Top Stories
Reuters: "More than a week after Iran said it had been the victim of another cyber attack by its enemies, foreign computer experts say they have seen no evidence, and some doubt its existence. On April 25, the commander of Iran's civil defence agency, Gholamreza Jalali, told the semi-official Mehr news agency that experts were probing a virus they called 'Stars', but gave no details of its apparent target or intended impact. Last year, Iran said computers at its first nuclear plant had been infected with the Stuxnet computer worm, widely believed to have been designed by a foreign intelligence agency to attack its nuclear program. Stuxnet -- believed to work by corrupting the plant's industrial processes to cause physical damage -- spread around the world, allowing computer experts to analyse it and close programming holes to halt its spread. In contrast, no one at any of the range of anti-virus firms, technology consultancies and think tanks contacted by Reuters had any further details of 'Stars'. 'Until the Iranians provide some more information or someone else can verify the nature of this apparent new threat, I think I need to remain sceptical,' said John Bassett, associate fellow at Britain's Royal United Services Institute and former senior official at Britain's signals intelligence agency GCHQ." http://t.uani.com/mCQrtJ
Guardian: "Close allies of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being 'magicians' and invoking djinns (spirits). Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as 'a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds'. The arrests come amid a growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei which has prompted several MPs to call for the president to be impeached." http://t.uani.com/ieZZcp
WSJ: "A group of Republican senators slammed bank reporting requirements proposed by the U.S. Treasury, saying they fall short of the comprehensive Iran sanctions intended by Congress. The draft rules stem from a law passed last July requiring U.S. financial institutions to disclose whether their foreign bank clients do business with blacklisted Iranian entities. Treasury has proposed that U.S. banks only provide the information upon written request from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. government's financial intelligence unit. The senators, a group that includes Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) and Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), said in a recent letter to acting Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen that the law was not intended to be discretionary. U.S. financial institutions should regularly require foreign banks for which they maintain correspondent accounts to disclose their ties to Iran - whether Fincen asks or not, they wrote. They also criticized Treasury for taking nearly a year to draft the rules and said the the reporting requirements should apply to all 'domestic financial institutions,' not just U.S. banks." http://t.uani.com/lgpotJ
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
Reuters: "Iran imported nearly 50,000 barrels per day (bpd) of gasoline in March and in April, industry sources told Reuters, much of it from Asia, as the Islamic Republic kept up its practice of dodging Western sanctions. Five vessels carrying a total of 1.505 million barrels of gasoline were shipped from Asia in March, a senior trading source said. In total, imports for the month were more than 48,500 bpd. In April, Iran bought 49,400 bpd, according to shipping documents that showed a further five cargoes carrying a total of 1.482 million barrels. Three of them involved ship-to-ship transfers in the Strait of Hormuz. 'When we talk about Iranian imports, around five cargoes per month is the number we keep hearing,' one Gulf-based trader said. 'I guess the main question is where is it coming from?'" http://t.uani.com/miLWYi
UPI: "Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has widened its ever-expanding economic power with a no-tender contract from the Oil Ministry to develop two big natural gas fields in southern Fars province. Even before the April 30 award, the IRGC's engineering and construction arm, Khatam-ol-Anbia, was the largest contractor of government projects in Iran and has become a massive business conglomerate that is independent of state regulation. 'Within the Islamic Republic, and increasingly in Iran's external trade, the IRGC is an economic powerhouse,' says Ali Alfoneh, an Iranian analyst working in the West." http://t.uani.com/kSe618
Domestic Politics
Bloomberg: "Iranian members of parliament are renewing a bid to summon President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for questioning over some of his policies, the state-run Mehr news agency reported. The move comes following recent reports of a rift between Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- the country's highest authority -- over the resignation of the intelligence minister. Ahmadinejad, who had been absent from official meetings for a week, denied there were conflicts when he returned to work on May 2, without explaining his absence. Some 90 lawmakers have signed a petition demanding Ahmadinejad be summoned to Parliament, the report said. The petition needs to be submitted to Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani before it can be considered. At least one fourth of the 290 members of parliament must sign the document." http://t.uani.com/meO1cs
