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WSJ: "As uprisings rolled across the Middle East this year, Iran stepped up its jamming of the BBC, Voice of America and other Western networks with Persian-language news channels. The move 'is intended to prevent Iranian audiences from seeing foreign broadcasts the Iranian government finds objectionable,' five networks protested in a joint statement this month. While the use of Western technology for Internet censorship by Middle Eastern and North African regimes has gained attention this year, satellite television has also become a potent force in the region and, in Iran, a target of censorship. Some 45% to 60% of Iranians watch satellite TV, according to estimates from the state media company and an Iranian research center, exceeding the number believed to use the Internet. Iran so far seems to be winning a struggle to filter out unwanted TV content and broadcast its own propaganda: The country jams channels like the BBC on Western satellites even as Iran's state media company broadcasts pro-government news on some of the same satellites, and at times has aired forced confessions of political detainees." http://t.uani.com/vCtGpq
Bloomberg: "The Obama administration is accusing the elite of Iran's regime and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps of profiting 'on the back of the average Iranian' as the nation's currency plunges under pressure from international sanctions. The new allegation coincides with the decline in the market value of the Iranian rial, which has dropped about 15 percent against the dollar in the past five weeks and 35 percent since March, according to Tehran's independent Donya-e-Eqtesad newspaper. The 39 percent difference between the central bank's official rate and market rates on Dec. 21 was the largest in almost two decades, economists in Tehran and Washington said in interviews. U.S. Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen said the gap between the two rates has provided an arbitrage opportunity exploited by officials and businesses affiliated with the IRGC... They are among regime elements able to obtain foreign currency at the favorable official exchange rate and sell it for a profit in exchange bureaus at the market rate, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in written testimony Dec. 1." http://t.uani.com/v7gPgg
AFP: "No oil will be permitted to pass through the key oil transit Strait of Hormuz if the West applies sanctions on Iran's oil exports, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned on Tuesday. The threat was reported by the state news agency IRNA as Iran conducted navy wargames near the Strait of Hormuz, at the entrance of the oil-rich Gulf. 'If sanctions are adopted against Iranian oil, not a drop of oil will pass through the Strait of Hormuz,' Rahimi was quoted as saying. 'We have no desire for hostilities or violence... but the West doesn't want to go back on its plan' to impose sanctions, he said." http://t.uani.com/s8zyBX
Nuclear Program & Sanctions AFP: "Iran on Tuesday put on trial an American man of Iranian descent accused of spying for the US Central Intelligence Agency, Fars news agency reported. 'The first hearing in the trial of Amir Mirzai Hekmati, recently arrested for spying for the United States, started Tuesday' in a closed Tehran court, Fars reported. Hekmati, a 28-year-old former US Marine born in the United States to an Iranian immigrant family, was shown on Iranian state television mid-December saying in fluent Farsi and English that he was a CIA operative sent to infiltrate the Iranian intelligence ministry. The US government says Hekmati has been falsely accused and has demanded his immediate release." http://t.uani.com/rGYuS2
Xinhau: "A Ukrainian company will invest 1 billion U.S. dollars to develop three Iranian oil fields, the local satellite Press TV reported on Sunday. Iran's Petroleum Engineering and Development Company (PEDC) and Ukraine's Inter Naft Gas Prom Pars will sign the contract by the end of the current Iranian year (March 20), said the report. Under the comprehensive development plan of the three oil fields, Koohmond, Boushkan and Kouhkali, 10,000 to 12,000 barrels of oil are expected to be produced per day in the first phase, and about 25,000 barrels per day in the second phase, according to the report." http://t.uani.com/sn5zlz
Domestic Politics
WashPost: "In the Islamic republic of Iran, the law requires women to cover their hair and bodies in public. But how to do so remains up to them, and the result is persistent confusion in the streets. Though leading Shiite Muslim clerics advise women to wear chadors - the traditional head-to-toe cloak, usually black - Iran's urban fashionistas increasingly prefer tight-fitting coats and scant head scarves. Now, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is stepping into the dispute. He wants to settle it by promoting government-approved apparel for women, garments intended to introduce an array of clothes that are 'Islamic and beautiful' at the same time. Hard-liners are not amused. They say that the new designs encourage 'Western values.'" http://t.uani.com/virBCo
AP: "An Iranian official has struck a lawmaker in the face during an argument on the floor of Parliament over government subsidies. In a session broadcast on state radio, the two men brawled for several minutes before the parliament speaker expelled Behrouz Moradi, who heads a department on government subsidies. Moradi slapped lawmaker Hossein Hosseini in the face Tuesday after the legislator raised accusations the government has failed to pay out subsidies to companies providing heating gas, electricity and water. The government sharply reduced energy and food subsidies last year, but insists it has paid what was budgeted." http://t.uani.com/tHeFU
Foreign Affairs
AFP: "Iraqi political blocs have held talks with Iran over a standoff sparked by a warrant for the arrest of the country's Sunni Arab vice president that has stoked sectarian tensions, officials said on Tuesday. Charges that Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi ran a death squad have plunged Iraq into political crisis, and representatives of multiple parties have spoken to top officials in Tehran, according to senior political sources in Baghdad and the autonomous Kurdish region, where Hashemi is holed up. The United States, which completed a troop pullout a week ago, has long charged that Iran plays a nefarious role in Iraq by funding and supporting militias, and interfering in Iraqi politics, charges Tehran rejects. 'Iraqi parties are contacting Iran to mediate over the Hashemi issue,' an official close to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said, speaking on condition of anonymity." http://t.uani.com/sVQQqA
