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Reuters:
"Russia's U.N. envoy on Wednesday said the next round of talks
between Iran and six world powers will be a two-week marathon session,
while warning a panel of U.N. sanctions experts not to sabotage the final
phase of the delicate negotiations. Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin
told the Security Council that the negotiations are scheduled to run from
July 2 to July 15 in Vienna. Other senior officials close to the talks
confirmed the talks are expected to last two weeks, as a July 20 deadline
for a long-term deal approaches... Churkin sharply criticized the U.N.
Panel of Experts on Iran, which monitors compliance with the Security
Council's sanctions regime, saying 'any information not backed up by
concrete facts ... could have a negative impact on the conduct of
negotiations of the group of six and Iran.'" http://t.uani.com/1jQVLy3
AFP:
"Iran has offered 'rational proposals' in nuclear negotiations but
'excessive demands' of the P5+1 world powers are likely to prevent
agreement by the July 20 deadline, Tehran's foreign minister said
Thursday... 'Iran is ready for a resolution and made rational proposals,'
the official IRNA news agency quoted Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad
Zarif as saying. 'But the excessive demands of the other party could
prevent an agreement,' he added. 'At that time the world will know who
was responsible for the deadlock in the nuclear negotiations.' Zarif had
on June 20 said Iran and world powers are yet to find common ground on
the main issues in the nuclear talks. 'We feel there are still maximalist
stances on the other side, which I think should be dropped,' Zarif had
said." http://t.uani.com/1pmz8K8
Haaretz:
"Israel fears that the United States and other world powers are
softening their stance on how many centrifuges Iran would be allowed to
retain under a permanent deal on its nuclear program. Senior Israeli
officials said the six countries negotiating with Iran have hinted that
they could live with it retaining several thousand centrifuges, rather
than the mere few hundred they had originally demanded as a ceiling... 'A
month ago, the powers presented a very hard line on the matter of uranium
enrichment and agreed to leave only a symbolic enrichment capacity of 300
to 500 centrifuges, to give the Iranians an honorable out,' said one
senior Israeli official who deals with the Iranian nuclear program and
has been involved in Israel's talks with the six powers on the issue.
'But after the last round, we became concerned that the powers hinted to
the Iranians that they'd be willing to talk about a much larger number of
centrifuges remaining in Iran's hands.' The senior official said that
according to Israel's information, the six powers' new stance is that
Iran can retain 2,000 to 4,000 centrifuges. 'In that case, Iran would
remain a nuclear threshold state,' he said. 'It would retain an
enrichment capability that would enable it, within a short time, to break
out to a nuclear bomb the moment it decided to do so.'" http://t.uani.com/1jQUlUn
Sanctions Relief
Bloomberg:
"As the minister in charge of Turkey's $800 billion economy in 2013,
Zafer Caglayan was facing a series of numbers that didn't bode well for
coming elections. Inflation was up, growth was slowing and the lira was
weakening. One key measure of financial health was particularly
worrisome: the country was importing far more goods, services and capital
than it was sending abroad. By October, when he was interviewed by a
local CNBC affiliate, Caglayan described the gap as unsustainable and
said the government would take steps to improve it. What he didn't
mention was a clandestine export-boosting operation started up more than
a year before that was helping to solve the trade imbalance. At the time
of the television appearance, it was still underway. Three weeks before,
Caglayan had been secretly taped by national-police investigators telling
his collaborators to find a way to increase exports by at least $1
billion a month. His orders came from the top in a two-hour meeting with
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he told an associate. The operation
featured an Iranian-born businessman who liked fast horses, faster cars
and the fastest planes. His unique skill: Getting gold into
sanctions-encircled Iran. Enough gold that for a time he became the
government's key instrument in improving Turkey's irksome economic
imbalance. How a team that included Turkey's economy minister sought to
manage the current account deficit, as the gap is called, by juicing
exports to Iran is laid out in a 300-page document prepared by Turkish
investigators in 2013. Caglayan and his collaborators also came away with
tens of millions of dollars in bribes, according to the document, which
has been cited in parliament by opposition lawmakers." http://t.uani.com/1qeywWu
Terrorism
Algemeiner:
"Iran's top-level internet domain '.ir' came under threat in a U.S.
court of law on Wednesday, when Israeli lawyers asked a New York judge to
grant some of the billions owed to families of victims of terror acts
sponsored by the Islamic Republic from money it earns registering
websites in Iran. The novel case asks the court to instruct ICANN, the
national domain registry that is part of the U.S. Commerce Department, to
support U.S. laws that call for Iran to forfeit any potential U.S. asset
to pay victims, laying claim to its '.ir' and 'یران' top-level domains
and all Internet Protocol addresses being utilized by the Iranian
government and its agencies." http://t.uani.com/1sHO9aM
Iraq Crisis
WSJ:
"After toiling more than a decade to shape Iraq and Syria into
strong Arab allies of the Islamic Republic, Iran is now facing a daunting
reality: supporting two states torn by war. The crisis in Iraq, where an
al Qaeda offshoot is gaining ground, has sparked a debate among Iranian
policy makers and political observers over whether Tehran's policies have
paid off. Some argue that for all the military, financial and political
capital that Iran has invested to bolster their Shiite-linked
governments, the benefit has been small and it is time to change course.
