Top Stories
AFP: "The US Treasury targeted companies and individuals affiliated with Iran's national shipping line Monday with measures to isolate them from US finance and commerce. In slapping sanctions on 10 shipping companies and three individuals linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, the Treasury said it was 'responding to Iran's continued efforts to evade sanctions and its ongoing creation and use of new front companies, subsidiaries and affiliates to protect IRISL and to advance its proliferation activities.' The measures targeted IRISL's operations in Britain, China, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. 'As the private sector around the world increasingly turns its back on Iran's national shipping line, IRISL's efforts to evade international sanctions and increased scrutiny have grown more and more desperate,' Adam Szubin, director of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, said in a statement. 'The persistent attempts by IRISL to deceived the world, including through the front companies identified today, attest to the weakness of IRISL as it tries to maintain a semblance of legitimacy while supporting Iran's proliferation activities.' UAE-based firms Pacific Shipping, Great Ocean Shipping Services, Azores Shipping, Atlantic Intermodal, Crystal Shipping and Pearl Shipping were among the designated companies." http://t.uani.com/k3k7SD
WashPost: "A growing confrontation between Iran's clerical rulers and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is spilling over to unusually direct criticism of the president's inner circle of advisers. Hard-line ayatollahs and representatives of the Revolutionary Guard Corps who were instrumental in bringing Ahmadinejad to power in 2005 now accuse his top aides of plotting to push Shiite clerics from politics. Although Ahmadinejad, who has become increasingly isolated, has relied closely on his tightknit group, the critics are demanding that the president cut all ties with his team. In an apparently orchestrated effort, official state media have started reporting that some members of Ahmadinejad's inner circle are relying on fortune-tellers; others are charged with embezzling government money. Official publications have begun referring to Ahmadinejad's four top aides as leaders of a 'deviant' political current that is trying to gain absolute power in the country. The power struggle took one of its apparent victims Tuesday when Iran's deputy foreign minister and ally of a top Ahmadinejad aide resigned. The Associated Press reported that Mohammed Sharif Malekzadeh faced corruption charges, but has denied the allegations." http://t.uani.com/joPHAJ
JPost: "After publication of a joint investigative report in The Jerusalem Post and the German business daily Handelsblatt late last month, French shipping giant CMA CGM S.A. announced in early June the establishment of an Iran Compliance Desk to prevent Tehran's use of ships it operates to smuggle weapons and nuclear technology. At the firm's world headquarters in Marseille, nerves are frayed: Faced with the threat of US sanctions, president Jacques Saadé is preparing stricter monitoring measures... Rising US pressure on the company has shaken up its management structure. In Marseille, company officials don't seem to trust their own monitoring mechanisms and are cautiously promising improvements - probably also to appease the annoyed Americans. A spokesman said it has organized a compliance team exclusively to investigate trade with Iran. In addition, information technology systems will be upgraded and investigations carried out of all firms used by the company for freight monitoring. CMA CGM appears to see a US-based conspiracy against its shipping operation. A spokesman told the Post that anti-Iran lobby groups in the United States are targeting CMA CGM. The spokesman views the maritime company as a victim of such a campaign. A second spokesman told the Post that 'black PR' is being used to damage the company in the US." http://t.uani.com/j6R0dA
Nuclear Program & Sanctions
ABC: "A Kuwaiti shipping company that has done more than $1 billion in business with the U.S. military has also had ties to one of the men indicted in New York Monday for his alleged role in an international conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran. Members of Congress have for months been asking the Pentagon if the defense contractor Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport (KGL) may be secretly doing business with Iranian front companies, and those questions took on fresh urgency Monday with the 317-count indictment. Among those indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance was Moghaddami Fard, an Iranian man whose name appears on dozens of emails with top KGL executives, and who sat on the five-member board of directors of a company that was partially owned by KGL. 'I am deeply concerned by information that suggests the U.S. Army and Defense Logistics Agency may be contracting sensitive military logistics services to an entity tied to Iran's primary shipping company,' Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) told ABC News Monday. 'We must come down hard on this company so others realize they will pay a price for doing business with Iran,' said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). 'Our sanctions must have sharp teeth.'" http://t.uani.com/jueUa1
