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TOP STORIES
Iranian officials said on
Tuesday that a satellite launch that had been condemned by the Trump
administration failed when the carrier rocket could not reach orbit.
"I would have liked to make you happy with some good news, but
sometimes life does not go as expected," Iran's minister of
telecommunications, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, said in a
Twitter post. He said the rocket, a Safir, long used for satellite
launches, had failed in the final stage, falling short of placing its
payload into the correct orbit. He did not offer any explanation.
The U.S. plans to grant no new
waivers to buyers of Iranian oil as it intensifies efforts to
eliminate the Middle Eastern producer's exports of crude, a senior
official said. U.S. sanctions have so far cut Iran's exports to about
1 million barrels a day from a level of 2.7 million before Washington
announced sanctions on the country. Of the eight buyers that secured
initial U.S. waivers to buy oil from Iran, only five are still doing
so, Brian Hook, the State Department's special representative for
Iran, said in an interview.
South Korea imported no Iranian
oil for a fourth month in December following the reimposition of U.S.
sanctions, cutting its 2018 imports from the major supplier by 60
percent, preliminary customs data showed on Tuesday. The
world's fifth-largest crude importer won a six-month sanctions waiver
from Washington in November, allowing it to purchase a limited amount
of oil from Iran, but has been working to overcome payment and
insurance issues.
NUCLEAR DEAL & NUCLEAR PROGRAM
National Security
Adviser John Bolton retweeted, with apparent approving
comment, a report that accused Iran of fudging its reports to
nuclear-disarmament watchdogs. Specifically, the report
published by the Institute for Science and International Security
accused Iran, based on satellite imagery and documents seized
last year by Israeli intelligence, of not-identifying a former
nuclear weapons site under Project 110 of the Amad Plan.
The Israelis captured copious
secret Iranian documents that demonstrate the Islamic Republic long
worked on underground nuclear facilities at Parchin. Now a
detailed analysis of the Iranian scheme has come out, and it warrants
close attention. The analysis shows that the Iranians' secret nuclear
program was successfully hidden from Western intelligence services
(including our own) and from the IAEA, the UN's International Atomic
Energy Agency, which is supposed to monitor Iranian operations.
MISSILE PROGRAM
Iran launched a satellite on Tuesday that failed to
reach orbit, after the US warned against the launch earlier this
month. The satellite "did not reach enough speed in the third
stage and was not put into orbit," Mohammad Jahromi, the
country's Minister of Communications and Information Technology, told
the official IRNA news agency after a ceremony was held for the
launch at Imam Khomeini Spaceport early Tuesday. The minister said
Iran would launch another satellite soon.
SANCTIONS, BUSINESS RISKS, & OTHER ECONOMIC
NEWS
Monir Farmanfarmaian, the grand
dame of Tehran's vibrant art scene, has set a new record for a local
female artist after an untitled mirror mosaic of hers fetched almost
$1m at an art auction in the Iranian capital. The 96-year-old Iranian
artist, who once hobnobbed with the likes of Andy Warhol, Willem de
Kooning and Jackson Pollock in New York, topped 104 other artists,
whose works were presented at the 10th Tehran Auction on Friday.
PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS
Next month Iran will mark 40
years since the founding of the Islamic republic. But as the regime
enters middle age, it continues to partake in many of the same
criminal acts that first put it on the international map. Now on the
verge of that revolutionary anniversary comes news of yet another
American gone missing in Iran. This one was not a dual national,
as many of the recent Americans captured by the regime were, but
rather a veteran of the U.S. Navy who was in Iran visiting his
girlfriend.
A British-Iranian aid worker who
has been jailed in Tehran is going on hunger strike in protest at her
treatment, her employer and her husband said. Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 40, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters
Foundation, was arrested in April 2016 at a Tehran airport as she
headed back to Britain with her daughter after a family visit.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the
British-Iranian woman held by Tehran, started a hunger strike after
her interrogators tried to persuade her to become a spy, her husband
has claimed. Richard Ratcliffe revealed his wife was calm as she
began an initial three-day hunger strike in protest at the Iranian
prison authorities' refusal to give her a clear written undertaking
that she would receive medical help for a lump on her breast, as well
as other concerns.
Iran's general prosecutor on
Monday denied claims by a labor protest leader that he was tortured
in prison following strikes at a sugar factory, state TV reported.
"News of a Haft Tapeh sugar factory worker being tortured is an
outright lie and no harm or torture has happened," Mohammad
Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying. "The individual who claims
he has been tortured did this with a political purpose and a certain
agenda," he added.
