Iran is now calling on everyone else to disarm

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NEED TO KNOW:

Earlier this month something monumental happened: The United States and its allies successfully negotiated a deal with Iran to prevent it from building nuclear weapons any time soon. It was an act of diplomacy near unthinkable for the better part of the last three decades.

But the significance of the deal shadowed an uncomfortable truth: Among the nations negotiating this arrangement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, Iran was the only country that didn't actually have nuclear weapons. The rest — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China and Russia — all have nuclear weapons. (To be fair, Germany just holds American nukes on its soil, it doesn't have its own).

India and Pakistan also have nuclear weapons, it's worth noting. As does North Korea. Perhaps most significantly, Israel probably has about 80 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, though it doesn't publicly declare them and has not signed on to the non-proliferation agreement. That's a startling fact given all of Israel's bluster about the Iranian nuclear threat to its very existence and its staunch rejection of the deal struck this month.

This is all the context for statements made by the Iranian foreign minister today. Mohammad Javad Zarif, in an editorial in The Guardian, called on Israel and the other nuclear powers to begin disarming. Zarif wrote that the campaign would “probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy. But we must endeavor to convince and persist, as we did in Vienna.”

He also called for a zone in the Middle East that is completely free of weapons of mass destruction. To the average American, it might come as a surprise to hear an Iranian official calling for peaceful disarmament. Iran has a blood-soaked foreign policy and actively supports the murderous regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But Iran was once a leader on the issue of reducing weapons in the region. And today's editorial appears to be a sign that the country may be returning to that role. If anyone will listen, however, is another story.

WANT TO KNOW:

Like the United States in the last few years, and indeed like many other parts of the world, the United Kingdom is debating the possibility of decriminalizing and even legalizing the sale and use of marijuana.

According to several surveys, the majority of Brits want to legalize weed. An online petition to fully legalize weed — submitted by a 25-year old economics students — got nearly 200,000 signatures. Parliament is bound to debate anything that gets more than 100,000 signatures. So it's expected to reluctantly take up the issue very soon.

Police are also supportive of legalizing pot. GlobalPost Senior Correspondent Corinne Purtill reports that marijuana possession has accounted for 65 to 70 percent of drug crimes in England and Wales every year for the last decade. Such policing costs a lot of money for a force that is has endured major austerity cuts since the global financial crisis.

But the UK parliament is unlikely to debate the issue seriously. Prime Minister David Cameron, whose Conservative Party was just decisively re-elected, has in fact done the oppoiste, leading an anti-drug campaign. UK politicians probably worry that liberalizing drug laws is bad politics. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was trounced in the media in 2004 when he tried to decriminalize the use of marijuana.

“Politicians are behind the curve compared to the public on this issue,” one expert told Purtill.

STRANGE BUT TRUE:

So a piece of an airplane wing washed up on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean earlier this week. Everyone immediately began to rightly speculate that this could be a piece of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which mysteriously vanished from the skies last year.

The wing looks like it's from a Boeing 777, which is the same kind of plane that MH370 was. But investigators say it will take a few days to confirm that, and a few more days to confirm that the wing is specifically from the missing plane. And even if it is able to confirm that the wing is from a Boeing 777, and that is from MH370, it is pretty unlikely that it will reveal any of the reasons why the flight disappeared at all.

So, to sum up what they are saying more succinctly, it's still possible that it was aliens. Or Russia.