Reuters: "Iran plans sweeping changes to university courses to make them more compatible with Islam, the official IRNA news agency reported on Friday. Deputy Minister of Science for Research and Technology Mohammad Mehdi Nejad Nouri, quoted by IRNA, said at least 36 courses would be changed by September after revision by a group of university and seminary experts. The report did not name the subjects that would be changed, but officials said last year Iran would review 12 disciplines in the social sciences, including law, women's studies, human rights, management, sociology, philosophy, psychology and political sciences, as their contents were too closely based on Western culture." http://t.uani.com/kAWeDx
Foreign Affairs
Reuters: "The United States has drawn up a new plan for an Iranian dissident camp in Iraq, calling for its residents to be temporarily moved to a new location in Iraq pending eventual resettlement in third countries. A senior State Department official said on Thursday the plan was aimed at preventing more violence at Camp Ashraf, where 34 people were killed last month after Iraqi security forces moved against it. 'We recognize that this is a humanitarian tragedy that is occurring and has great potential to be a humanitarian issue into the future,' the official said on condition of anonymity. 'Given the history of provocation, we are deeply concerned about the possibility of future violence.'" http://t.uani.com/j4TkJe
Opinion & Analysis
David Ignatius in WashPost: "When there's political upheaval in Tehran, it's often interwoven with the explosive question of possible outreach to the United States. And that may be the case with a recent feud between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The key figure in this dispute is Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, Ahmadinejad's former chief of staff and said to be his choice as successor in the next Iranian presidential elections, scheduled for 2013. In recent months, Mashaei is said to have initiated a series of contacts attempting to open a dialogue with the United States. This new outreach follows Ahmadinejad's efforts in 2009 to explore a possible nuclear deal with the West, which were rebuffed by Khamenei. Paradoxically, the hard-line president, notorious for his anti-Israel rhetoric, would also like to take credit for a deal that eases Iran's isolation and opens the way for greater contact and cooperation with the West. 'He [Ahmadinejad] craves recognition from outside, and Mashaei is his instrument,' says one well-informed Iran analyst. The political ferment in Tehran is one more sign of the Arab Spring, an earthquake that is shaking the entire Middle East. In this environment, both Ahmadinejad and Khamenei understand that the legitimacy of their increasingly isolated regime is in danger. Ahmadinejad's circle seems to favor outreach; Khamenei and the clerics want deeper retrenchment. Sources say Mashaei has sent multiple signals indicating that he wants to meet with American representatives. U.S. officials say there hasn't been a meeting, and that's probably because Washington isn't clear precisely who Mashaei represents or what his agenda for talks might be. Although President Obama has never dropped his offer to talk with Iran, it would be risky for the United States to engage any single faction. That's likely one explanation for U.S. wariness about Mashaei's overtures." http://t.uani.com/kZ4WuB
Michael Weiss in The Daily Telegraph: "While Britons celebrated the royal wedding last Friday, one of Iran's greatest intellectuals willingly fell to his death from the sixth-floor balcony of his Tehran apartment. Siamak Pourzand, aged 80, had held out long enough against the Islamic Republic, despite its best efforts to erase his outsize influence and, indeed, his existence. In the end, he died on his own terms. Pourzand was an already prominent cultural commentator and foreign correspondent long before Ayatollah Khomeini boarded a plane from Paris, full of big ideas, in 1979. He reported on JFK's funeral and interviewed Nixon while also finding time to write supple film criticism for the prestigious French journal Cahiers du Cinema. Secular and cosmopolitan to the core, Pourzand had no time for the guardianship of the sadists and made a point of saying so, especially in the late 1990s when he began writing for various opposition newspapers (having been banned from the ones that were now mullah-controlled). He covered the funeral processions of Darius and Parvaneh Forouhar, a married couple who were assassinated in their Tehran apartment in 1998 as part of the 'chain murders' of prominent Iranian dissidents. Why didn't Pourzand leave Iran when he had the chance? One of his daughters, Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, a long-time human rights activist in New York, told me yesterday that her father always believed that a nation's cultural identity was the first casualty of fanatical revolutions. 'He used to talk about Savonarola,' Banafsheh said, 'who also tried to erase a great culture in the service of religiosity. My dad hung around as a gift to Iranian people.' A flicker of hope appeared during the 'reformist' presidency of Mohammed Khatami, when Pourzand was appointed the director of the privately-funded Tehran Arts and Cultural Center. Reformism in those days came with a price, however: the digging-in of religious hardliners who set up 'parallel institutions' in Iran that were beholden to no one but themselves and, of course, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. A shadow government operating inside a rogue government, the parallel institutions fell foul of Iran's obscurantist constitution and legal codes. The most feared of these institution was the Amaken, or the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prohibition of Vice." http://t.uani.com/kPCRWo
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