Iran's general prosecutor has
hit back at a labor leader for two days in a row, saying there was no
torture during his detention and he has lied "to cover-up his
crimes". Mohammad Javad Montazeri did not say what crimes the
labor leader is accused of, except a vague reference to membership in
illegal organization, without providing details. He was speaking on
state television on Tuesday.
Three years ago, American Ph.D. candidate
Xiyue Wang left for what he thought would be a quick trip to Tehran
to research 19th-century Central Asian politics, with his wife and
2-year-old son waiting behind at Princeton. Instead, he was arrested
by Iranian police and became what many consider to be the latest pawn
in the Islamic Republic's decades-long history of American
hostage-taking. Wang is now one of at least four known Americans held
prisoner in Iran, all accused of spying. Xiyue Wang's wife spoke out
on his conditions in a sit-down interview with Fox News - and
rejected the regime's allegations.
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS & NEGOTIATIONS
In a barnstorming tour that took
him to eight countries in one week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
burned with one central message: "The need to counter the
greatest threat of all in the Middle East, the Iranian regime and its
campaigns of terrorism and destruction," as he put it in Cairo
on Thursday. Jetting from capital to capital, meeting with kings,
princes and presidents, his goal was to get Arab countries to work
together to roll back Iranian influence in the region and take on the
militias Iran is backing.
The U.S. will step up efforts to
counter Iran's "dangerous activities" around the region
including the financing and activities of proxy organizations such as
Lebanon's Hezbollah, a senior U.S. official said Monday. U.S.
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale spoke
following talks he held with Lebanese politicians at the end of an
official visit. It comes amid a domestic political crisis over an
ongoing government vacuum and tensions along the southern border,
with the discovery of what Israel says are cross-border tunnels dug
by the Hezbollah group for attacks on Israel.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)
slammed The New York Times on Monday for what he called its
"absurd criticism" of John Bolton after the paper
warned the national security adviser could "precipitate a
conflict with Iran." "This is an absurd criticism of
Amb. Bolton," Rubio wrote his more than 3.6 million followers on
Twitter. "Shia militias in #Iraq are proxies of &
controlled by #Iran," he added. "They want to use them to
kill our troops but have deniability. Any attack by Shia militias
against U.S. should be treated as an attack from Iran."
Members of the Trump
administration vehemently denied attempting to create a backchannel
for potential negotiations with Iran, after a senior confidant of
Ayatollah Khamenei alleged overtures to this effect recently were
made. Ali Shamkhani, who sits on Tehran's National Security Council,
was quoted by Middle East media outlets as saying that, "During
my visit to Kabul, [Afghanistan in December] the Americans...asked to
hold talks."
Supporters of President Barack
Obama attack President Donald Trump for reversing his predecessor's
policies. To be sure, many of Trump's actions are debatable. But his
approach to Iran and radical Islam are historic and vital correctives
to the disastrous strategies pursued by Obama. Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo, in particular, did a masterful job in his Cairo speech
of making the president's case with the moral clarity his predecessor
lacked.
The Wall Street Journal has
a bombshell report revealing that President Trump's
national security team sought options from the Pentagon for striking
Iran. Daniel Drezner, a Tufts professor and Washington Post
columnist, responded to the reports by calling national
security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
"batshit insane," his unfortunately common response to
those who disagree with him.
RUSSIA, SYRIA, ISRAEL, HEZBOLLAH, LEBANON & IRAN
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu on Tuesday urged Iran to quickly remove its forces from
neighbouring Syria or face continued attacks on them by Israel.
"Yesterday I heard the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman saying
'Iran has no military presence in Syria, we only advise them',"
Netanyahu said at a Tel Aviv ceremony to install a new head of
Israel's armed forces. "So let me advise them -- get out of
there fast, because we'll continue our forceful policy of attacking,
as we promised and are doing, fearlessly and relentlessly," he
said.
IRAQ & IRAN
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif continued
on Monday his official visit to Iraq, which coincides with the first
trip in a decade by Jordan's King Abdullah II. The monarch had landed
in Baghdad on Monday for talks with senior officials, including
President Barham Salih, Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi and
parliament Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi. Zarif appeared to be alarmed
by Jordan's rapprochement with Iraq, announcing that President Hassan
Rouhani will be paying a visit to Baghdad in March.
MISCELLANEOUS
Before the Iranian government
arrested him as a spy, Jason Rezaian made a terrific Tehran
bureau chief for The Washington Post. No one in Iran was as qualified
as he, and possibly nobody outside Iran could have gotten the
requisite journalist visa. Rezaian was born and raised in Marin
County, Calif., to an Iranian father and an American mother, his
family maintained business as well as family ties to the old country
and he's a dual national Iranian-American citizen, as familiar with
and connected to each country as almost anyone else in the world.
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