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NYT: "The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel's never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal. Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role - as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran's efforts to make a bomb of its own. Behind Dimona's barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran's at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran's ability to make its first nuclear arms." http://nyti.ms/g7r1ak
Daily Telegraph: "Russian nuclear scientists are providing technical assistance to Iran's attempts activate the country's first nuclear power plant at the Gulf port. But they have raised serious concerns about the extensive damage caused to the plant's computer systems by the mysterious Stuxnet virus, which was discovered last year and is widely believed to have been the result of a sophisticated joint US-Israeli cyber attack. According to Western intelligence reports, Russian scientists warned the Kremlin that they could be facing 'another Chernobyl' if they were forced to comply with Iran's tight deadline to activate the complex this summer. After decades of delays over the plant, which was first commissioned by the Shah in the 1970s, Iran's leaders are demanding that scientists stick to the schedule set last year. They argue that any delay would be a blow to Iran's international prestige." http://bit.ly/gd05LT
AP: "Despite a tightening net of sanctions, Iran has continued covert attempts to purchase technology for its controversial nuclear program through more than 350 companies, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported Sunday. Citing U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, Aftenposten reported that Iran has tried several times in 2008 and 2009 to buy uranium, computers and control systems required to run nuclear reactors. It said the country has also tried to buy centrifuges, milling machines and materials which can increase the range of Iranian missiles. The cables come from a trove of 250,000 uncensored U.S. diplomatic documents that WikiLeaks has been making public. Aftenposten said last month it had obtained all the documents." http://bit.ly/eRH1gZ
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
WashPost: "Diplomats from six nations and the Arab League toured Iran's main uranium enrichment facility on Sunday in a visit organized by Tehran in hopes of bolstering its assurances that its nuclear work is entirely peaceful. The United States and some of its allies have for years accused Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability under the cover of a civil nuclear power program, and Washington - which was not invited - mocked Iran's event as a 'magical mystery tour.' It said it was no substitute for fully cooperating with the U.N. nuclear watchdog to prove that its nuclear work has no military dimension." http://wapo.st/dYotG1
Guardian: "Iran has admitted the two unmanned US spy planes that it claimed to have shot down were hit outside its airspace, a local news agency reported. The semi-official Fars news agency quoted Gen Gholam Ali Rashid, acting chief of the country's armed forces as saying 'the planes were shot down outside of Iran's airspace'. However he did not say why the planes were targeted. He did say Iran has the remains of the planes in its possession. On Saturday, Iran said it had determined the two aircraft were operated by the US after announcing their downing earlier this month. The US navy's 5th Fleet, which is based in the Gulf, said at the time that it had no reports of any aircraft downed recently." http://bit.ly/hKhH5o
Human Rights Daily Telegraph: "Mrs Ashtiani's sentence to be stoned for adultery was suspended last year after condemnation from several governments, but she had still faced death by hanging for being an accomplice in her husband's murder. In a letter to Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian president, the head of parliament's human rights committee, Zohre Elahian, said the hanging, too, had been suspended due to pleas from her children. 'Although the stoning sentence has not been finalised yet, the hanging sentence has been suspended due to (her children's) pardon,' the letter said, according to student news agency ISNA. Ashtiani has been sentenced to 10 years' jail, Elahian said. She was arrested in 2006." http://bit.ly/dFkJrJ
AP: "Iranian authorities have unleashed an 'execution binge' with an average rate of one person hanged every eight hours since the beginning of the year, a rights group monitoring the Islamic Republic said Sunday. 'The Iranian Judiciary is on an execution binge orchestrated by the intelligence and security agencies,' stated Aaron Rhodes, a spokesman for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. A statement by the New York-based group said at least 47 prisoners have been hanged since Jan. 1, including a reported Kurdish activist accused of fighting against the state. It said other jailed Kurds also are at risk of facing the gallows for alleged links to a groups battling for greater rights for Iran's Kurdish minority." http://bit.ly/e2P3Ze
Domestic Politics
NYT: "After months of false starts, dire warnings and political wrangling, Iran has embarked on a sweeping program of cuts in its costly and inefficient system of subsidies on fuel and other essential goods that has put a strain on state finances and held back economic progress for years. The government's success in overcoming political obstacles to make the cuts and its willingness to risk social upheaval suggest that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have consolidated power after the internal fractures that followed his bitterly disputed re-election in 2009 - a development that some analysts believe could influence Iran's position at nuclear talks in Istanbul this month." http://nyti.ms/f7YNOR