'Iran's geopolitical policies have failed. We have lost Hamas,
overstretched Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now have al Qaeda spilling from
Syria to Iraq,' said Saeed Leylaz, a prominent political analyst close to
the government." http://t.uani.com/1qKV2pV
Human Rights
Reuters:
"The U.N. human rights chief appealed to Iran on Thursday not to
execute a woman convicted of murdering her husband at age 17. Razieh
Ebrahimi, imprisoned in Ahwaz, is among some 160 people thought to be on
death row in Iran for crimes committed before they turned 18, U.N. High
Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement. More than
250 people are believed to have been executed in Iran this year, Pillay
said. 'The imminent execution of Razieh Ebrahimi has once again brought into
stark focus the unacceptable use of the death penalty against juvenile
offenders in Iran,' she said. Ebrahimi was married at 14 and gave birth
to a child a year later. She says that her husband subjected her to
domestic violence, according to the statement. She was arrested in 2010.
'Regardless of the circumstances of the crime, the execution of juvenile
offenders is clearly prohibited by international human rights law,' said
Pillay, a former international judge." http://t.uani.com/1jQVLy3
Domestic Politics
AFP:
"A bill aimed at encouraging more births by outlawing sterilisation
and vasectomies has passed a first reading in Iran's parliament, media
reported on Wednesday... The bill passed its first reading in parliament
on Tuesday with the support of 106 of the 207 MPs present, according to
the Iran daily. The report added however that some MPs were opposed to
the criminalisation of sterilisation and the law was sent back to
parliament's health committee for modification. The bill sets out
punishments ranging from two to five years in prison for non-authorised
operations such as vasectomy, tying of fallopian tubes and other forms of
sterilisation, and abortion. Currently abortion is outlawed in Iran
except in special cases but the other operations are permitted." http://t.uani.com/1nLc1Ch
Reuters:
"Iran wants to raise gas imports from Azerbaijan almost six-fold to
2 billion cubic metres (bcm) a year from a current 370 million cubic
metres and to use gas storage in Azerbaijan, a source at the Azeri state energy
company SOCAR told Reuters. Despite having the world's biggest natural
gas reserves, Iran is struggling to keep up with subsidy-fuelled gas
consumption, which has almost doubled during the past decade to over 160
billion cubic metres (bcm) a year." http://t.uani.com/1jmZO5j
Opinion &
Analysis
Arsham Parsi &
Benjamin Weinthal in The Ottawa Citizen: "While the
world powers prepare for a July negotiation session with Iran over its
illicit nuclear program, the deteriorating situation for sexual minorities
continues unabated. Sadly, the nuclear talks have drowned out
voices for influencing a change in Iran's persecution of its LGBT
citizens. Many observers expected a Persian thaw with the election of the
relatively moderate Hassan Rouhani one year ago this month. But nothing
substantive has changed for LGBT rights in Iran. To its credit, Canada
has gone to great lengths to help Iran's struggling LGBT community,
including aid to refugees to relocate to Canada. Former Immigration
Minister Jason Kenney has worked with the Iranian Railroad for Queer
Refugees organization, assisting in the expedited placement of over 200
Iranian queers into Canada. Foreign Minister John Baird declared in 2012,
'We will speak out on the issues that matter to Canadians - whether it is
the role and treatment of women around the world, or the persecution of
gays.' With a view toward countries like the Islamic Republic of Iran,
Baird added, 'Yet, too many countries currently have regressive and
punitive laws on the books that criminalize homosexuality.' While
President Hassan Rouhani has not invoked the highly inflammatory anti-gay
rhetoric of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he has remained silent
about violence against LGBT Iranians. Take some recent examples. Rouhani
has not called for the release of imprisoned non-gay journalist Siamak
Ghaderi, who was arrested in 2010 for challenging Ahmadinejad's assertion
that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Admittedly, Rouhani is not in
control of the judiciary. Nevertheless, there were high expectations that
Rouhani's rhetoric about the current home arrests of the 2009
presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi would lead
to their release. After all, Rouhani was the former head of the National
Security Council. But it was clear to us that his talk was merely part of
his election campaign devoid of action." http://t.uani.com/TmeUks
Matthew Levitt
& Nadav Pollack in WINEP: "As Sunni militants
from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) captured Mosul two
weeks ago and set their sights on Baghdad, Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah offered to send fighters to Iraq to help turn the jihadist
tide. In Syria, the Lebanese Shiite group's forces have already deployed
in large numbers over the past several years and made all the difference
in the Assad regime's battle for survival. In Iraq, Hezbollah would
likely dispatch only small numbers of trainers and special operators. Yet
given the group's past special operations and training activities in Iraq
and its close ties with Iran's elite Qods Force, even a modest deployment
would likely have a significant impact... The war in Syria requires a
great commitment from Hezbollah in terms of personnel and weapons, and
significant numbers of its fighters have already lost their lives in
helping the Assad regime. Yet given its willingness to answer Iran's call
for help in Syria, the group will probably answer the call to fight in
Iraq as well. Nasrallah is already laying the groundwork to justify such
involvement by invoking the same hollow excuse of 'defending Shiites and
Shiite holy places.' As in the past, Hezbollah's contribution does not
have to include hundreds of fighters, but only a limited number of
experienced trainers and special operations 'consultants.' This type of contribution
would not overstrain the organization, and it could facilitate
far-reaching achievements for Iraqi Shiite militias." http://t.uani.com/1yRjvfB
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