels carrying refugees from departing from Turkey instead of sending them back from Greece, Sobotka argued.

He claimed that Turkey had the means to fulfill the obligations it made at a EU-Turkey summit in December 2015 and tackle smuggling and the refugee influx to Europe. At the summit, EU member states vowed to give Ankara 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion) and revive negotiations on Turkey's EU membership. In exchange, Turkey's authorities promised to counter illegal migration on its territory and prevent refugees from reaching Europe.

The Afghan army has cleaned over 30 villages from the militants in the southern Kandahar province, local media reported, local authorities said.

The military operation in the province was launched 20 days ago, and at least 30 militants had been killed and another 18 wounded, local government spokesman Samim Khpalwak was quoted by the Pajhwok Afghan News agency on Sunday.

The notorious Taliban insurgents were expelled from the area, including their permanent hideouts there, he added.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the US and EU will bring Europe more problems than benefits, Bulgarian economist Nina Djulgerova told Radio Sputnik. The critics of the TTIP have long instated that US companies will make trade negotiations instrumental in their attempts to alter European economic laws. A recent Control and Corporate Europe Observatory study indicated that this is exactly what the United States is already doing, Der Spiegel wrote on Friday.

"There is a great deal of pessimism in the EU about this, especially given the amount of secrecy surrounding this agreement... Europeans, including MPs and senior EU officials, don't know what this agreement is really all about as the main provisions of this agreement remain unknown. New facts keep cropping up all the time, but no one can say for sure what is true and what is a lie," Nina Djulgerova told Radio Sputnik.