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TOP STORIES
The Trump administration is advancing a strategy that
could derail efforts by Boeing Co. and Airbus SE to sell hundreds of
jetliners to Iranian airlines, U.S. officials said.
In its determination to secure a nuclear
deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law
enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed
terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the
United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
Iran's economy is starting to recover more rapidly from
years of international sanctions but the country urgently needs to
shore up its banks, a senior International Monetary Fund official said
on Monday. Gross domestic product growth soared to 12.5 percent in the
year through last March 20, but that was almost entirely due to a leap
in oil exports, after most sanctions were removed under a deal with
world powers on Tehran's nuclear program.
IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Iranian
counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif discussed the Middle East and Iran's
nuclear deal in a phone conversation, Russian foreign ministry said on
Monday.
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS
US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday he does not
see the need for a stepped-up military posture against Iran, the day
after a top diplomat said evidence shows Tehran is supporting Huthi
rebels in Yemen... When asked if he thought such evidence warranted an
emboldened or expanded military response from the US, Mattis said:
"Not militarily, no." "It's the reason Ambassador Haley
was there and not one of our generals," he told Pentagon
reporters. "This is a diplomatically-led effort to expose to the
world what Iran is up to." Mattis lambasted Iran for its support
of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, "despite the murder of his
own people on the industrial scale," and of its support for
Lebanese group Hezbollah.
SANCTIONS ENFORCEMENT
It was on Thursday when lawyers for a Turkish banker on
trial in Manhattan federal court told the judge that their client would
take the stand the next day, to testify on his own behalf. The banker,
Mehmet Hakan Atilla, 47, had been charged with conspiring to violate
United States sanctions on Iran in a case that has drawn much attention
in Turkey, including from that country's president, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, who has repeatedly criticized the prosecution.
An executive at Turkey's majority state-owned Halkbank
took the witness stand in a New York courtroom on Friday and denied
charges that he participated in a scheme to help Iran evade U.S.
sanctions.
SANCTIONS RELIEF
China's top oil and gas company CNPC is considering taking
over Total's stake in a giant Iranian gas project if the French company
leaves Iran to comply with any new U.S. sanctions, industry sources
said.
HUMAN RIGHTS
Iranian state television broadcast on Sunday what it
described as the confessions of an Iranian academic with Swedish
residency who it said had provided information to Israel to help it
assassinate several senior nuclear scientists. His wife, speaking by
telephone from Stockholm, said he had been forced by his interrogators
to read the confession.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Iran on Sunday criticized French President Emmanuel Macron
over his tough stance toward Tehran and said Paris would soon lose its
international credibility if it "blindly follows" U.S.
President Donald Trump.
IRAQ CRISIS
Iran has reopened all its border crossings with Iraq's
autonomous Kurdish region, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Monday,
after their closure over a controversial independence vote.
GULF STATES, YEMEN, LEBANON, AND IRAN
A Yemeni rebel spokesman has heavily criticized U.S.
charges that Iran is funneling missiles to the Shiite rebels in Yemen,
known as Houthis.
Iran's foreign minister accused the United States on
Friday of trying to divert attention from its own responsibility for
the deadly war in Yemen with claims of Iranian weapons shipments.
The debate about whether Iran is providing ballistic
missiles to Houthi rebels in Yemen has been ended, thanks to U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who has unveiled
components of Iranian missiles recovered from target sites in Saudi
Arabia fired on by the Houthis.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif announced
that he would file a complaint at the United Nations against the United
States in wake of its accusations last week that Tehran was supplying
Yemen's Houthi militias with missiles.
France reacted cautiously on Friday to U.S. evidence which
allegedly proved Iran supplied weapons to Houthi militia in Yemen,
saying it was still studying information at its disposal and the United
Nations had yet to draw any conclusions.
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