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AFP: "US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that Iran is directly or indirectly communicating with opposition groups in Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen in a bid to shape events there. It was the first time that Clinton detailed alleged efforts by Iran to meddle in the three-month wave of Arab revolts that has toppled presidents in Tunisia and Egypt, convulsed Libya and shaken Yemen, Bahrain and Oman. 'They are doing everything they can to influence the outcomes in these places,' Clinton told the Senate Appropriations Committee. 'They are using Hezbollah... to communicate with counterparts... in (the Palestinian movement) Hamas who then in turn communicate with counterparts in Egypt,' the chief US diplomat said. 'We know that they are reaching out to the opposition in Bahrain. We know that the Iranians are very much involved in the opposition movements in Yemen,' she said. 'So either directly or through proxies, they are constantly trying to influence events. They have a very active diplomatic foreign policy outreach,' she added." http://t.uani.com/fA2UU6
Haaretz: "Zimbabwe was willing to work with Iran on extracting uranium resources meant for Tehran's nuclear program, Zimbabwe's foreign minister told the Iranian ISNA news agency on Thursday. Last month a new intelligence report claimed that Iran was expanding its covert global search for the uranium it needs for its nuclear activities and a key focus is Zimbabwe. The report is in line with international assessments that Iran's domestic supplies cannot sustain its nuclear program that could be turned toward making weapons. Speaking of the issue during an official visit to Tehran, Zimbabwean Foreign Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi told ISNA that while 'Zimbabwe holds rich resources, but the problem we face is lack of budget, finance and required technical equipment to take the very rich resources out and use them.'" http://t.uani.com/fXNbFH
BBC: "Iran's opposition says more than 200 people were arrested on Tuesday while trying to protest in Tehran. Opposition websites said security services rounded up protesters in several locations in the capital and were helped by police in plain clothes. Another 40 people were said to have been detained in the city of Isfahan. Opposition groups had called for rallies over the reported imprisonment of their leaders - Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. The two men had been placed under house arrest several weeks ago as authorities cracked down on protests staged in solidarity with the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Their families say that on Monday they were taken to prison, although the government denies this." http://t.uani.com/filKxq
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
WSJ: "India has started making overdue payments to Iran for crude oil imports after more than two months of negotiations to resolve the payment deadlock, India's oil minister said Thursday. The two countries have been in discussions since December, when India's central bank placed restrictions on transactions with Iran through a financial clearing house that Washington believes Tehran has been using to bypass international sanctions. 'Pending dues of National Iranian Oil Co. are now being cleared and as of March 1, payment of €1.5 billion ($2.1 billion) has been made to the Central Bank of Iran,' S. Jaipal Reddy told lawmakers in a written reply in the lower house of parliament. Mr. Reddy didn't say how the payments were made. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said last month that India was trying to expedite settlement of the Iran oil payment issue by transferring funds through the German central bank Deutche Bundesbank. Government officials said the mechanism called for payments through State Bank of India Ltd. which will make payments in euros through the Hamburg-based European-Iranian Trade Bank AG." http://t.uani.com/ggIHUA
Reuters: "Two Iranian naval ships, whose passage through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean last month Israel described as a 'provocation,' will return via the canal to the Red Sea on Thursday, an official said. Coinciding with political turmoil in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, Iran's decision to send warships close to Israeli territory has rattled politicians in the Jewish state. The ships arrived on February 23 in Syria, an ally of Iran and enemy of Israel, after passing through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, the first Iranian navy vessels to do so since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution." http://t.uani.com/ibkW3p
AFP: "After years of calling for tough action against arch-foe Iran, Israel is finally getting around to joining international sanctions against Tehran, officials said on Thursday. The foreign ministry is preparing legislation that would see Israel adopt laws targeting companies that violate international sanctions, ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP. 'It turns out there is a lacuna in Israeli legislation concerning Iran,' Palmor said. 'There seems to be a gap between policy and legislation, and this would bring the legislation up to date.' Israel has repeatedly called for tougher international steps against its bitter enemy Iran." http://t.uani.com/e4IbGR
Domestic Politics
Radio Farda: "'We the workers of Parsilon [a factory] are hungry' read a banner at a gathering during President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's March 1 speech in Khoramabad. The banner was a direct challenge to Ahmadinejad and his recent claim that 'Iran is among the few countries in the world where no one goes to bed hungry.' He made similar comments during a 2009 press conference. Ahmadinejad said that when the revolution ousted the shah's regime, 95 percent of Iranians lived in absolute poverty. He added that today there were no poor in Iran that are in need of food." http://t.uani.com/dUfoI7
Foreign Affairs
AFP: "Iran has blasted arch-foe the United States over accusations Tehran is arming and training militants in Afghanistan, where US-led forces are battling a raging Taliban insurgency. US Rear Admiral Gregory Smith charged on Monday that the Islamic republic was offering 'support in training, financial support, and equipment, mostly ammunition' to Afghan militants. Iran said his claims were unsubstantiated. 'Remarks by Americans accusing Iran of supporting militants in Afghanistan are baseless and unacceptable,' foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told English-language Press TV on Tuesday." http://t.uani.com/fDuYIz
Opinion & Analysis
Emanuele Ottolenghi in WSJ: "While the world focuses on Libya's popular uprising and Moammar Gadhafi's murderous response, Iran has also-far from the international spotlight-been ratcheting up its repression. In the last few days, Tehran has moved to arrest the two leading figures of Iran's opposition, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, and has reportedly transferred them from house arrest to a political prison run by the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mass protests have erupted again, in open defiance of the regime, and are spreading far beyond Tehran. But Iran's rulers already showed in 2009 that they take no chances and no prisoners when it comes to shielding themselves from their people's wrath. Another bloodbath now is not hard to imagine. Western democracies have been quick to condemn Gadhafi, and have passed a number of measures against him and his regime since Tripoli's crackdown began. By contrast, Iran's violent political repression is only part of the latest, gory wave that has been ongoing for more than a year and a half, and yet there appears no urgency in the West to adopt human-rights sanctions against Tehran. There are compelling reasons to rectify this policy discrepancy. Like Libya, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a place where dissent has been put down, with varying degrees of brutality, for decades-since the early days of the 1979 Revolution. There, torture is rife and the family members of dissidents are intimidated, kidnapped and sometimes raped; hundreds of political prisoners, minorities, homosexuals and women die at the hangman's hands every year, following hasty trials held in utter disregard for the most elementary rules of fairness and justice; and cruelty is dispensed regularly for the sole purpose of instilling fear in the population. Until Iranians openly challenged their regime following the June 2009 fraudulent elections, Western democracies did little to question Iran's treatment of its own people. But then, Iran erupted." http://t.uani.com/dVjDSD
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