AFP: "Iran, OPEC's second largest oil exporter, has discovered a new onshore gas field with reserves valued at 50 billion dollars, Oil Minister Masoud Mirkazemi said on Sunday. The Khayam field east of Assaluyeh on the Gulf has '260 billion cubic metres (9.18 trillion cubic feet) of gas, of which 210 (billion) can be exploited, which is about 24 million cubic metres per day,' the minister told reporters. Iran has the world's second-largest reserves of natural gas after Russia. Its South Pars field in the Gulf that it shares with Qatar holds around 14 trillion cubic metres of gas, or eight percent of world reserves." http://bit.ly/gJOIgc Foreign Affairs
WashPost: "A protracted fuel blockade by Iran sparked protests in Afghanistan for the second day in a row Sunday as tensions rose between the Islamic neighbors, who share a long border and a complicated history. Afghan demonstrators in the western border city of Herat threw eggs and stones at the Iranian consulate, protesting the six-week border blockade of fuel tankers passing through Iran that has caused prices of gasoline and winter heating fuel to rise between 35 and 60 percent across the country. Afghanistan's commerce minister, Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, said at a news conference in the capital Sunday that the government was 'not happy' with Iran, marking the first public criticism of the actions by Afghan officials. He said the Afghan government had not received any plausible explanation for the blockade, which has left up to 2,000 fuel trucks stranded on the border. 'Whatever reason they have given is not acceptable to us,' Ahady said." http://wapo.st/dSibO1 Opinion & Analysis
Doyle McManus in LAT: "After years of warning that an Iranian atomic bomb is right around the corner, Israeli officials now say Iran is at least four years away from deploying a nuclear weapon, maybe more. And Obama administration officials agree, although they shy away from endorsing a specific time frame. 'We've gained some breathing space,' a senior U.S. official told me last week. 'The good news is that we have slowed down the nuclear clock.' U.S. and Israeli officials say their revised timeline is based mainly on reports that Iran is having trouble with its centrifuges, the machines that enrich ordinary uranium into the stuff used in weapons. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave credit last week to the economic sanctions the United States and its allies have imposed. But the full story is more interesting than that. The Obama administration has applied a sophisticated array of pressures on Iran that go well beyond the sanctions and diplomatic 'engagement' that have been the public face of its policy. The measures are showing results - and for that, the administration deserves some credit. One factor has been sabotage, including the implanting of a virus in the computers that control Iran's centrifuges. Neither Israel nor the U.S. has claimed credit for that, but they haven't criticized it either, and they readily acknowledge that it produced positive results. Another key accomplishment has been a painstaking tightening of international export controls to prevent Tehran from buying the high-technology goods it needs to keep its program going." http://lat.ms/gX7G2K
Yossi Melman in Haaretz: "Israel will not attack Iran. At least not in the next few years. It will not attack, first and foremost, because the United States opposes such a move. Israel has never taken any independent step on a strategic issue of global importance without first coordinating or consulting with its allies, or at least without reaching the conclusion that the move would be received favorably in Washington. Israel will not attack Iran because its leadership is divided over the issue, and most decision makers at the operational and political levels, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, are concerned that adventurism could be disastrous. Israel will not strike because this would mean that Iran, Hezbollah and not unlikely, also Hamas (the chances of Syria joining in are minor), will respond with massive missile barrages targeting population centers and strategic sites - including the Dimona reactor, power plants, military basis and airports. There is also another reason, which is gradually becoming clearer and bolsters the assessment that an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear installations and support systems (aerial defense, communications, command and control) is not expected in the coming years. Such a strike would be redundant. According to foreign reports, Israeli intelligence, in cooperation with its American counterparts, has made such a strike redundant." http://bit.ly/fjbw9I
Richard Spencer in The Daily Telegraph: "Lebanon is becoming the Berlin Wall of the new Cold War: the frightening, potentially nuclear proxy struggle between allies of the West and Iran. The West came to West Berlin's short-term rescue with the 1948 airlift, but then could do little but stand and watch as the Soviet Union boxed Germany's former capital into a corner for four decades. Now Lebanon's democratically elected government has had its legs taken away from under it by Hizbollah, Iran's local front organisation. The country faces its own division, stand-off and stagnation, if not worse. Like Berlin after the Second World War, Lebanon is a fractured place, with the major world powers - in this case, the US, Saudi Arabia and Iran/Syria - having their own local front men... And the United Nations tribunal which is the pretext for the latest row is said to have very good circumstantial evidence that Hizbollah played a key role in the 2005 killing, even if the evidence against individual members is likely to be less clear-cut. That would be a huge embarrassment for its growing regional credibility, which has depended on its being carefully ambiguous about exactly when it has been prepared to use terrorism to further its ends. But a wounded Hizbollah is a dangerous tool in the hands of Iran, which is clearly desperate to distract domestic attention from sanctions, economic crisis and growing evidence that Israel and maybe the US have successfully sabotaged its uranium enrichment programme. The talk is constantly of a new confrontation with Israel, but a constant stand-off with America across the world is perhaps more likely." http://bit.ly/f52z5k
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