AP: "A top Iranian official told the International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday to focus on nuclear safety rather than 'baseless and marginal issues' - an expression of unhappiness with attempts to probe charges that Tehran wants nuclear arms. Fereidoun Abbasi's comments to a high-level meeting on improving nuclear safe practices reflected Iran's dissatisfaction with IAEA chief Yukiya Amano for making the Iran investigation a top priority of the agency. It contrasted sharply with other statements on the opening day of the conference that were restricted to the meeting's agenda - tightening and improving nuclear safety in the wake of Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster. The criticism of Amano appeared to be the public side of what two senior Western diplomats said was a campaign, led by Iran and supported by fewer than a dozen allies within the agency, to accuse the IAEA chief of what Tehran says is pro U.S. bias." http://t.uani.com/lQwNtr
Human Rights
AFP: "Iran has freed human rights campaigner Emadeddin Baghi after he served a year-long jail term on charges of spreading 'propaganda against the regime,' Arman daily reported Tuesday, quoting his lawyer. Baghi was sentenced in July 2010 to a one-year jail term and was banned for five years from political activities for 'propaganda against the regime,' according to his lawyer Saleh Nikbakht. The award-winning journalist was arrested on December 28, 2009, a day after opposition supporters took to the streets in a new round of protests against the controversial June 12 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." http://t.uani.com/kM5x65
Domestic Politics
AFP: "Iran's parliament on Tuesday launched impeachment procedures against Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi for appointing an aide to the president's underfire chief of staff as one of his deputies. The motion to impeach Salehi, signed by 33 lawmakers, was officially 'read out in the parliament on Tuesday by an MP in the presiding board,' as required by the law, a statement on the parliament website said. Under the constitution, the signatures of 10 MPs in the 290-seat majlis are needed to start impeachment procedures against an incumbent minister. The move needs the approval of parliament's presiding board before being sent for a vote. The targeted minister has to appear before parliament within 10 days to defend his case and ask for vote of confidence again. The impeachment move comes after Salehi on Saturday appointed Mohammad Sahrif Malekzadeh as a deputy foreign minister in charge of administrative and financial affairs. Malekzadeh was a top official in the high council of Iranian affairs abroad, run by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, whom ultra-conservatives accuse of aiming to undermine the Islamic regime." http://t.uani.com/jKZUyI
Opinion & Analysis
Tina Rosenberg in NYT: "Few doctors anywhere in the world have done their country a greater service than the Iranian brothers Arash and Kamiar Alaei. Kamiar, who is 37, is currently living in Albany, N.Y., where he is working on a doctorate in public health. Arash, who is 42, is a resident of Tehran's notorious Evin prison - where until recently, Kamiar lived as well. Kamiar was released from prison a few months ago, but out of concern for Arash, kept the news quiet. Now that Arash has completed half of his six-year sentence - it is customary in Iran for first offenders to be released at the halfway mark, although Kamiar stayed longer - Kamiar has started to speak out on his brothers' behalf. Last week, the brothers received a major award - the Global Health Council's Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. The brothers' story is a sobering reminder of the risks run even by sophisticated and well-connected advocates for social change. But their work has born fruit: the changes that the Alaei brothers were instrumental in creating are still mostly in place in Iran today, and will likely last. In Fixes, we normally look at successful projects. But today I want to highlight the achievements of two people who did extraordinary things while working under hostile and ultimately dangerous circumstances. Late last year, I wrote about Iran's extraordinary programs to fight AIDS - a disease that in Iran, as in many other countries, is concentrated among injecting drug users. In the early years of the Iranian revolution, the ayatollahs decreed very harsh measures for drug users. All treatment was abolished; possessions of heroin could bring the death penalty. These policies led to astronomically high H.I.V. rates among drug users that threatened to unleash a wider AIDS epidemic. But during the government of Mohammad Khatami, Iran abandoned this approach and instituted a pragmatic, humane policy towards drug users, which includes the widespread use of needle exchange and the provision of methadone maintenance therapy - even in prisons. The policy has greatly reduced infection among drug users and kept H.I.V. from spreading into the general population. Among the biggest heroes of this story are the Alaei brothers. When Kamiar was a medical student in Tehran in 1997, he saw a young hospital patient in isolation and asked his colleagues why. They said that the young man had AIDS. 'Should we be scared of him?' Kamiar thought. 'That can't be right.' He began to learn about the disease and realized how misunderstood and stigmatized it was. He talked about it with his brother, who was then practicing general medicine. When Kamiar graduated, the two brothers began to treat people with AIDS. Empathy is not courage, but it creates courage. Thus began a journey that had a consistent focus: the brothers' identification with one of the most downtrodden and reviled groups in Iran." http://t.uani.com/mDDHdk
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