Top Stories
AFP: "President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad challenged the West on Tuesday to put more pressure on Iran, which
he said would fail to make any impact on the Islamic republic or its atomic
programme. Ahmadinejad, in an address to the people of the northeastern
province of Golestan, said that during a trip he made last month to the United
States, people there 'were insisting that the sanctions have affected us. And
I, on your behalf, insisted and told them: The sanctions have had no effect,
and whatever the heck you want to do in the next two years, do it now so we see
what you are capable of,' he said in the speech broadcast live on state
television." http://bit.ly/aM6qdD
AP: "Iran claimed Tuesday that a
computer worm found on the laptops of several employees at the country's
nuclear power plant is part of a covert Western plot to derail its nuclear
program. Iranian officials have suggested in recent days that the Stuxnet worm
that has affected computers of employees at the Bushehr nuclear power plant
could be a conspiracy to damage Iran's nuclear activities. But Tuesday's
comments by Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast were the strongest
accusations of Western sabotage so far... 'They (the West) have shown by their
words and actions that they try, through any possible means, to prevent or
delay our peaceful nuclear activities,' Mehmanparast told a news conference. 'These
actions won't make us give up our (nuclear) rights at all. These methods won't
help stop or delay nuclear activities in our country,' he added." http://nyti.ms/crwNGO
WashPost: "The
Government Accountability Office said five companies from China, the United
Arab Emirates and Singapore may still be selling gasoline to Iran despite U.S.
sanctions signed into law July 1. The GAO said the companies include
subsidiaries of Sinopec and PetroChina, which are listed on the New York Stock
Exchange. Another is a Beijing-based state-owned oil firm called Zhuhai
Zhenrong, which has an office in Tehran and is one of four companies allowed to
import oil to China. The United States has been seeking to use sanctions to
pressure Iran to halt its nuclear program. Although Iran has ample crude oil,
it has a shortage of refining capacity and last year imported about 130,000
barrels a day of gasoline and other products, according to the GAO report." http://wapo.st/96asIL
Nuclear
Program
UPI: "Royal Dutch
Shell needs to 'come clean' on its energy dealings in sanction-strapped Iran,
the president of advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran said. London's
Guardian newspaper reported last week that Royal Dutch Shell increased the
amount of oil it purchased from Iran by 27 percent from May to August compared
with the previous three months... UANI applauded the energy companies, including
Shell, for complying with the sanctions and ending their investments in Iran
but called for a complete halt to all activity in the energy-rich Islamic
republic. 'These European firms must recognize that their decisions to conduct
business in Iran affect Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons,' UANI
President Mark Wallace said in a statement. 'In particular, Royal Dutch Shell
must come clean and make transparent the full extent of and risks associated
with its business in Iran.'" http://bit.ly/bxiMZ8
Bloomberg: "Japanese sanctions
against Iran, the second-largest oil producer in the Middle East after Saudi
Arabia, may reduce crude exports from the Persian Gulf nation by 25 percent,
according to Nomura International. 'Recent Japanese sanctions against Iran
could force oil exports to below 1.5 million barrels a day in the near term from
2 million barrels a day currently, negatively affecting global supply while helping
push oil prices higher,' the unit of Japan's largest brokerage said in a note
today." http://bit.ly/daNVo3
Independent: "An
arms smuggler who admitted attempting to export telescopic sniper sights to
Iran was jailed for two-and-a-half years today. Andrew Faulkner, 42, of
Spalding, Lincolnshire, was arrested after a shipment of 100 sights was
intercepted at Heathrow Airport in February last year. The former Royal Marine,
who was due to be paid around £10,000 for his role, pleaded guilty to being
involved in the exportation of controlled goods." http://bit.ly/aqQhzk
Human
Rights
Radio Farda: "An Iranian
opposition website says 73 students are currently being held in Iranian jails
over their activism, RFE/RL's Radio Farda reports. Daneshjoonews.com published
the names of the jailed students and said the number is the highest it has been
in decades. It said the students are being held throughout the country, from
Tehran's notorious Evin prison to jails in Ahwaz, Tabriz, Isfahan, Babol,
Rajaee Shahr, and in Gohardasht, which is outside of Tehran." http://bit.ly/9XyuyF
AFP: "Iran has cleared a former
British embassy employee who was jailed last year on espionage charges,
and
commuted his sentence to a suspended one-year jail term, his lawyer said
on
Monday. 'The appeals court dropped espionage charges for which Hossein
Rassam was
sentenced to four years in prison,' the lawyer, Babak Farahi, told AFP.