Reuters: "Iran signed an agreement with Afghanistan on Monday to export one million tons per year of gasoil, gasoline and jet fuel to the neighbouring country starting next year, the official IRNA news agency reported. The Islamic state, which was long dependent on imported gasoline for 30 to 40 percent of its consumption, said last year it had started exporting the fuel. The sales were confirmed to Reuters by trade sources, but they did not know at the time where the cargoes were being exported. 'Iran has exported gasoil to Afghanistan over the past years but the export of gasoline and jet fuel will begin next year,' IRNA quoted Ali Reza Zeighami, managing director of the National Iranian Refining and Oil Products Distribution Company, as saying." http://t.uani.com/ucvAjS
Opinion & Analysis
Roshanak Taghavi in HuffPo: "Headlines around the world have been abuzz since Tuesday about the precarious state of Iran's economy, after the market rate for the Islamic Republic's currency, the rial, dropped over 10 percent in less than a day to its lowest level ever against the dollar. The catalyst behind the sudden drop in Iran's currency was a report by the semi-official Mehr News Agency, citing Iran's Ambassador in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi as saying that Tehran's Trade Promotion Organization would no longer allow registration for imports routed through Iran's third-largest trading partner, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Mehr also reported the Iran-United Arab Emirates Chamber of Commerce as saying on Tueday that Iran's Central Bank has ordered local businesses to stop using UAE currency, the dirham, for financial transactions. The report has since been removed from Mehr's website. The UAE, which is Iran's third largest trade partner, is a major route for re-exports into Iran. In the eight months since March 2011, roughly $13 billion worth of registered imports have been routed through the UAE into the Islamic Republic. Since Tuesday, Tehran's market exchange rate has stabilized -- falling from as high as 15,300 to slightly above its initial 13,800 rials per dollar value -- after Iran's Foreign Ministry formally denied reports of any trade cuts with the UAE or halts in registration. Nevertheless, the sudden panic that ensued serves as a gauge -- to both Iran's financial markets and the government -- of how another political shock to the market will impact Iran's currency. 'If there's another shock, the rate won't fall back down again; it'll stay around 15,000 rials to the dollar,' one prominent financial expert in Tehran tells me. Had Tehran not canceled its ban, then local Iranian importers seeking to register with the government for transactions with the Emirates would no longer have had access to foreign exchange -- whether in the form of the U.S. dollar, euro or the Emirati dirham -- at the stronger official government exchange rate. Instead, they would have had to sell their rials at the weaker market exchange rate, which would have dramatically raised business costs. Iranian economists and experts on the Islamic Republic's monetary policies say the initial decision to halt registration of imports was primarily political, resulting from pressure by many Iranian parliamentarians to enact the ban in retaliation for payment restrictions imposed on Iran's banking system by the UAE due to UN sanctions and the US Treasury's financial sanctions." http://t.uani.com/uqlg02
Emanuele Ottolenghi in The Weekly Standard: "When NATO planes launched their air campaign over Libya's skies last spring and Western leaders said that Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi had to go, the first regime to change was at the London School of Economics. Its director, Sir Howard Davies, resigned following embarrassing dis-closures about LSE's financial links to Libya and sizable donations from Qaddafi's anointed heir, his son Saif al-Islam, who'd been awarded a doctoral degree from LSE. It seems that British academic institutions have yet to learn the lesson. For now it's the United Kingdom's oldest and most distinguished university, Oxford, that has brought scandal upon itself by giving a place to a Middle Eastern despot's son-a scion of the Islamic Republic of Iran who has already distinguished himself as a human rights abuser and a torturer. Oxford University's Wolfson College, which the late Sir Isaiah Berlin helped establish, is now the academic home of 42-year-old Mehdi Hashemi Bahramani Rafsanjani, the fourth child of former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. These days, Rafsanjani the elder styles himself a champion of Iran's reformists. But having tied the family fortune and its connections to the cause of challenging current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not make Rafsanjani a liberal democrat. In addition to the violence and repression he is responsible for inside Iran, he has also been one of the Islamic Republic's chief exporters of terrorism. As president, Rafsanjani dispatched Iranian hitmen to kill Iranian exiles across Europe. There is an arrest warrant against him from Argentinian prosecutors for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. The son it seems has followed in his father's path. When Rafsanjani was president, he lent a hand to his youngest boy, Mehdi, who was trying to make a living in the oil industry. In 1992, a former Iranian oil ministry official, Houshang Bouzari, managed to line up a $1.8 billion contract for the exploration and development of Iran's offshore natural gas resources in South Pars field, and Mehdi wanted a cut. He approached Bouzari and demanded $50 million in exchange for his services-presumably, access to the sitting president of Iran. Bouzari turned the offer down and found himself thrown into jail in June 1993. He spent several months at Evin prison where he was tortured. He was released after his family paid ransom and the state had taken away his contract. Eventually, Bouzari managed to flee the country and, after taking up residence in Canada, sued Iran for damages in an Ontario court... How Mehdi ended up parked in one of the world's most prestigious universities not only highlights the moral torpor of British academe, but also offers a window onto the dark universe of Iranian political backstabbing." http://t.uani.com/uNkpyN |
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