'He was
sentenced to one year in jail, suspended for five years, for propaganda
against
the establishment... as he had no previous record and held no managerial
posts,'
he said." http://bit.ly/9kx1Wh
Domestic Politics
NYT: "The web sites of two senior
clerics have been blocked by government censors, a possible sign of a hardening
political divide at the highest level of Iran's religious establishment. The
web sites of the clerics, Grand Ayatollah Yusuf Sanei and Grand Ayatollah
Asadollah Bayat-Zanjani, who are both 'sources of emulation,' the highest
clerical rank in Shiite Islam, were first reported blocked by news sites linked
with Iran's political opposition movement on Sunday. The official site of a
third top cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali-Mohammad Dastgheib, was reported blocked
early last month." http://nyti.ms/9gkx8i
LAT: "Gold markets across Iran
remained shuttered in recent days as a strike against a 3% value-added tax
entered its second week. Video of the markets uploaded to the
Internet from the capital of Tehran all the way to the southern provincial
capital of Ahvaz showed darkened, locked stalls and empty corridors. Monday
was a religious holiday in Iran, and observers are waiting to see whether the
strike will continue Tuesday. Merchants and jewelers claim the government
is looking to fill its coffers by taxing small businesses unfairly. The
government continues to paint the union of goldsmiths and jewelers as a group
of greedy and corrupt businessmen." http://lat.ms/bnI1ek
Foreign Affairs
WSJ: "As Iraqi politicians
wrangle through a seventh month of government-formation talks, an unexpected
casualty is emerging: Iranian influence over the country's fractured Shiite
groups. Before inconclusive March parliamentary polls, Iran had pushed Iraq's
Shiite leaders to rally under one umbrella coalition to preserve a sect-based
majority in parliament, as they did in the previous elections in 2005,
according to several Iraqi politicians. When this failed, Tehran urged Shiites
to reunite, post-elections, in an ad hoc coalition backing Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki, a conservative Shiite." http://bit.ly/aN0Fm1
SMH: "Israel has stepped up
efforts to persuade Lebanese officials to cancel a visit next week by the
Iranian President, which it has branded an act of provocation. With Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad due in Beirut next Wednesday for a two-day state visit to Lebanon,
his first since he became President in 2005, Israel has already stepped up its
military presence along the Lebanese border. Mr Ahmadinejad is scheduled to
meet Lebanese political leaders including the head of the militant Shiite
movement Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. He has also vowed to travel to the south
of Lebanon to visit the Hezbollah-controlled villages of Bint Jbeil and Maroun
al-Ras, both of which were partly destroyed during the 2006 war with Israel." http://bit.ly/chWgo0
Opinion
NY Daily News Editorial: "A fine student of Joseph Goebbels is Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, who pioneered
the theory that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it. Between spouting calculated fabrications about
the Holocaust and the attacks of 9/11, Ahmadinejad said on his recent visit to New
York: 'My election opponents are completely free... They express their opinions
and views in complete freedom. There are no restrictions on legal activities,
and they can influence the society like the rest of the people.' Days later,
Hossesin Derakhshan, known as the Blogfather and credited with sparking the
blogging revolution in Iran, was sentenced to 19 years in prison for
cooperating with hostile countries, spreading propaganda and insulting
religious figures." http://bit.ly/cmZbtJ
Mark Dubowitz in Weekly Standard: "Yet many European and Asian
companies continue to make deals with Iran, including Chinese companies (like
CNPC, CNOOC, and Sinopec) and Swiss companies (like Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft
Laufenburg and Ceresola TLS, which last week FDD revealed had sold €1 billion
of tunneling and heavy earth-moving equipment to Iran)... The
U.S. should certainly continue to pursue sanctions against companies like NICO,
and other Iranian-government controlled entities in Europe. But it should also
go after the many foreign energy firms that are violating U.S. law. If the
Obama administration opts for only symbolic and selective measures, it could
collapse our Iran policy, making it likely to require more drastic measures to
prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Observers in Tehran, Beijing,
Moscow and elsewhere are watching. Will President Obama enforce the
comprehensive sanctions he worked so hard to pass?" http://bit.ly/a5IDxf
Meir Javedanfar in The Diplomat: "When Osama bin Laden made a
second plea over the weekend for Muslim countries to be more generous in their
aid to flood-stricken Pakistan, he failed to mention one country that already
has been-Iran. Last month, the Islamic Republic of Iran's leadership pledged
$100 million to Pakistani flood victims in the form of reconstruction
assistance, in addition to the tonnes of relief goods Iranian officials say are
sent there every week. Yet this potentially key development has gone largely
unnoticed by the international media. It shouldn't, not least because the level
of assistance is unusually large by Iranian standards. Indeed, it's one of the
largest aid pledges by the Iranian leadership to date... But humanitarian
considerations aside, there's one thing that has been repeatedly clear in
Iran's post-revolutionary history-its leadership doesn't pledge sums like $100
million unless it also sees some kind of political benefits to doing so." http://bit.ly/db0fEH
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment