HYPOCRITES NEWS

Iran President Ahmadinejad offers talks

2012-01-27T02:06:00.000+03:30

President Ahmadinejad accused the West of trying to ruin negotiations in order to put pressure on Iran

Iran is ready to revive talks with the West but tougher sanctions will not force it to give into demands over its nuclear programme, its president says.

On Monday, the EU banned new oil contracts with Iran, saying it was not confident Tehran's nuclear plans were "exclusively peaceful".

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said it was evident that "those who resort to coercion are opposed to talks".

Tehran insists its nuclear programme is for energy purposes.

Negotiations between Iran and the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany ended in a stalemate in January 2011.

President Ahmadinejad is the highest-ranking Iranian official since then to offer to resume talks.

In a speech made in Kerman, southeastern Iran, and broadcast on state television, he accused the West of trying to ruin negotiations in order to put increased pressure on Iran.

"It is the West that needs Iran and the Iranian nation will not lose from the sanctions," the president said.

"It is you who come up with excuses each time and issue resolutions on the verge of talks so that negotiations collapse,'' he said.

"Why should we shun talks? Why and how should a party that has logic and is right shun talks? It is evident that those who resort to coercion are opposed to talks and always bring pretexts and blame us instead."

BBC correspondent Kasra Naji says Tehran has failed to clarify exactly what kind of talks it is prepared to enter into.

In the last two rounds of meetings, in Turkey and Geneva, Iranian officials were happy to talk about anything except the West's concerns about its nuclear programme, our correspondent added.

EU sanctions

EU foreign ministers formally adopted the sanctions against Iran at a meeting in Brussels.

In a joint statement, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Iran had "failed to restore international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme".

The EU said the sanctions prohibit the import, purchase and transport of Iranian crude oil and petroleum products as well as related finance and insurance. All existing contracts will have to be phased out by 1 July.

Investment as well as the export of key equipment and technology for Iran's petrochemical sector is also banned.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the purpose of the sanctions was "to put pressure on Iran to come back to the negotiating table".

Iran branded the embargo "unfair" and "doomed to fail", but it was welcomed by US President Barack Obama, who said it showed international unity against the "serious threat" posed by Iran's nuclear programme.

The EU currently buys about 20% of Iran's oil exports.

IAEA Iran visit

Earlier this week, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog confirmed it would send a team to Iran between 29 and 31 January "to resolve all outstanding substantive issues".

In a report last November the IAEA said it had information suggesting Iran had carried out tests "relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device".

Iran sells most of its oil to countries in Asia. The EU and the United States are now working to persuade Asian countries to reduce their purchases from Iran as well.

But Beijing has criticised the European Union for its ban. China - a big importer of Iranian crude oil - has long opposed unilateral sanctions targeting Iran's energy sector. It says the nuclear dispute should be resolved through dialogue.

On Thursday, China's official Xinhua News Agency quoted its foreign ministry as saying: "To blindly pressure and impose sanctions on Iran are not constructive approaches."

Iran has already threatened to retaliate to the sanctions against it by blocking the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf, through which 20% of the world's oil exports pass.

The US has said it will keep the trade route open, raising the possibility of a confrontation-bbc.

Share |

Iran sanctions will hit its economy, but not kill it

2012-01-25T04:07:00.000+03:30

Experts say recent sanctions from the U.S. and Europe will crimp Iran's ability to sell its oil, get foreign imports, and are at least partly behind a huge spike in prices there.

Over the last few months Western governments have been tightening the economic noose around Iran.

The idea is to use economic pressure to force Iran's government to give up its nuclear program, which it says is for peaceful purposes but many think is actually intended to produce a weapon.

But sanctions can also have a huge impact on a nation's people. In Iraq, the United Nations estimated half a million children were killed by malnutrition and disease in the 1990s as a result of international sanctions and a refusal by Saddam Hussein to accept a UN program to alleviate the suffering there.

In Iran's case expert opinion varies as to just how hard sanctions will hit that economy. But there is consensus around two points: 1) It won't be as bad as Iraq. 2) It's already hurting Iranians and the suffering is bound to get worse.

"The sanctions are increasingly biting," said Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an Iranian-born professor of economics at Virginia Tech. "The Iranians are having a hard time paying for things they import, and getting paid for things they export."

Tightening the oil vise: The latest round of sanctions from the United States, the UK and Europe aims to directly restrict Iran's ability to sell its oil.

They accomplish that goal largely by going after Iran's central bank, which finances Iran's 2.2 million barrels a day in oil exports, and any international bank that does business with Iran's central bank.

Iran oil sanctioned by Europe

The sanctions are supposed to allow transactions in essential items like food and medical supplies.

The problem, say experts, is that international banks become nervous and ban all transactions with the country rather than risk the wrath of the United States or Europe. Banks that are thought to be in cahoots with the Iranians might find themselves banned from doing business in the world's largest and second largest economies.

Hospitals in Iran are having a hard time getting advanced medial equipment from abroad because they can't find banks to finance the transactions, said Jamal Abdi, policy director at the National Iranian American Council.

Previous sanctions that prohibited the sale of items that can have both civilian and military uses, like airplane parts, has resulted in air disasters that have killed 1,000 Iranians over the last decade, said Abdi.

Share |

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY IN IRAN

2012-01-22T21:31:00.001+03:30

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY IN IRAN

My Dear Compatriots and Freedom loving citizens of the World,

Today I am submitting the following report to the United Nations Security Council on crimes against humanity, ordered by Mr Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, and carried out on the people of Iran. The focus of the attached "Report on Crimes Against Humanity Committed in Iran on the Orders of Mr. Ali Khamenei Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran" are the crimes against humanity committed to suppress popular dissent after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fraudulent re-election in June 2009. The evidence in this report provides sufficient cause for the United Nations Security Council to take up this matter and refer it quickly to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. However, for the past thirty-three years, the Supreme Leaders of the Islamic Republic have had in place a policy and record of oppression against ethnic communities and religious minorities. I intend to file further supporting reports documenting the abuses of these Iranian citizens and will summarize these crimes in another report.

This attached report along with the cover letter is addressed to the following recipients:

The Right Honorable President Hu Jintao of the People's Republic of China
The Right Honorable President Nicolas Sarkozy of the French Republic
The Right Honorable President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia
The Right Honorable President Barack Obama of the United States
His Excellency Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom

His Majesty King Mohammed VI of Morocco
Her Excellency Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany
His Excellency Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho of Portugal
His Excellency Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India
The Right Honorable President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan
The Right Honorable President Juan Manuel Santos Calderan of Colombia
The Right Honorable President lvaro Colomof Guatemala
The Right Honorable President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan
The Right Honorable President Jacob Zuma of South Africa
The Right Honorable President Faure Gnassingba of Togo

The Right Honorable Mark Lyall Grant, Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Vitaly Churkin, Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Wang Min, Permanent Representative of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Susan Rice, Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Gerard Araud, Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Agshin Mehdiyev, Permanent Representative of Azerbaijan to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Nestor Osorio, Permanent Representative of Colombia to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Peter Wittig, Permanent Representative of Germany to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Gert Rosenthal, Permanent Representative of Guatemala to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Hardeep Singh Puri, Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Mohammed Loulichki, Permanent Representative of Morocco to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Abdullah Hussain Haroon, Pakistan Ambassador to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Jose Filipe Moraes Cabral, Permanent Representative of Portugal to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Baso Sangqu, South African Permanent representative to the United Nations
The Right Honorable Kodjo Menan, Permanent Representative of Togo to the United Nations

I want to thank the team of legal and human rights experts who worked tirelessly to put together this important report. I strongly urge the members of the United Nations Security Council to give top priority and their highest consideration to this vital matter and expeditiously refer these crimes to the International Criminal Court.

The people of Iran have suffered far too long and today expect help and support from the international community. I therefore encourage all justice-minded people around the world to take action and ask their respective governments - particularly those who are members of the security council - to take positive action on this complaint.

Reza Pahlavi

Your Excellencies,

I address this message to you to alert you of the grave acts ordered by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mr Ali Khamenei. These acts constitute systemic and continuing violations of human rights and are subject to a classification as "crimes against humanity" as defined in Article 7 of the Rome Statute. These acts are directed against all Iranian citizens of all social classes, who are demanding that their human rights, as defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, be respected.

In addition to the matters related in the recent report of Mr. Ahmad Shahid - Special Reporter on the Human Rights Situation in Iran - there are ample evidences indicating that the regime which deprives Mr. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Ms Zahra Rahnavard and Mr. Mehdi Karroubi of their freedom violates all international laws. None of them have been able to benefit from the legal rights that an ordinary person prosecuted by the justice of his or her own country must have access to. They have in fact been refused the right to defend themselves and to benefit from legal representation.

In this wave of repression that affects the entire population, the Islamic Republic has used cruel, inhuman and degrading means and methods against many Iranian citizens, including but not limited to : Behnam Ebrahimzadeh, Bahman Ahamdi Amoui, Mansour Osanlou, Hasan Asadi Zeidabadi, Emaddin Baqi, Ayatollah Boroujerdi, Emad Behavar, Hossein Palani, Ali Pour Soleiman, Mohammad Reza Pour Shajari , Mostafa Tajzadeh, Majid Tavakoli, Reza Joshan, Hamid Reza Khadem, Mehdi Khodaee, Reza Khaajee, Mohammad Davari, Arzhang Davoudi, Majid Dorri, Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, Ali Reza Sepahee Laeen, Issa Saharkhiz, Ghasem Sholeh Sadi, Keyvan Samimi, Heshmatollah Tabarzadi , Abulfazl Abedini, Javad Alikhani, Sad Gholamhosseinpour, Abbas Kakaee, Javad Lari, Farshad Maroufi, Mohammad Reza Moghayse, Hamid Moazzani, Abdollah Momeni, Bahareh Hedayat, Mahboobeh Karami, Hojatoleslam Arash Honarvar, Ahmad Zeidabadi, Ali Jamali, Mohsen Aminzadeh, Mohsen Mirdamadi, Feizollah Arabsorkhi, Esmaeel Sahabeh, Mohammad Esmaeel Khourbak, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, Massoud Bastani, Farshad Ghorbanpour, Davood Soleimani, Behzad Nabavi, Mohsen Safai Farahani, Shabnam Madadzadeh, Saeed MatinPour, Hassan Fathi, Mehdi Mahmoudian, Priest Yousef Nadarkhani, Saeed Malekpour, Arash Sadeghi, Farshid Fathi, Shahin Zeinali, Arya Aramnejad, Sasan Vahebi, Reza Shahabi, Saeed Matinpour, Ali Malihi, Mohammad Seif, Mohammad Javad Mozaffar, Haniyeh Farshi, Mohammad Sedigh Kabodvand, Ali Akbar Ajami, Mahdiye Golroo, Fereshte Shirazi, Ronak Saffarzadeh, Mahbobeh Karami, Mosa Saket, Reza Malek, Saeed Maasouri, Amir Khosro Dalirsani, Zeinab Jalalian, Shirkooh Maarefi, Farah Vazehan, Sama Norani, Mahvash Sabet, Ziya Nabavi, Arash Honarvar Shojaei, Fariba Kamalabadi, Jamalodin Khanjani, Afif Naeemi, Saeed Rezaiee, Behrouz Tavakoli, Vahid Tizfahm, Parastou Dowkoohaki, Javad Emam, Saeed Jalalifar, Amir Khoram, Babak Dashab, Fatemeh Kheradmand, Alireza Rajaee, Hossein Zarrini, Seyed Alireza Beheshti Shirazi, Fereidoon Seydi Rad, Jalil Taheri, Mohammad Farid Taheri Ghazvini, Mohammad Tavassoli, Siamak Ghaderi, Abolfazl Ghadiani, Mohsen Mohagheghi and Mohammad Reza Motamednia. These and hundreds of other political prisoners from all categories of the Iranian people represent all democratic tendencies and are now oppressed.

Security forces and intelligence services of the Islamic Republic use the accusation of "crimes against national security" to justify their arbitrary arrests and to remove all proof and evidence attesting to the serious and systematic human rights violations in which they are engaged. On this basis, lawyers and defenders of human rights are prevented from accomplishing their mission: they are intimidated and some are arrested and imprisoned. Nasrin Sotoudeh, Abdulfatah Soltani, Hengameh Shahidi, Mohammad Seifzadeh and Kohyar Goudarzi are now silenced for these reasons. Their only crime is to have demanded respect of human rights for their compatriots.

As a founding member of the United Nations, Iran has signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to express its willingness to join the community of nations working for peace and mutual understanding among the people. Despite that, leaders of the Islamic Republic are part of an ongoing violation of these universal values. The acts they commit, or which they give orders to commit, consist of serious violations of the provisions contained in this Declaration, particularly Articles 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 19, and Article 20 paragraph 1 and Article 21.

The only thing we can do is to report the names of the victims of the Islamic Republic, to provide documentary evidences and to inform the world about their situation. In addition to the names we have mentioned, there are hundreds, even thousands, who are held in prisons. There are hundreds, even thousands, who are subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The silence of the international community concerning the human rights situation of political prisoners in Iran can but lead to a worsening of the repression and encourage the Islamic Republic to continue its policy of terror.

As it is based on religious law, the Constitution of the Islamic Republic gives all political, military and economic power to the Supreme Leader, Mr Ali Khamenei, whose institution is at the top of the regime's hierarchy. The powers he holds give him the possibility to control and intervene without limitation in all aspects of the public and private life of Iranians.

As Supreme Leader, Mr. Ali Khamenei nominates six of the twelve members of the Guardian Council of the Constitution, which then selects, in accordance with his instructions, eligible persons for the political institutions. The Head of the judiciary is nominated by him and can be dismissed at will. The Head of the judiciary implements the penal policy decided by the Supreme Leader and nominates the six others members of the Guardian Council of the Constitution in accordance with his instructions.

The Supreme Leader also controls the activity of the members of the regime's Expediency Discernment Council, which works with him to preserve the regime and is composed of six members of the Guardian Council of the Constitution, the President of the Islamic Republic, the President of the Parliament, the Head of the judiciary, and ten or so persons nominated by him.

The Supreme leader controls the activity of the Assembly of Experts, indeed elected by the people but whose candidates must satisfy the requirements he defines through the Guardian Council of the Constitution. This Assembly works with him on the development of a political-religious doctrine in order to preserve the authority of the clergy in the country. Finally, he nominates the senior officials of the army and the police, the members of local councils, and the head of national radio and television services.

Thus, the person primarily responsible for the crimes committed by the Islamic Republic is the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic: Mr. Ali Khamenei.

For a long time, the Islamic Republic has managed to hide its true face of a totalitarian dictatorship. However, since the fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the people of Iran have experienced increased and unprecedented repression, implemented on the basis of a plan conceived, considered and prepared by the highest authorities of the regime. Thus, during the crackdown, security forces of the Islamic Republic have committed crimes against humanity, as defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statute, including:

- Murder;

- Imprisonment;

- Torture and rape;

- Enforced Disappearance;

- Persecution of various groups for political, religious or sexual reasons.

These crimes were not committed in a specific place or a particular region of Iran, but throughout the country, and against any Iranian civilian whose only crime was to demand free elections and the respect of the people's vote. From the evidence that we have updated, it is clear that these crimes were deliberately committed against the civilian population, implementing political decisions taken by the highest authorities of the regime, and primarily by Mr. Ali Khamenei.

I accuse Mr. Ali Khamenei to be the person with primary responsibility for all crimes committed against Iranian citizens. What happened after the 2009 election meets all criteria of crimes against humanity, as defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statute.

For these reasons, I call on the Heads of State and Governments of member countries of the Security Council to refer these crimes to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, in accordance with Article 13 b) of the Rome Statute, so that he can investigate the crimes committed by leaders of the Islamic Republic against Iranian civilians.

I also call on the Heads of State and Governments of member countries of the Security Council to significantly increase pressure on the leaders of the Islamic Republic by demanding the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners. As the Islamic Republic is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the international community have to call the Iranian regime to comply with its international obligations and with the fundamental rights of the Iranian people.

We believe that such a reaction from the international community, in response to the behaviour of the Iranian regime against its citizens, will send a strong message to the leaders of the Islamic Republic.

Your Excellencies,

The focus of the attached "Report on Crimes Against Humanity Committed in Iran on the Orders of Mr. Ali Khamenei Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran" are the crimes against humanity committed to suppress popular dissent after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fraudulent re-election in June 2009. However, for the past thirty three years, the Islamic Republic has had in place a policy and record of oppression against ethnic communities and religious minorities. We intend to file further supporting reports documenting the abuses of these Iranian citizens and we will summarize these in another report.

I respectfully request that you refer this urgent matter to the International Criminal Court. I assure you that there will be no resolution of the crises caused by the Islamic Republic unless it is forced to respect the fundamental rights of Iranian citizens.

Reza Pahlavi

Share |

Iranian Film Wins Golden Globe

2012-01-16T17:20:00.005+03:30

Director Asghar Farhadi (left) and actor and screenwriter Peyman Moaadi pose with their Golden Globe for best foreign language film.

The Iranian film "A Separation" has won the best foreign language film award at the Golden Globe prizes in Los Angeles.

The Golden Globes are ranked second in prestige after the Oscars in the annual Hollywood film awards.

“A Separation,” from writer-director Asghar Farhadi, tells the story of a married couple facing the dilemma of whether to leave Iran.

It beat out rival films from China, Belgium and Spain, as well as "In the Land of Blood and Honey," the bilingual film about the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina directed by U.S. actress Angelina Jolie.

Farhadi, speaking after the ceremony to journalists in Beverly Hills, said that Iranians and Americans have "no issues with each other."

"In my opinion, the people [of the two countries] have no issues with each other. The people of Iran, as I mentioned earlier, are very peace-loving," he said. "I hope not just for Iran but all over the world that no one experiences war, and war becomes something that we discuss as something from the past."

“A Separation” earlier won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin Film Festival.

In the other Golden Globe prizes, "The Descendants" won for best drama, "The Artist" for best musical or comedy, Martin Scorsese won best director for "Hugo," George Clooney won best actor for "The Descendants," and Meryl Streep got best actress for "The Iron Lady."

Film: Separation won Golden Globe 2012

Related News

Iran Film Festival Gives Western Audiences Glimpse Into Closed Society

A Separation FULL Movie leaked Part 1/9

A SEPARATION - ASGHAR FARHADI

Share |

Iran Film Festival Gives Western Audiences Glimpse Into Closed Society

2012-01-16T17:17:00.000+03:30

"A Separation" follows the strained relationship between an Iranian couple
The much-acclaimed Iranian film, "A Separation," headlined Prague's inaugural Iranian Film Festival this week, in a showcase event highlighting the best of Iran's distinguished film industry.

Ashgar Farhadi's film has received plaudits in Iran as well as in the international film community after being the first Iranian film to win the prestigious Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival and being nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globe Awards in the United States.

The Golden Globes will be held on January 15.

"A Separation" explores the complex issue of migration and poses an uncomfortable question that has confronted a generation of Iranians living in Iran and abroad: to stay in Iran and be slowly strangled by the rigors of Iranian society or flee to the West and become irrelevant?

The film tells the story of the strained relationship between a middle-class couple, Nader and Simin. Nader is driven by his duty to stay in Iran and take care of his ageing and ill father. Simin, meanwhile, is driven by a need for escape and longs to leave Iran, especially for the sake of their young daughter, Termeh.

A series of heated arguments follow between the couple and a climax is reached when Simin leaves home and demands a divorce from Nader, which instigates a series of unforeseen and tragic events.

The film was warmly received by audiences in Prague. Martina Spatna, one of the chief organizers of the film festival, says films like "A Separation" are important because they give Western audiences a rare glimpse into Iran's closed society.

"[Our aim was to] introduce great Iranian films to audiences in the Czech Republic and let the people here discover a part of Iranian culture. The achievement is to represent the Iranian culture and to express Iranian reality," Spatna said.

Spatna, who is also the director of the Czech inter-cultural agency, EasyTalk, says Iranian cinema provides a unique link between Iran and the West.

"In terms of culture there is a lot to share among the countries. We hope Iranian cinema will produce even more great films, which will be popular around the world so that there might be even more links between Iran and other countries," Spatna said.

Increasing Censorship

Iranian journalist Reza Seddigh, who lives in Malaysia, says cinema in Iran remains one of the few links the country has to the outside world. He says it is vital to maintain that link, even amid growing government pressure on the film industry in Iran.

"For independent filmmakers in Iran whose films are not being distributed and screened [for political reasons], foreign film festivals, especially in Europe, are very important as it gives them an opportunity to screen their films. It also allows them to be in direct contact with Western audiences," Seddigh said.
Seddigh's comments come amid a government crackdown on the Iranian film industry, which has been traditionally critical of the Islamic regime. The government has accused the industry of having sympathy with Iran's opposition Green Movement.

Farhadi, as one of Iran's most acclaimed directors, has experienced the brunt of increasing government censorship.

In September 2010, Iranian officials closed the set of "A Separation" for a week after comments Farhadi made at a film festival in Iran, where he reportedly said he wished two dissident Iranian filmmakers, with connections to the opposition Green Movement, were at the event. Farhadi later apologized and production was resumed.

A more significant blow to the Iranian film industry was an order earlier this month by Iran's Culture Ministry to close the House of Cinema, the country's leading independent film-promotion institute.

Disagreements between Iran's House of Cinema and the Culture Ministry reportedly began in 2009 after it invited a Hollywood delegation to visit the Islamic Republic.

Tensions were further fueled by another incident in 2010, when five Iranian filmmakers were accused and arrested for collaborating with the BBC.

Share |

Why is Britain ramping up sanctions against Iran?

2012-01-04T14:39:00.000+03:30

David Cameron and Barack Obama meet outside No 10 Downing Street during a presidential visit in May 2010.
Sabre-rattling at Washington's behest is an idiocy, and likely to do little other than escalate the steps to open conflict

'The dog returns to its vomit, and the sow returns to her mire/ And the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire." Kipling was right. Britain is out of Iraq and desperate to get out of Afghanistan. So why gird ourselves for a fight with Iran, a proud country of 75 million people with whom we cannot go to war without taking leave of our senses?
Do any of Britain's leaders really think further economic sanctions will stop Iran's nuclear programme? I cannot believe it. Sanctions did not topple Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic or Muammar Gaddafi; they led merely to war. Sanctions have been imposed on Iran for 33 years because there was nothing else to do. They have done no good and almost certainly been counterproductive in reinforcing autocracy.
Washington has announced new commercial and financial sanctions on Iran, blacklisting anyone who does business with it. With an election in the offing, President Obama must show America's pro-Israel lobby that he is tough somewhere in the Middle East. The EU must this month decide whether to collude with the US in this dangerous game and ban Iran's oil exports. The threat was enough to get Tehran to test medium-range missiles in the Gulf, and its wilder heads to murmur about closing the Straits of Hormuz, thus blocking a third of the world's sea-borne oil.
This sabre-rattling – in the midst of a recession – is beyond stupid. No one has seriously doubted that Iran's government, surrounded by nuclear-armed or nuclear-allied powers, would one day seek a similar capability. It is the nature of well-resourced and insecure regimes to find comfort in "the ultimate weapon". It seems of no account that no war fought by a nuclear power has seen such a weapon even threatened. It was not a factor in Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands, the Caucasus, Kashmir or numerous Middle East conflicts. The one time such weapons were "on the table" was over Cuba in 1962 – and then they probably helped prevent war.
Any fool may say, you cannot be too careful. It is the motto of the arms race. Israel has a nuclear capability for that reason, and that is why Iran wants one. A pre-emptive Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear plants might postpone their work, but make eventual war more likely. I would prefer it if Iran had no such missiles, but that is hardly for Britain to say when it demands "the right" to its own. In this case, what matters is the avoidance of escalation, of the megaphone belligerence that makes some western leaders vulnerable to the "inevitability" of war.
The only question for the west over the last three decades has been how to respond to Iran's fundamentalist leadership and, more recently, its craving for nuclear status. The answer has been of startling ineptitude. The attempt to set up pro-west regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan led the west to upset the balance of power established by the Iran-Iraq war and the Taliban-Pakistan regime in Kabul. Now the Iraq occupation has secured for Tehran unprecedented influence in Baghdad. Its influence also penetrates deep into western Afghanistan, and its support for resistance movements in the Gulf sheikhdoms is said to be growing by the year. Where now the Foreign Office's famed Arabists?
The long experience of sanctions indicates that they suck the sanctioning powers into confrontation. Their imposition is a prelude either to inert hostility or to war. They embattle the victim regime, driving power and money to its ruling cadres. In Tehran, as in Tripoli and Baghdad in the 1990s, sanctions toppled nobody but made rulers and generals rich. They impoverish not just the poor but the mercantile and professional classes, denying them contact with the outside world. They hasten middle-class emigration and thus reduce the scope for political pluralism and opposition.
Government sources at the weekend rejected all this experience. They claimed tougher sanctions would "hasten Iran's economic collapse and deepen rifts within the regime, in the hope that saner voices will deem the price of pursuing nuclear weapons too high". This commits the democratic fallacy that totalitarian states react to economic pressure as democracies might. Sanctions do not initiate such a process. They just build walls. Meanwhile we are enraging Iran's scientific community by apparently condoning secret assassination as a way of impeding its nuclear programme.
The idea that any nation becomes more malleable when threatened from outside is absurd. A reasonable observer could assume that every utterance from Washington and London at present is scripted to bolster the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on his insecure throne. The west's threats must exhilarate the young bloods of the Revolutionary Guard and depress the opposition. They may be supported by Iran's émigrés, but the diaspora is seldom a reliable guide to politics in the home country.
Economic sanctions are coward's diplomacy. They purport to high moral stance but are merely a low-risk way of bullying the world. The danger is that they encourage militarist lobbies to escalate the steps that lead to open conflict.
Those who argue against unnecessary war are routinely asked the father's knee question, "So what would you do?" Taught since 1939 that Britain must be seen to do something, the British are programmed to meddle. There have been occasions in the last 50 years when it has been right to declare hostilities against other nations – the Falklands, Kosovo and the first Iraq war. But usually the answer to "what to do" about foreign regimes of which we disapprove is, quite simply, to do nothing.
For the most part, other nations' business is not ours. In the last 25 years Britain has mostly been useless at putting the world to rights – it has struggled to wrap itself in the tattered flag of empire, at vast expense but to little effect. It would have been better, far better, to maintain good relations with other states in the hope of assisting causes we profess to hold dear. As for rattling a sabre whenever Washington says so, that is the most humiliating idiocy.-Guardian

Share |

Oil holds at $112 on Iran threats, strong data

2012-01-04T14:32:00.000+03:30

Oil held around $112 a barrel on Wednesday, supported by fears of possible supply disruptions from Iran and by strong economic data from the United States and China.
Oil prices surged on Tuesday as Iran threatened to choke off crude shipments through the strategic Strait of Hormuz in retaliation against tougher sanctions from the West over its nuclear program.
Brent February crude rose 4 cents to $112.17 barrel by 1040 GMT, after rising more than 4 percent on Tuesday to settle at the highest since November 15. This represented the biggest one day gain since last May.
U.S. February crude was down 20 cents to $102.26 a barrel, following its highest close since May 10.
However, sluggish demand, particularly in Europe, could be put under further pressure by prices at these levels, said Olivier Jakob, analyst at Petromatrix in Zug, Switzerland.
"Iran is the supporting factor, but these price levels will hurt the economy, Europe oil demand with prices at these levels will be a total disaster."
He added that the euro's recent weakness against the dollar was making oil particularly expensive in the region, equivalent to $133 per barrel in 2008 terms.
Tensions between Iran and the West heightened further after Tehran issued its most aggressive statement yet as new U.S. and EU financial sanctions take a toll on its economy.
Tehran threatened to take action if the U.S. Navy moved an aircraft carrier into the Gulf but the U.S. dismissed it, saying it would keep sending carrier strike groups through the Gulf.
However many think the chance of Iran following through with its threats is fairly remote, and that prices will begin to reflect this.
"I don't think anyone thinks that Iran has anything to gain by doing it, and they will hurt themselves and their relationship with China," said Jeremy Friesen, commodity strategist at Societe Generale in Hong Kong.
Political risk from Kazakhstan was also a factor, with President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Wednesday extending until January 31 a state of emergency in the western oil city of Zhanaozen, where at least 16 people were killed last month-Reuters

Share |

Nations to Weigh Impact of Possible Iran Oil Curbs

2011-12-19T22:11:00.000+03:30

The Obama administration, its European allies and key Arab states are intensifying discussions on how to maintain stability in the global energy markets in a possible precursor to a formal embargo on Iran's oil exports and its central bank.
Such an embargo would constitute the most direct economic confrontation yet between Iran and the West and would amplify tensions as Iran repeatedly threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes about one-fifth of the world's oil supply.
U.S. and European officials indicated in interviews they are taking steps that could lay the groundwork for such financial penalties as part of the effort to counter Iran's nuclear program.

In particular, the officials said they are seeking assurances from major oil producers, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, to increase exports to the European Union and Asian nations if tighter sanctions on Tehran's energy exports and central bank are enforced in the coming months.
These officials said there is also a growing discussion with emerging oil exporters—such as Libya, Iraq, Ghana and Angola—to increase their production capacities to guard against any shortages caused by the West's economic campaign against Iran.
"If properly implemented, countries will trend away from Iranian supply," said a European official involved in the discussions. "There are lots of conversations going on with Saudis at various levels on this."
Representatives from 11 countries involved in the financial war against Tehran will meet on Tuesday in Rome as part of a group that has been informally dubbed the "coalition of like-minded countries."
U.S., European and Arab diplomats said Iran's oil exports and global energy prices will be key issues discussed at that session, which Western diplomats said will include foreign ministry and finance officials from all the Group of Seven leading industrial nations, along with South Korea, Australia, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. A European Union representative will also attend the meeting.
In addition to energy policy, the conference will focus on sanctions on Iran's finance and transportation sectors, and ensuring the free flow of information into Iran, these officials said.
The U.S. and its European allies have sanctioned most of Iran's financial sector, key transportation firms and businesses linked to Tehran's military since 2006. The United Nations Security Council has also passed four rounds of sanctions against Tehran.
But Washington and Brussels have been wary about hitting Iran's oil exports and the central bank, due to concerns about global energy prices and Tehran's threats to retaliate. Iran last year was the second-largest exporter among the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, selling around 2.6 million barrels of crude oil each day. The Obama administration has been reluctant since taking office to directly sanction Iran's oil exports or its central bank, which facilitates most Iranian energy sales, due to fears this could drive up global energy prices and imperil the U.S. economic recovery.
Still, a determination in the West to take these steps has intensified in recent weeks due to growing fears about Iran's nuclear program and Tehran's alleged support for international terrorism.
Iran says its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes and denies any role in terrorism. But the U.N.'s nuclear agency last month said it had uncovered significant evidence that Tehran has been developing the technologies used to develop nuclear weapons.
France and Britain this month formally presented a plan to the EU to enact a total embargo on both Iran's oil exports and its central bank. The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, approved legislation last week obligating the White House to also blacklist Bank Markazi, the Iranian central bank.
"There's been a palpable hardening of sentiment toward Iran that wasn't there before," said a second European official involved in the negotiations.
U.S., European and Arab officials involved in the discussions on targeting Iran's oil exports said there is a growing recognition that China, India and other major developing countries will continue to buy Iranian oil irrespective of any unilateral steps taken by the U.S. or EU. As a result, a major focus of the Obama administration and Europeans is to find unanimity among the EU states and the West's closest Asian allies, particularly Japan and South Korea, to end all Iranian oil purchases.
This would cut off around half of Tehran's total oil exports and force Iran to sell its supplies at discounted rates to the Chinese and others, said these officials. European countries most dependent on Iranian oil are Greece, Spain and Italy, said European officials.
"The key here is to be doing this in a way where you can phase it in and it doesn't produce that kind of a spike," said Dennis Ross, who oversaw Iran policy at the White House before departing earlier this month. "There may well be a way to expand the overall pie of production."
Arab diplomats share the West's concerns about the pace of Iran's nuclear program. But so far, at least publicly, they have been cautious about using oil as a weapon against Tehran.
At a meeting of OPEC's members in Vienna this week, Iran's oil minister, Rostam Ghasemi, said he had gained assurances from Saudi Arabia that the world's largest exporter of crude oil—currently around 10 million barrels per day— wouldn't try to replace Tehran's crude in case of a Western oil ban.
Still, in private, Saudi officials said last week that they have been conveying to the U.S. and Europe their willingness to step in and increase sales if the sanctions on Iran's oil sector and central bank go into effect.
"It is very logical. It is not political; it is a marketing policy," said a senior Saudi official. "I told this to the Americans, tell your companies if they need more oil they should ask for it and we will give it to them."
The effects of any embargo on European markets should be less daunting than during the Libyan war, because spare oil, mainly from Saudi Arabia, is of a very similar quality to Iranian crude. That means European refineries can just substitute it.
However, oil exporters will need to find a way to help Greece finance its purchases of Gulf oil if it forswears Iranian crude; Athens has been getting Iranian crude on credit.
Other Arab oil officials said they are skeptical that Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait and other major oil exporters can fully make up for Iranian supply. They said OPEC and other countries would have to export at levels dangerously close to full capacity to make up the difference.
"If global sanctions ended up making it impossible for Iran to sell its oil, Gulf countries couldn't make up for the loss," said a Kuwaiti energy official. "You don't replace Iran's 3.6 million barrels" a day, he added, referring to Iran's total production.
While the punitive measures may not disrupt the global supply of oil, many analysts worry about a price spike all the same. While action by Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz would be difficult to pull off in the teeth of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, "just the rhetoric could absolutely spook the oil market," said Amrita Sen, an energy analyst with Barclays Capital in London.-The wall street journals

Share |

Iran state TV airs "confession" of detained CIA spy

2011-12-19T22:06:00.000+03:30

Iranian state television on Sunday aired what it described as the confession of an Iranian man detained for spying for the CIA.
State television broadcast a taped interview with Amir Mirza Hekmati, in which he said he had received training by the U.S. intelligence services. The channel said he had been sent to Iran to provide misinformation to Iranian intelligence.
Iran's Intelligence Ministry said Saturday it had captured a CIA spy of Iranian origin who had received training in the U.S. Army's intelligence units and spent time at U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
State television showed Hekmati seated, wearing an open-necked shirt.
"They (U.S. agents) told me, 'If you are successful at this mission we can train you further, we can give you other missions ... This mission requires that you travel to Iran,'" he said, appearing calm.
In a video with a voice-over in the channel's main news bulletin, pictures of Hekmati were shown in what seemed to be U.S. military bases.
"I was in a spying center in Bagram (a major U.S. base in Afghanistan) ... I went to Dubai and then ... I flew to Tehran," Hekmati said, without mentioning the date.
"They told me, 'You will become a source of military and intelligence information for the Iranians for three weeks and we will give you money for this and then you will return.'"
Iran's state television has in the past broadcast confessions from those accused of threatening state security.
In May, Tehran announced the arrest of a network of 30 CIA-backed spies involved in sabotage and espionage.
Tuesday 15 people were indicted for spying for Washington and Israel. Under Iran's Islamic law, espionage can be punishable by death.-Reuters

Share |

Few details on Iran intelligence minister's Saudi trip

2011-12-14T17:08:00.000+03:30

Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz (right) during a meeting with Heydar Moslehi in Riyadh
Iran's intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, visited Saudi Arabia this week to clear up "misunderstandings" and discuss security issues, Iran's foreign ministry said Tuesday without elaborating.
Moslehi went to Riyadh on Monday, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told a regular media briefing, according to Mehr news agency.
"The intelligence minister's trip to Saudi Arabia has to do with consultations between the two countries aimed at removing misunderstandings and discussing security issues," Mehmanparast was quoted as saying.
The Saudi Press Agency reported that Moslehi met Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, who is Saudi Arabia's interior minister. SPA said "questions of common interest" were discussed, without disclosing details.
Moslehi's trip to Riyadh was the first by a top Iranian official since the deterioration of Iran-Saudi ties in recent months following a Saudi military intervention in Bahrain in March to back the Sunni minority regime there against Shiite pro-democracy protesters.
Relations have further frayed with Riyadh accusing Tehran of interfering in neighbouring Arab states and warning that Iran's nuclear programme could pose a threat to regional security.
And tensions worsened following US accusations of an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi envoy to Washington. Tehran has denied the charge.-AFP

Share |

Ex-Iran Guard commander visits White House with Iraq leader

2011-12-14T17:01:00.000+03:30

A former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the FBI says played a role in a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 U.S. servicemen, accompanied Iraq’s prime minister to the White House on Monday, attending an event at which President Obama trumpeted the end of the Iraq War.
Hadi Farhan al-Amiri, transportation minister in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, was part of the delegation that visited the White House to discuss Iraq’s future and Iran’s influence there, among other topics.
At a joint White House news conference with Mr. al-Maliki, Mr. Obama proclaimed that the U.S. is committed to being a major player in the region and that Iraq’s neighbors should take heed. He did not mention Iran by name.
Critics have accused Mr. al-Maliki, a Shiite, of acting at the behest of the Shiite government in Iran. But Mr. Obama told reporters that he believes the Iraqi prime minister when he says that “his interest is maintaining Iraqi sovereignty and preventing meddling by anybody inside of Iraq.”
“And he has shown himself to be willing to make very tough decisions in the interests of Iraqi nationalism, even if they cause problems with his neighbor,” the president said in a thinly veiled reference to Iran.
White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to confirm whether Mr. al-Amiri was part of the Iraqi delegation. He referred questions to the Iraqi government.
Mr. al-Maliki’s office listed Mr. al-Amiri as a member of the delegation. A spokesman for the Iraqi Embassy was unavailable to elaborate on Mr. al-Amiri’s role in the White House visit.
Louis J. Freeh, who served as FBI director in the Clinton administration and the early months of the George W. Bush administration, said it was shocking that Mr. al-Maliki would include Mr. al-Amiri in his visit to Washington.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has been involved in “countless acts of terrorism, which are acts of war against the United States,” Mr. Freeh said in an interview.
Mr. al-Amiri served as a commander of the Revolutionary Guard's Badr Corps, a battalion that was tasked with operations in Iraq. He remained active in the Badr Corps during the late 1980s and 1990s, when he was working on resistance efforts against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
The FBI linked the Revolutionary Guard to the attack on the Khobar Towers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996. Nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed by a bomb blast at the towers, which were housing American military personnel.
“As a senior leader, [Mr. al-Amiri] would have to have known about Khobar, and he would know Gen. [Ahmad] Sherifi, who was the IRGC general that conducted the operation,” Mr. Freeh said.
He added that the “FBI would love to sit down and talk to him, show him photographs and ask him questions” about the fugitives named in the Khobar Towers indictment.
The Revolutionary Guard has been linked to several acts of terrorism, including an attack on the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires in 1994, in which 85 people were killed and hundreds wounded.
The Revolutionary Guard supported Iraqi Shiite deserters and refugees, organized them into the Badr Corps and used them against Saddam’s regime in Iraq.
The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, formerly known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was one of the groups that received financial and military support from Iran during that time. Mr. Bush met the council’s leader, Sayyed Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, at the White House in 2006.Ali Alfoneh, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam, Iran thought it was time to position pro-Iranian Shiite elements in the new Iraqi government.
“All those elements governing Iraq today have at some point been cooperating with Iran,” Mr. Alfoneh said.
“That is true of the president [Jalal Talabani], the prime minister and a good number of Iraqi politicians who previous to their arrival in Iraq were refugees living in Iran,” he added.
Analysts and Western officials say some of those officials still depend heavily on Iran.
U.S. officials say the Revolutionary Guard has had a role in several attacks on U.S. interests worldwide.
“In addition to the well-publicized Arbabsiar case, the IRGC has supported Shia militant groups who attack U.S. forces in Iraq,” said a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Mansour Arbabsiar, a U.S. citizen and used-car salesman, has been accused of a central role in a suspected plot by the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. He has pleaded not guilty.
Outside the White House on Monday, a large group of protesters rallied in support of Iranian exiles at Camp Ashraf, which is located about 40 miles north of Baghdad.
The Iraqi government has set a Dec. 31 deadline to close the camp, which houses members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), listed by the U.S. as a terrorist group. The exiles’ supporters fear the camp’s unarmed residents will be massacred because of their opposition to Iran’s government.
Current and former members of Congress, former officials who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, a former Iraqi official and a former senior commanding officer at Camp Ashraf spoke at the protest.
“We did not fight and die … for you to deliver the integrity of Iraq to the mullahs in Iran,” said former Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, New Jersey Democrat, in remarks directed at Mr. al-Maliki.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who served as homeland security secretary in the George W. Bush administration, called on the Obama administration to take the MEK off the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Army Brig. Gen. David Phillips, former senior commanding officer at Camp Ashraf, said he found no evidence linking the camp’s residents to terrorist acts.
“A few had unpaid parking tickets in the United States,” he said. “That shows you how thoroughly we did the research on who they were.”
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell suggested that U.S. Marines be left in Iraq to ensure the safety of Camp Ashraf residents.
All U.S. combat troops are scheduled to leave Iraq by the end of this month.
Mr. Freeh warned of an imminent “genocide” at Camp Ashraf.
MEK leader Maryam Rajavi addressed the rally via teleconference from France. She said the al-Maliki government had turned Iraq into the “backyard of the Iranian regime” and accused the Obama administration of obstructing a European Parliament plan to relocate the camp’s residents.
“The people of Iran and the United States will judge you on the basis of what you did when you could stop a great carnage,” she said.
“One day, you will severely criticize yourselves for the events unfolding these days and for wasting time,” she added.-The washington post

Share |

Obama Says U.S. Has Asked Iran to Return Drone

2011-12-13T00:55:00.000+03:30

President Obama said on Monday that the United States had asked Iran to return an American surveillance drone that the Iranians say they captured on Dec. 4. It was Mr. Obama’s first public comment about the remote controlled aircraft in a case that has elevated American tensions with Iran.
“We have asked for it back — we’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Mr. Obama said of the vehicle in a short question-and-answer session with reporters at the White House. Mr. Obama appeared along with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of
Iraq, with whom he discussed issues including American concerns about Iran’s influence in the region.
Mr. Obama was answering the question: “And speaking of Iran, are you concerned that it will be able to weaken America’s national security by discovering intelligence from the fallen drone that it captured?”
Mr. Obama did not elaborate on the incident or on Iranian assertions that its forces had captured the drone through a digital attack on the aircraft’s avionics, which they say caused it to land safely inside northern Iran.
American officials have called that account highly unlikely, and attributed the loss of the drone to a technical malfunction. Precisely how the drone, which was managed by C.I.A. controllers in neighboring Afghanistan, ended up on the ground in Iran, apparently nearly intact, remains unclear.
Last Thursday, the Iranian authorities staged an elaborate televised video presentation of what they said was a captured RQ-170 drone with radar-evading technology. The RQ-170 is capable of lingering for hours at 50,000 feet, monitoring developments on the ground; American officials have said that the device was part of a stepped-up effort to monitor suspect nuclear sites in Iran.
On Monday, Iranian military officials were quoted in the state-run press saying that they were busy extracting intelligence data from the drone and were intending to reverse-engineer it to learn how it works.
Iran lodged formal complaints last week about what they called the drone incursion, protesting to both the United Nations Security Council and Switzerland’s ambassador to Tehran, who is responsible for American interests in Iran. The United States and Iran broke diplomatic relations more than 30 years ago.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who began an overseas trip early Monday, described efforts to seek the return of the drone from Iran as "an appropriate request." But he cast doubt on chances that Iran would agree. "I don’t expect that that will happen,” Mr. Panetta said. -Newyork times

Share |

Iran steel factory blast: Foreigners among seven killed

2011-12-13T00:51:00.000+03:30

A local MP said there appeared to have been unexploded munitions in the consignmnt of scrap

An explosion at a steel factory in Iran has killed seven people including foreign nationals, say reports in Iranian state media.

The blast in the city of Yazd was caused by discarded ammunition which arrived at the plant with a consignment of scrap metal, the official Irna news agency reported.
It happened late on Sunday at the privately owned plant, Irna said.
At least 12 other people are reported to have been injured.
The governor of Yazd region in central Iran, Azizollah Seyfi, said "several of those killed were foreign nationals".
He gave no further details of their nationalities or what caused the blast, although he did say it was being investigated.
A local member of parliament, Ali Akbar Oliaw, said there appeared to have been unexploded munitions in with the steel.
"Among the scrap metal was ammunition which had not worked, and this caused the blast," he was quoted as saying.
Unexplained blasts There have been several unexplained explosions in Iran so far this year at factories and military sites, fuelling rumours of foreign intelligence involvement designed to disrupt Iran's nuclear programme.
A powerful blast in November killed 17 people at a military base near Tehran belonging to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards.
Israel later said that explosion could have slowed down Iran's nuclear activities.
A further blast was reported at a factory in Isfahan province on 28 November.
The causes of these incidents remain unclear.
Iran denies trying to make an atomic bomb and says its nuclear activities are purely peaceful.-bbc

Share |

Iranian president targeted by shoe thrower

2011-12-13T00:47:00.000+03:30

A man reportedly threw two shoes Monday at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejahd but missed.

A 45-year-old textile worker who has been out of work for a year threw his shoes Monday at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to protest not having received unemployment benefits, an Iranian website reported. He missed, striking a banner behind the president instead, said Ghased News, an unofficial website. CNN has not been able to confirm the report independently.
Ghased News said the incident occurred in the northern city of Sari during a memorial ceremony for a former oil minister who died last year.
Attendees beat the man until security forces intervened, the site reported. The man had been fired from his job at a weaving factory and said he had not received unemployment benefits for a year, it said.
Ghased News identified the man as Rashid S., a resident of Sari who was once jailed for throwing eggs and tomatoes at former President Mohammad Khatami.
The audience apologized to Ahmadinejad and chanted slogans in his support, Ghased News said.
Ahmadinejad's website, www.president.ir, posted a picture of the president at the event but made no mention of the flying footwear.
Throwing shoes is a sign of profound disrespect in Arab countries, but not in Iran. In December 2008, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a news conference in Baghdad. He, too, missed. As he was pushed to the floor, the reporter shouted that his act was a "farewell kiss" to the "dog" who launched the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The reporter, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, was released after nine months in jail.
Though many Iraqis hold Bush in low esteem, opinions were mixed in Iraq following the incident. Some viewed al-Zaidi as a hero, with thousands taking to the streets calling for his release; others said his act went against Arab traditions of honoring guests.
According to the CIA World Factbook, citing official government figures, Iran's unemployment rate last year was 13.2%. But many Iranians believe the true figure to be much higher.-CNN

Share |

Iran sees crude market "relatively balanced"

2011-12-11T06:39:00.000+03:30

Iran's OPEC governor said on Saturday the oil market was "relatively balanced", indicating the country will not push for any major shift in an OPEC ministerial meeting next week.
"The market is relatively balanced ... and my feeling is there is a general sentiment among the OPEC members to make a decision based on the real needs of the market," Mohammad Ali Khatibi told Reuters.
Khatibi's comments came days ahead of a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna on Wednesday.
Iran, OPEC's leading price hawk, said in November it would ask member states to reduce output back to pre-Libya crisis volumes, but it has since backed down from that stance and now appears likely to agree a new production target that legitimises current output of around 30 million barrels a day.
"If there is a real need in the market, an appropriate decision should be made," Khatibi said. "But if there is a surplus of oil supply in the future, a solution should be sought for that."
"The decision should be made on the need of the market. OPEC has always sought a balanced market in which there is neither shortage nor surplus."
Talks in OPEC's last meeting in June broke down in acrimony as members failed to reach consensus over output.
Iran, which holds the OPEC rotating presidency, successfully opposed a move led by Saudi Arabia to raise the OPEC ceiling but the top exporter went ahead and raised output unilaterally. Saudi Arabia says it is now pumping at its highest rate for decades. (Writing by Ramin Mostafavi; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)-Reuters

Share |

Russian election: Biggest protests since fall of USSR

2011-12-11T06:13:00.001+03:30

Daniel Sandford in Moscow: 'It is in many ways a political reawakening

Thousands of people have attended the biggest anti-government rally in the Russian capital Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union.

As many as 50,000 people gathered on an island near the Kremlin to condemn alleged ballot-rigging in parliamentary elections and demand a re-run.
Other, smaller rallies took place in St Petersburg and other cities.
Communists, nationalists and Western-leaning liberals turned out together despite divisions between them.
The protesters allege there was widespread fraud in Sunday's polls though the ruling United Russia party did see its share of the vote fall sharply.

“Start Quote

The time has come to throw off the chains”

Alexei Navalny Jailed protest leader, in message posted on his blog

Demonstrations in the immediate aftermath of the election saw more than 1,000 arrests, mostly in Moscow, and several key protest leaders such as the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny were jailed.

A message from Mr Navalny was released through his blog, saying: "The time has come to throw off the chains. We are not cattle or slaves. We have a voice and we have the strength to defend it."
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has never experienced popular protests like these before, the BBC's Steve Rosenberg reports from Moscow.
During his decade in power, first as president then prime minister, he has grown used to being seen as Russia's most popular and powerful politician.
But as one of the protesters put it to our correspondent, Russia is changing.
'We are the people' Police put the number gathering on Moscow's Bolotnaya Square for the "Fair Elections" rally at 25,000 while organisers talked of 100,000.

Nobody believes the elections were free and fair. Many are also asking that the head of the election commission stands down, and some are going even further and demanding that Vladimir Putin himself resigns.
There's a real sense of anger - and although the numbers are not that big in global terms, in Moscow terms this is a very, very significant demonstration.
This number simply haven't come out onto the streets of Moscow since 1990s.
It should not be underestimated what a significant moment this is.
It may not deal a fatal blow to Mr Putin's government, but it is certainly the most severe wake-up call he has received during 12 years in power.

The BBC's Daniel Sandford reports from the scene that the number seems to be closer to 50,000, and people continued to rally on the square after hearing the speakers.

A resolution was passed calling for the cancellation of Sunday's election results, new elections, the resignation of electoral commission chief Vladimir Churov, an investigation into the alleged ballot-rigging and the immediate release of arrested protesters.
Konstantin Kosachyov, a United Russia MP authorised to speak on behalf of the Kremlin, ruled out holding negotiations on the organisers' demands.
"With all respect for the people who came out to protest, they are not a political party," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.
Authorities had permitted the protest on condition the rally was relocated from central Revolution Square to Bolotnaya Square, an island in the Moscow River just south of the Kremlin where access points could be easily controlled.
Marchers to the rally streamed across a bridge under the walls of the Kremlin walls, past a long line of police.
Prominent figures at the rally included younger opposition activists like Yevgenia Chirikova, as well as former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister under the late Boris Yeltsin.

Protests in pictures

At least 50,000 police and riot troops were deployed in Moscow ahead of Saturday's protests and the city began to resemble a police state rather than a democracy, Daniel Sandford says.

There were no immediate reports of protest-related arrests in Moscow but the interior ministry reported 130 arrests at rallies across the country, most of them in Khabarovsk in the far east.

Film; Protests in Russia, 20111210

Share |

Britain withdraws diplomats from Iran after embassy attack

2011-11-30T13:17:00.001+03:30

Iranian protesters storming the British embassy in Tehran
Foreign Office confirms that some staff are leaving country following storming of compound in Tehran by Iranian protesters

Britain is withdrawing diplomatic staff from Iran after a mob attacked its embassy and a residential compound in the Iranian capital.
The Foreign Office confirmed that some of its staff were leaving, but did not say who or how many. Nor did it say whether it would continue to have an embassy in Iran or maintain diplomatic relations with the country.
A spokesman said: "The prime minister and foreign secretary have made clear that ensuring the safety of our staff and their families is our immediate priority. In light of yesterday's events, and to ensure their ongoing safety, some staff are leaving Tehran.
"We do not comment on our contingency plans. We will make an announcement about our embassy at an appropriate time."
Protesters, including members of the paramilitary basij brigades, under the control of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, stormed the embassy, surging through lines of riot police to break into it and a separate residential compound, the Qolhak Gardens, in northern Tehran.
Staff locked themselves in their offices and homes as the crowd ripped the gilded UK crest off the embassy, pulled down the union flag to replace it with the Iranian flag, and threw satellite dishes off the roofs of embassy buildings. They also smashed windows and burned British, US and Israeli flags.
The scenes, reminiscent of the 1979 seizure of the US embassy, prompted the foreign secretary, William Hague, to accuse Iran of breaching the Vienna convention.
He said: "The United Kingdom takes this irresponsible action extremely seriously. It amounts to a grave breach of the Vienna convention which requires the protection of diplomats and diplomatic premises under all circumstances. We hold the Iranian government responsible for its failure to take adequate measures to protect our embassy, as it is required to do."
David Cameron warned the Iranian government of "serious consequences" for failing to protect Britain's diplomatic staff.
The storming of the embassy was triggered by the UK's decision to sever ties to the Iranian banking system and parliament, the Majlis, after the International Atomic Energy Agency published a report citing "credible" evidence that Iranian scientists had experimented with a nuclear warhead design and could be continuing to do so.
The Majlis retaliated on Sunday by calling for the expulsion of Britain's ambassador, Dominick Chilcott, and the permanent downgrading of bilateral relations.-Guardian

Iran will face 'serious consequences' over embassy attack, says Hague - video

Share |

Analysis: Iran adopts "wait and see" policy on Syria's crisis

2011-11-27T21:31:00.000+03:30

Iran, its crucial anti-Israel alliance with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at risk from an uprising against his rule, has chosen a "wait and see" policy driven in part by concern not to alienate anyone who might succeed him, analysts say.
A downfall of Assad could deal a strategic blow to Shi'ite Muslim-dominated Iran, where confrontation toward Israel remains one of its overriding foreign policy principles.
Iran has used various regional cards, including fears it could unleash militant proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas against Israeli and U.S. interests, to deter foreign intervention in Syria, making it harder for protesters to overthrow Assad.
But analysts say the Iranian-Syrian axis now faces a serious dilemma: Should Iran stick with Assad -- whose family has ruled Syria for 41 years -- at any cost or should it jettison the Islamic Republic's most important Middle East ally?
"Iran's policy is to wait and see ... We need to be patient as the situation is very unclear and very sensitive in Syria. We hope for the best possible outcome for everyone," said an Iranian government official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"(But although) Assad helped Iran play a leading role in its fight against the Zionist regime (Israel) ... now it is unwise for Iran to take sides."
Iran will be hard-pressed to find Arab allies to replace Syria so it will be naturally keener to ensure Assad -- whose minority Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam -- can ultimately vanquish the revolt by majority Sunni Muslims.
"A weak Assad is no longer an effective regional ally for Iran ... But it is better to have a weak ally rather than a Sunni (Muslim) leader in power in Syria," said Iranian analyst Hamid Farahvashi.
WARY OF "BACKING THE WRONG HORSE"
However, Iranian leaders are also worried that siding too emphatically with Assad could undermine their chances of establishing a beneficial relationship with any new Syrian government, analysts say.
"Iranians do not want to back the wrong horse ... It is a very sensitive period and any wrong move could have negative consequences," said Farahvashi.
There are rumors in Tehran suggesting that Iranian officials have met members of the Syrian opposition in an effort to probe the possibility of forming future alliances.
"We do not want to be seen as betrayers of our ally ... but like all other countries, Iran's priority is to preserve the country's interests," said the Iranian official.
The Syrian crisis has added to pressures on Iran's clerical elite, ranging from tightening international sanctions imposed over Iran's disputed nuclear work, high inflation, long queues of jobless and investors keeping a tight hold on their purses.
Betraying frayed nerves about the possibility of government change in Syria, Tehran has called the unrest against Assad an "American-Zionist" conspiracy. Whether Tehran has contingency plans for any overthrow of Assad remains unclear.
"Everything will happen behind the scenes. Iran might get closer to Lebanon's Hezbollah or other Shi'ite militant groups in the region to preserve its influence in the region," said an Asian diplomat in Tehran, speaking on ground rules of anonymity.
The United States says Iran's policy toward the Syrian crisis has included financial and military aid. Iran denies any involvement in matters of the Syrian state.
Iranian officials still hope Assad will outlast the revolt. "Assad can bring millions of his supporters into the streets ... He enjoys support of his nation in big cities as we have seen in pro-government rallies in Syria," the government official said.
Iranian leaders hope international efforts to unseat Assad will ultimately be undone by concerns not to ignite broader sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims that could destabilize the wider region.
Saudi Arabia, which shares U.S. fears that Iran is covertly seeking nuclear arms, has long accused Tehran of trying stir up its Shi'ite minority. Analysts say Syria might become the focal point of an Iranian-Saudi battle for regional dominance.
"Syria might become a ground for America and Saudi Arabia to settle scores with Tehran ... Further pressure on Assad might cause sectarian violence in Lebanon, Iraq and many other parts of the region where Iran has influence," said political analyst Mansour Marvi.
IRAN EYES TURKEY IN SYRIAN CRISIS
With Turkey's condemnation of its erstwhile ally Assad over his military crackdown on protesters that has left thousands dead, Iran has become more cautious in its approach to Syria's crisis, condemning his use of violence and calling on his government and the opposition to reach an "understanding."
Turkey and Iran are competing for influence in the new Middle East and each presents a model -- one Islamic, the other secular and democratic -- for Arab revolutionaries.
Iranian leaders view Ankara as a key cog in what they see as a U.S. scheme backed by Gulf Arab states to contain Tehran's ambitions to be the Middle East's dominant power and undermine its Islamic Revolution.
Some diplomats and analysts disagree, however.
"More than having influence, Iran is wisely using regional conflicts, like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, to its own benefit," said an Asian diplomat in Tehran. "Americans credit Iran for their mistakes in the Middle East."
Iran's hardline rulers were quick to put a positive spin on the Arab Spring uprisings against autocratic rulers, saying it will spell the end of U.S.-backed governments in the region.
While analysts abroad have said the Arab Spring has been largely secular in nature, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has dubbed it the "Islamic Awakening," saying it was inspired by Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution that replaced the U.S-backed Shah with a Muslim theocracy.
The government's Syria policy has angered President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rivals, deepening a political rift within the conservative elite dating to the 2009 presidential election that the opposition says was rigged to secure his return to power.
Some politicians, including legislators, say Iran should side with the Syrian opposition and not "a figure (Assad)."
"Iran could have mediated and controlled the crisis in Syria if Ahmadinejad's government had a better position in the international community," moderate former deputy foreign minister Mohammad Sadr was quoted as saying by some pro-reform Iranian websites.
Iran's reformist opposition has watched with admiration as popular revolutions have toppled several Arab dictators.
But despite divisions within Tehran conservative ruling elite, opposition leaders looks incapable for now of resuming serious street protests quelled by Revolutionary Guards two years ago in the wake of Ahmadinejad's re-election.-Reuters

Share |

Iran arrests 12 'CIA spies' for targeting nuclear plans

2011-11-27T21:26:00.001+03:30

Iran accuses CIA spies of targeting its nuclear programme

Iran has arrested 12 spies of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the official IRNA news agency reports.

Parviz Sorouri, an influential lawmaker, said the agents were targeting Iran's military and its nuclear programme.
He said they were operating in co-ordination with Israel's Mossad and other regional agencies.
The United States and its allies suspect Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon program, a charge Tehran denies.
Mr Sorouri, a member of the powerful National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, did not give the nationality of the alleged agents, nor when they were arrested.
"The US and Zionist regime's espionage apparatuses were trying to use regional intelligence services, both inside and outside Iran, in order to deal a strong blow to our country," he was quoted as saying.
"Fortunately, these steps failed due to the quick measures taken by Intelligence Ministry officials," Mr Sorouri said.
Spy ring The Iranian claim follows reports in the US that Lebanon's Hezbollah has unravelled a CIA spy ring within the Shia militant organisation. Hezbollah has close ties to Iran.
Reports quoting US intelligence officials emerged this week appearing to suggest that a number of US spies had been unmasked and that their lives were now in danger in Lebanon.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah said the reports were true. "Lebanese intelligence vanquished US and Israeli intelligence in what is now known as the intelligence war," he told the AFP news agency.
In June the group's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, said on TV that he had unmasked at least two CIA spies who had infiltrated the ranks of the organisation.
Although the US Embassy in Beirut initially said there was no substance to the accusations, the Associated Press reports that American officials later conceded that Nasrallah had been telling the truth.
In May, Iran said it had arrested 30 people after breaking up a spy network run by the CIA.
It said the network had operated out of American diplomatic missions in the Malaysia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to recruit Iranians as spies.-bbc

Share |

Iran parliament votes to downgrade relations with UK

2011-11-27T21:24:00.001+03:30

The vote comes in a difficult period for relations between the two countries

Iran's parliament has voted by a large majority to downgrade diplomatic relations with the UK.

The move comes after the UK Treasury imposed sanctions on Iranian banks on Tuesday, accusing them of facilitating the country's nuclear programme.
Iranian radio reported some MPs chanted "Death to Britain" during the vote, which was approved by 87% of MPs.
The move needs approval by Iran's Guardian Council, which vets all legislation, before it can take effect.
Parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani warned that the chamber was "observing the behaviour of this country [Britain], and it is the beginning of the road," Iranian state media reports.
The vote could lead to the expulsion of the British ambassador in Tehran, Dominick Chilcott, who was only appointed to the post last month.
Britain's Foreign Office said that the vote was "regrettable".
"If the Iranian Government acts on this, we will respond robustly in consultation with our international partners," it said.
Nuclear row
Relations between Iran and the UK have been worsening amid rising tension over Iran's nuclear programme.
The sanctions announced by Chancellor George Osborne on Tuesday cut off all UK financial ties with Iranian banks.
Mr Osborne said there was evidence that Iran's banks were funding its nuclear programme.
That decision followed a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that suggested Iran was working towards acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Iran says its nuclear programme has entirely peaceful ends.-bbc

Share |

Iran explosion at Revolutionary Guards military base

2011-11-13T04:09:00.001+03:30

A local resident said the sound of the blast was "deafening"

Seventeen soldiers have been killed in an explosion at a military base near Iran's capital Tehran, officials say.

The blast occurred when weapons were being moved inside a Revolutionary Guards depot, a spokesman for the elite unit told state TV.
Windows in nearby buildings were shattered and the blast was heard in central Tehran, 40 km (25 miles) away.
Two hours after the explosion a fire still raged and there were traffic jams on nearby roads, a local reporter said.
The death toll was revised down from an earlier figure released by the Revolutionary Guards of 27.
Local MP Hossein Garousi said "a large part of an ammunition depot exploded," parliament's website reported.
Revolutionary Guards spokesman Ramezan Sharif did not say what had caused the "accident" in the village of Bidganeh, near the city of Karaj.
"Some of the casualties are reported to be in a critical condition," he said.
An emergency worker said that 12 people had been taken to hospital.
Karaj resident Kaveer told the BBC's Newshour programme that the sound was "deafening".
"We were kind of shocked. I just ran out of the house and looked around," he said.
Economic force
An elite military force, the Revolutionary Guard was set up shortly after the 1979 Iranian revolution to defend the country's Islamic system.
It has since become a major military, political and economic force in Iran.
The Revolutionary Guard has been targeted by UN sanctions aimed at pressuring Iran to halt uranium enrichment.
There have been occasional unexplained explosions in Iran before.
Eighteen people were killed in a blast at a Revolutionary Guards base in the north-western Lorestan province in October 2010.
The latest blast comes at a time of heightened tensions over Iran's nuclear ambitions.
The UN's nuclear watchdog the IAEA released a report on Tuesday which, correspondents say, prompted new fears that Iran's nuclear programme has a military objective.
There has also been speculation in Israel's media that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering ordering strikes against Iran's nuclear sites, in the hope of stalling or ending its programme.
Iran says its nuclear programme has purely civilian aims.-bbc

Film: BBC: Deadly blast at Iran arms depot

Share |

America's itch to brawl has a new target – but bombs can't conquer Iran

2011-11-04T15:30:00.000+03:30

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the inauguration of Iran's Karrar drone aircraft at Malek-e Ashtar University in 2010.
A post-imperial virus has infected foreign policy. We've been here before, we know the human cost, and now we must stop

This time there will be no excuses. Plans for British support for an American assault on Iran, revealed in today's Guardian, are appalling. They would risk what even the "wars of 9/11" did not bring: a Christian-Muslim armageddon engulfing the region. This time no one should say they were not warned, that minds were elsewhere, that we were told it would be swift and surgical. Nobody should say that.
To western strategists, Iran today is exactly where Iraq was in 2002. The country posed no threat to the west. Yet "weapons of mass destruction" were said to be primed and had to be urgently eliminated. The offending regime could be subjugated by air power or, if not, by regime change. The cause was noble, and the outcome sure.
There any comparison ends. Iran is not a one-man, two-bit dictatorship, but a nation of 70 million people, an ancient and proud civilisation with a developed civil society and a modicum of pluralist democracy. Certainly its insecure leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants a weapons-ready nuclear enrichment programme, as next week's United Nations report by the International Atomic Energy Authority is expected to repeat. But he leads a country which, like Pakistan, Britain or Israel, craves status, prestige and the vague security that these unusable weapons seem to convey.
Nuclear dissemination is deplorable, but massively overhyped. Warheads cost a fortune to develop and keep in service. Modern anti-western aggression finds it cheaper and more effective to plan terrorist outrages. Nuclear bombs have not made Israel more secure. They have been useless to Pakistan in confronting India, and to North Korea against the south. They did not save apartheid in South Africa, or the Soviet Union from itself.
The planned attack on Iran is familiar in form. It is declared exclusively aerial, with missiles and unmanned drones deployed against nuclear and military targets. The airmen will promise, as they did in Belgrade, Baghdad and Benghazi, that bombing can do the job unaided. The enemy then digs in and fights back, the tempo of attack has to mount, and ground forces are sucked in.
We read that there are, as yet, no plans for a ground attack on Iran, though "a small number of special forces" may be required, as was required eventually in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. The mission will creep from wrecking Iran's nuclear capability to ensuring it cannot be rebuilt, and then to securing regime change and "freedom". We have been there so often before. The logic of war tends towards totality, without which no victory can be declared.
Total war on Iran would be a catastrophe. Every politician involved in this business should be locked in a room and forced to read the cuttings on Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade. Ahmadinejad may delight audiences with his bloodthirsty language about the west. But the rest of the world would ask by what right are two nuclear powers using violence to stop someone else joining their weirdly exclusive club. We would have no UN support for such a venture. No one seriously supposes that Iran, under whatever ruler, would seek to wipe out Israel – and anyway that is Israel's business.
Stopping Iran from developing a nuclear capability is and always was a lost cause. It appears to be three years from deliverable warheads and is besieged by foreign agents launching cyber-attacks, selling fake components and assassinating scientists. But Iran would be no easy target, like Libya or Iraq. The more isolated and threatened Iran is by the west, the more nuclear assertiveness attracts its leadership, and the more allies would rally to its cause.
Every expert report on Iran warns that bombing is the one thing likely to bond the unpopular Ahmadinejad to his people. The idea that they would rise up against him after the Pentagon's reported "shock and awe" three-day blitz of 1,200 targets is demented. Ahmadinejad's recent antics in New York were designed to provoke just such belligerence, to bolster his position and that of the hardliners. For rightwingers to play the enemy's game in this way used to be called treason. American presidential candidates now call it patriotism.
The wars of choice that followed 9/11 have acquired a rhythm of their own. They have yielded 10 years of rolling thunder across the Muslim world, variously proclaiming retaliation, humanity, regime change and democracy. There have been pluses – the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and (temporarily) the Taliban. But the minuses have been tens of thousands killed, millions displaced, societies upheaved, billions of dollars of destruction, and a region destabilised. The wars have been a gigantic, historic tragedy. They have not advanced western security one jot.
If ever there were a country that was once ripe for soft-power diplomacy, it was modern Iran. Yet the west misread Ahmadinejad and then misread such dissenters as Mohammad Khatami and parliament's speaker, Mehdi Karroubi. It defied pleas from moderates not to impose sanctions, rejecting the argument that Iran needed a strengthened professional, commercial and academic class as counterweight to the military and the mullahs. As with the sanctions imposed on Saddam's Iraq, Gaddafi's Libya and Mugabe's Zimbabwe, they have driven Iran's rulers into a siege economy. Sanctions weaken the forces of pluralism and opposition. They are plainly counterproductive.
Revolutionary Iran should have been flooded with aid, trade and cultural attention. That is what happened in Pakistan and Indonesia. Neither is a model state, but they have a developed middle class and are not regarded as regional menaces. The US is not declaring war on Pakistan, though it and its nuclear weapons pose a far greater threat to America's interests in the region than Iran.
Western bombs cannot conquer Tehran. America and Britain might be able to invade in sufficient strength to knock out nuclear bunkers, but they could not stop rebuilding, especially after a war that would radicalise the nation and make it far more antagonistic. The outcome might make Israel feel temporarily a little safer, but it would render both Israel and the west more vulnerable to terrorist and other retaliation.
A virus seems to be running through the upper echelons of Washington and London, that of a moral duty to wage war against perceived evil wherever it offers a bombing target. Anyone watching last month's Republican primary debate in Las Vegas will have been shocked at the belligerence shown by the six candidates towards the outside world. It was a display of what the historian Robert D Kaplan called "the warrior politics … of an imperial reality that dominates our foreign policy", a fidgety search for reasons to go brawling round the globe, at any cost in resulting anarchy. The spectacle was frightening and depressing.
British friends of America can see all the signs of another country in the throes of "losing an empire and not finding a role", of a paranoid nervous breakdown. Britain has been there before. It should never go back. It has been warned.-Guardian

Share |

U.S. Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit From Iraq

2011-10-30T16:12:00.000+03:30

United States soldiers performed a closing ceremony on Oct. 20 for a base in Tikrit, now under the control of Iraqi forces
The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.
The plans, under discussion for months, gained new urgency after President Obama’s announcement this month that the last American soldiers would be brought home from Iraq by the end of December. Ending the eight-year war was a central pledge of his presidential campaign, but American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.
After unsuccessfully pressing both the Obama administration and the Iraqi government to permit as many as 20,000 American troops to remain in Iraq beyond 2011, the Pentagon is now drawing up an alternative.
In addition to negotiations over maintaining a ground combat presence in Kuwait, the United States is considering sending more naval warships through international waters
in the region.
With an eye on the threat of a belligerent Iran, the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.
The size of the standby American combat force to be based in Kuwait remains the subject of negotiations, with an answer expected in coming days. Officers at the Central Command headquarters here declined to discuss specifics of the proposals, but it was clear that successful deployment plans from past decades could be incorporated into plans for a post-Iraq footprint in the region.
For example, in the time between the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States Army kept at least a combat battalion — and sometimes a full combat brigade — in Kuwait year-round, along with an enormous arsenal ready to be unpacked should even more troops have been called to the region.
“Back to the future” is how Maj. Gen. Karl R. Horst, Central Command’s chief of staff, described planning for a new posture in the Gulf. He said the command was focusing on smaller but highly capable deployments and training partnerships with regional militaries. “We are kind of thinking of going back to the way it was before we had a big ‘boots on the ground’ presence,” General Horst said. “I think it is healthy. I think it is efficient. I think it is practical.”
Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
“We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Tajikistan after the president’s announcement.
During town-hall-style meetings with military personnel in Asia last week, the secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, noted that the United States had 40,000 troops in the region, including 23,000 in Kuwait, though the bulk of those serve as logistical support for the forces in Iraq.
As they undertake this effort, the Pentagon and its Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, have begun a significant rearrangement of American forces, acutely aware of the political and budgetary constraints facing the United States, including at least $450 billion of cuts in military spending over the next decade as part of the agreement to reduce the budget deficit.
Officers at Central Command said that the post-Iraq era required them to seek more efficient ways to deploy forces and maximize cooperation with regional partners. One significant outcome of the coming cuts, officials said, could be a steep decrease in the number of intelligence analysts assigned to the region. At the same time, officers hope to expand security relationships in the region. General Horst said that training exercises were “a sign of commitment to presence, a sign of commitment of resources, and a sign of commitment in building partner capability and partner capacity.”
Col. John G. Worman, Central Command’s chief for exercises, noted a Persian Gulf milestone: For the first time, he said, the military of Iraq had been invited to participate in a regional exercise in Jordan next year, called Eager Lion 12, built around the threat of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.
Another part of the administration’s post-Iraq planning involves the Gulf Cooperation Council, dominated by Saudi Arabia. It has increasingly sought to exert its diplomatic and military influence in the region and beyond. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, for example, sent combat aircraft to the Mediterranean as part of the NATO-led intervention in Libya, while Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates each have forces in Afghanistan.
At the same time, however, the council sent a mostly Saudi ground force into Bahrain to support that government’s suppression of demonstrations this year, despite international criticism.
Despite such concerns, the administration has proposed establishing a stronger, multilateral security alliance with the six nations and the United States. Mr. Panetta and Mrs. Clinton outlined the proposal in an unusual joint meeting with the council on the sidelines of the United Nations in New York last month.
The proposal still requires the approval of the council, whose leaders will meet again in December in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and the kind of multilateral collaboration that the administration envisions must overcome rivalries among the six nations.
“It’s not going to be a NATO tomorrow,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic negotiations still under way, “but the idea is to move to a more integrated effort.”
Iran, as it has been for more than three decades, remains the most worrisome threat to many of those nations, as well as to Iraq itself, where it has re-established political, cultural and economic ties, even as it provided covert support for Shiite insurgents who have battled American forces.
“They’re worried that the American withdrawal will leave a vacuum, that their being close by will always make anyone think twice before taking any action,” Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, said in an interview, referring to officials in the Persian Gulf region.
Sheik Khalid was in Washington last week for meetings with the administration and Congress. “There’s no doubt it will create a vacuum,” he said, “and it may invite regional powers to exert more overt action in Iraq.”
He added that the administration’s proposal to expand its security relationship with the Persian Gulf nations would not “replace what’s going on in Iraq” but was required in the wake of the withdrawal to demonstrate a unified defense in a dangerous region. “Now the game is different,” he said. “We’ll have to be partners in operations, in issues and in many ways that we should work together.”
At home, Iraq has long been a matter of intense dispute. Some foreign policy analysts and Democrats — and a few Republicans — say the United States has remained in Iraq for too long. Others, including many Republicans and military analysts, have criticized Mr. Obama’s announcement of a final withdrawal, expressing fear that Iraq remained too weak and unstable.
“The U.S. will have to come to terms with an Iraq that is unable to defend itself for at least a decade,” Adam Mausner and Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote after the withdrawal announcement.
Twelve Republican Senators demanded hearings on the administration’s ending of negotiations with the Iraqis — for now at least — on the continuation of American training and on counterterrorism efforts in Iraq.
“As you know, the complete withdrawal of our forces from Iraq is likely to be viewed as a strategic victory by our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime,” the senators wrote Wednesday in a letter to the chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services-New York times

Share |

Iran says wants relations with U.S., but not now

2011-10-30T16:07:00.000+03:30

Iran would like to have friendly relations with the United States one day, but not under current conditions, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said on Saturday.
Commenting on remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier this week that Washington supported the Iranian people while opposing the policies of their government, her Iranian counterpart said her message did not add up.
"We have heard such statements over and over again but unfortunately they are full of contradictions," Salehi told a news conference.
Iranian leaders routinely blame the United States for many of their country's ills, often calling it "the great Satan."
The two countries broke diplomatic ties following the 1979 Islamic revolution and the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Relations remain tense, with Washington accusing Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons and sponsoring terrorism, charges denied by Tehran.
"Our policy is the establishment of (good) relations with all countries of the world except the illegal Zionist regime (Israel)," Salehi said.
"However the re-establishment of ties would have meaning (only) when the two parties enter negotiations on an equal basis, on the same level, free of any preconditions."
Nuclear talks between Tehran and world powers, including the United States, have stalled. Washington is pressing for new sanctions on Iran after uncovering what it says was an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
It is not the first time Iran has sent a signal that reconciliation with Washington might be possible some day under different circumstances. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said he "loves" the American people.
"We have no problems of the people of the United States. We love them. We have problems with the government of the United States," he said in a recent interview with CNN.
In similar vein, Clinton told Iranians, in an interview with Voice of America this week: "The United States has no argument with you. We want to support your aspirations ... We would be thrilled if tomorrow the regime in Iran had a change of mind."
On the possibility of resuming talks, Salehi was downbeat.
"On the one hand there is an expressed desire for negotiation but on the other hand there is (U.S.) rhetoric that does not correspond with (that)," he said.
"As long as these contradictions persist and there is a lack of goodwill, negotiations will certainly not have any meaning."-Reuters

Share |

Clinton: US confused by 'power struggle' in Iran

2011-10-27T13:29:00.001+03:30

Hillary Clinton said there was a pattern of wreckless behaviour coming from part of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards

US efforts to reach out to Iran have been hurt by confusion over who is running the country, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has told BBC Persian.

"We're not quite sure who makes decisions anymore inside of Iran," she said.
Mrs Clinton said that she believes the country is morphing into a military dictatorship.
The door remains open, however, for talks with Tehran on its nuclear program.
She said the State Department was planning to open a "virtual embassy" by the end of 2011, to give Iranians online information about visas and student exchange programs.
The United States, which has imposed sanctions on Iran, broke formal ties with the country in 1980.

A very strong case'

Mrs Clinton said that a power struggle within the Iranian government could potentially be a positive opportunity for Iranians.
"I think there is an opportunity for people within the country to try to influence how that debate turns out," she said.
American's top diplomat said she was aware of the scepticism around the US's charges that Iran was tied to a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US in Washington DC.
Mrs Clinton said the US had a "very strong case" and that the plot was representative of organisations like the Quds force becoming "more reckless".
She also accused Iran of showing "aggressive behaviour" towards its neighbours and of trying to "hijack and undermine the so-called Arab Spring awakening".
"We do not want a conflict with Iran but we do want to see the rulers of Iran change their outlook and their behaviour," she said.-bbc

Share |

Iran offers fresh nuclear talks with EU

2011-09-11T23:16:00.000+04:30

Iran's nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili has written to the European Union foreign affairs chief to announce the Islamic state's readiness for fresh nuclear talks with major powers, the foreign minister said on Sunday.
"A few days ago, Mr. Jalili's letter was sent to Ms. Catherine Ashton ... saying Iran is prepared for talks ... to reach bilateral agreements," Ali Akbar Salehi said in a news conference, when asked about Iran's nuclear work.
"We have received the letter, and we will study it carefully," a spokesman for Ashton said on Sunday.
Iran's nuclear talks with major powers in January failed after the Islamic state refused to halt its uranium enrichment, as demanded by the United Nations Security Council.
The United States and its European allies fear Iran is trying to build atomic bombs under cover of its nuclear programme. Tehran denies it, saying it needs nuclear technology to generate electricity.
After talks with his European Union counterpart in Geneva in February, Salehi hoped there would be further meetings, but no date was set.
In May, the EU rejected a similar letter from Tehran requesting nuclear talks, saying it contained nothing new that would justify a further round of meetings.
Iran has been hit by international sanctions for refusing to halt its sensitive nuclear activities, which it says is only aimed at generating electricity.-Reuters

Share |

Iran revolution "matter of time": U.S. defense chief

2011-09-09T15:56:00.000+04:30

Revolution in Iran appears to be a matter of time, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta predicted on Tuesday, saying the Iranian reform movement was learning from revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria.
Panetta, a former CIA director who took over the Pentagon's top job in July, was asked on the Charlie Rose television show whether the Arab Spring might spread to non-Arab Iran. Panetta responded: "Absolutely."
"I think we saw in evidence of that in the last election in Iran that there was a movement within Iran that raised those very same concerns that we're seeing elsewhere," Panetta said.
"And I think in many ways, it's a matter of time before that kind of change and reform and revolution occurs in Iran as well."
Iranian security forces crushed mass protests in the wake of Iran's disputed June 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Panetta acknowledged the difficulties supporting such protests given the potential for backlash.
"We should try to take every step to try to support their effort but at the same time, we've got to analyze each situation to make sure that we do nothing that creates a backlash or that undermines those efforts," he said.
Iran's leaders had hoped the Arab Spring would spell the end of U.S.-backed regimes in the Arab world. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has dubbed it the "Islamic Awakening," inspired by Iran's 1979 revolution that replaced a Western-backed king with a Muslim theocracy.
But Panetta offered a different interpretation of events and their impact on Iran.
"I think the reform movement in Iran is learning one hell of a lot from what's happened in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and Syria," Panetta said.
Supporters of Iran's opposition Green movement are watching the Arab uprisings with a mixture of admiration, regret for their own movement's failure and concern about what might replace fallen regimes.
"One of the issues we were looking at when Tunisia and Egypt happened is ... what sparked this? What made this all happen?" Panetta said, listing factors including social media and populations of youth who lacked hope for the future.
"The fact is when people decide that that moment has come, that's a moment when tremendous change is about to happen," Panetta said.
"And I think it's true, not only in the Middle East. It's going to be true in Iran as well."-Reuters

Share |

Oliver Stone's son in Iran to "prepare" documentary

2011-09-07T18:10:00.000+04:30

The son of film director Oliver Stone -- who angered some Americans with a recent movie about anti-U.S. Latin American leaders -- is in Iran doing the groundwork for a documentary, Iranian media reported on Tuesday.
"Sean Stone has come to Iran and wants to prepare the ground for making a documentary," Mehrdad Hojjati, an Iranian film producer, was quoted as saying by the ILNA news agency.
Another news agency, Mehr, reported that Oliver Stone, whom it described as an "anti-American system" director, would join his son on September 26 to help out.
The reports did not say what the film would be about.
In his 2009 documentary "South of the Border," Oliver Stone interviewed several leftist Latin American leaders, including Cuba's Raul Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who is a close ally of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a persistent critic of the United States.
In 2009, Stone said he had been in talks with Iranian officials to make a documentary about Ahmadinejad but that scheduling on both sides had prevented it.
The United States, dubbed "the Great Satan" by leaders of the Islamic Republic, has not had diplomatic ties with Tehran since the storming of the U.S. embassy in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Sean Stone, 26, is listed on the IMDB.com website as a documentary film maker and actor, having small roles in some of his father's movies.-Reuters

Share |

U.S. Commanders Want to Run Covert Ops Against Iran

2011-09-07T18:07:00.000+04:30

American military commanders are pushing to run more covert operations against Iran's rising influence in neighboring Iraq, a report said Tuesday.
The requests come amid Iran's rising influence in Iraq and the Middle East in general, both politically and in terms of material support for U.S. enemies, including weapons smuggling, The Wall Street Journal said.
What makes the request more urgent is the planned reduction in U.S. troop presence in Iraq by year's end, a development that many fear will lead to even greater influence by Iran, whose population is mostly Shi'ite, like Iraq.
The current request is awaiting action by the White House. If approved, covert action authorization would likely take the form of a classified presidential "finding," but is likely to be more limited in scope than the presidential order authorizing the CIA to begin covert operations against al Qaeda in 2001.
The paper said officials declined to discuss details about the proposed operations, but they are likely to include stepped up efforts to interdict arms smuggling at the Iran-Iraq border, among others.
The U.S. has conducted covert operations against Iran in Iraq in the past. Those have included increased U.S. military efforts to interdict Iranian agents and arms inside Iraq in recent months.
The paper reported that Washington has become more concerned about Iranian meddling in Syria and Bahrain recently as well, and as such has pushed the Defense Department establishment to develop plans to counter Tehran's rising influence.
In Iraq, U.S. officials say they have evidence Iran is providing Shi'ite militias there with more powerful weapons and better training. U.S. forces have interdicted weapons and uncovered caches in the past that were marked clearly as being manufactured in Iran.-Newsroom America

Share |

Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant connected to national grid

2011-09-04T16:13:00.000+04:30

The reactor's generating unit at Bushehr began operating at a low level in May

Iran's first nuclear power station has been connected to the country's electricity grid, state news reports.

Bushehr was supplying 60 megawatts of its 1,000 megawatt capacity to the national grid, officials said.
The reactor's generating unit began operating at a low level in May, prompting Israel and other nations to express fears the reactor could help Iran develop nuclear weapons.
Tehran says its intentions are purely peaceful.
But the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said it is "increasingly concerned" that Iran is also secretly working on components for a nuclear weapons programme.
Dogged by delays
Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation said the plant in the country's south was connected to the national grid at 23:30 (19:00 GMT) on Saturday.
The connection had initially been scheduled for late last year but, as with developments at Bushehr since the project began in the 1970s, it was dogged by delays.
Construction on the plant was abandoned after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution until the mid-1990s, when Moscow reached a billion-dollar deal with Tehran to complete it.
In February, Iran had to remove fuel from the reactor "for technical reasons", amid speculation that the Stuxnet computer virus may have been responsible.
The United States and other Western nations for years urged Russia to abandon the project, warning it could help Iran build atomic weapons.
But an agreement obliging Tehran to repatriate spent nuclear fuel to Russia eased those concerns.
In February, an IAEA report obtained by the BBC and made available online by the Institute for Science and International Security (Isis) - said Iran was "not implementing a number of its obligations."
These included "clarification of the remaining outstanding issues which give rise to concerns about possible military dimensions to its nuclear programme".
Six world powers are negotiating with Iran over its nuclear programme, and the country is subject to United Nations Security Council sanctions over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment.
Enriched uranium can be used for civilian nuclear purposes, but also to build atomic bombs.-bbc

Share |

Gaddafi, Britain and US: A secret, special and very cosy relationship

2011-09-04T16:09:00.000+04:30

Tony Blair with Gaddafi in Libya in 2007, their second meeting

Classified files lay bare the ties between the nations

By Kim Sengupta and Portia Walker in Tripoli, Jane Merrick and Brian Brady in London

Britain helped to capture one of the leading opponents of the Gaddafi regime before he was sent back to be tortured in Libya, according to a secret document discovered by The Independent on Sunday in the offices of Moussa Koussa, then Muammar Gaddafi's spymaster.

London's involvement in the rendition of Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, currently the military commander of rebel forces in Tripoli, is revealed in the letter from an MI6 officer. In it, he reminds Mr Koussa that it was British intelligence which led to the capture of Mr Belhaj, then leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, before he was sent to Libya in the rendition process by the Americans.

The senior UK intelligence official, whose identity is not being revealed by The Independent on Sunday for security reasons, then sought information obtained from the Islamist leader by "enhanced interrogation technique". Mr Belhaj had revealed that he was tortured during questioning.-independent

Original article

Share |

Turkey expels Israeli ambassador

2011-09-03T04:56:00.001+04:30

Turkish FM Ahmet Davutoglu: "Security can only be achieved throughgenuine peace"

Turkey has expelled Israel's ambassador and suspended all military agreements over its refusal to apologise for last year's raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla.

This came as the UN published a report saying that Israeli commandos used excessive force when they boarded an aid ship. Nine Turkish activists died.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said it was "time Israel pays a price for its illegal actions".
Israel has refused to apologise and said its troops acted in self-defence.
"Israel, like any other country, has a legitimate right to protect its citizens and soldiers," an Israeli government official told the BBC.
The report was leaked to the New York Times on Thursday, the day before it was delivered to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's office.
"The secretary general's idea was to help bring these two countries back together again. He deeply regrets the fact that this has not been possible through this report," said deputy UN spokesman Eduardo del Buey.
"I imagine he will want time to read the report, to discuss it with his officials and then take a decision as to future steps."
US state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Washington hoped Turkey and Israel "will continue to look for opportunities to improve their longstanding relationship, and we will encourage both to work towards that end", according to the AFP news agency.
'Null and void' The nine pro-Palestinian activists who died were on board the Turkish-flagged ship, Mavi Marmara, when it was intercepted by the Israeli navy in international waters as sailed towards Gaza's coast on 31 May 2010.

Yolande Knell BBC News, Jerusalem

The Palmer report was seen by the media in Israel as a rare vindication by the UN.
Crucially it accepted that its naval blockade of Gaza is both legal and "a legitimate security measure" to stop weapons reaching militants by sea.
An Israeli inquiry reached the same conclusion, while a Turkish one found it to be unlawful and a collective punishment of the people of Gaza.
The dilemma that remains for Israeli officials is how to handle the deepening of the rift with their long-time regional ally, Turkey, with which it has trade, military and strategic ties.
This report was meant to mend relations but has achieved just the opposite.
Turkey wants an apology and compensation for the families of the victims. Israel has expressed only regret but may consider payouts. It believes a full apology would demoralise its citizens and project weakness.

At the time, the Israeli military said its commandos fired live rounds only after being attacked with clubs, knives and guns. But activists on board said the commandos started shooting as soon as they hit the deck.

The UN inquiry chaired by former New Zealand Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer found the Israeli troops faced "significant, organised and violent resistance from a group of passengers" and were therefore required to use force for their own protection.
But it said Israel's decision to board the vessels "with such substantial force at a great distance from the blockade zone and with no final warning immediately prior to the boarding was excessive and unreasonable".
The report noted "forensic evidence showing that most of the deceased were shot multiple times, including in the back, or at close range".
The inquiry also found Israel's naval blockade "was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law".
The report was completed months ago, but its publication was delayed several times as Turkey and Israel attempted to repair their diplomatic relations, which have been frozen since the flotilla incident.
But on Friday, hours before the report was released by the UN, Turkey' announced that diplomatic relations had been reduced to the level of second secretary and all military agreements had been suspended.

Some activists on the Mavi Marmara attacked commandos as they landed on the ship

"The time has come for Israel to pay for its stance that sees it above international laws and disregards human conscience," Mr Davutoglu said. "The first and foremost result is that Israel is going to be devoid of Turkey's friendship."
"As long as the Israeli government does not take the necessary steps, there will be no turning back," he warned.
Mr Davutoglu said the report "displayed the violence committed by the Israeli soldiers", but added that some of its findings were questionable.
"Turkey does not recognise Israel's blockade of Gaza. It will secure the study of this blockade at the International Court of Justice."
He added that Turkey would take all necessary measures to protect its shipping in the eastern Mediterranean.
Asked to comment on the UN panel's decision not to recommend that Israel apologise, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said: "To be frank, the report is null and void for us."
Turkey's embassy in Washington later said in a statement that it was "determined to defend the rights of its citizens and will take legal actions against all those responsible for the crimes committed".
Hamas, whose decision to seize control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 led to Israel imposing the blockade, applauded the Turkish move.

Click to play

The raid on the flotilla has been condemned but the UN has declared Israel's blockade legitimate

"This is a natural response to the Israeli crime against the flotilla," spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told the BBC.
The Israeli official said the government accepted with "reservations" the UN report, which it considered "professional, profound and serious".
"During the events of the Mavi Marmara flotilla, Israeli soldiers boarded the boat with non-lethal means. They had no intention to hurt anyone," the official said.
"Once the Israeli soldiers were viciously attacked by dozens of violent IHH activists, armed with batons, knives and steel pipes, the soldiers had to defend themselves," the official added, referring to the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, which Israel has banned for supporting Hamas.
"As recommended in the report, Israel again expresses regret about the loss of life but will not apologise for acts of self-defence by its soldiers."-bbc

Share |

Iran leader: West cannot 'confiscate' Arab Spring

2011-09-01T18:27:00.000+04:30

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Iran's top leader warned the Arab world Wednesday not to allow Western powers and Israel to "confiscate" the region's pro-reform uprisings, in comments that appear to reflect the Islamic republic's unease about their standing in a profoundly altered Middle East.
Iran has tried to walk two paths since the pro-democracy rebellions began in February — lauding the popular revolts as modern-day heirs to Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, while maintaining relentless pressure on opposition groups at home.
But Iran is at risk of serious political setbacks. Iran's main Mideast ally, Syria's Bashar Assad, is under growing international pressure for his fierce crackdown on anti-government protests.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a speech broadcast on Iran's state TV to mark the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, reflected the added worries that the West and its allies could gain ground in the Arab Spring.
"Muslim nations in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen or other countries need vigilance today. They should not allow enemies confiscate the victories they've achieved," Khamenei said. "They should not forget that those who have come to the scene in Libya (U.S. and NATO) today and consider themselves owners of the uprising are the same people who used to sit and drink with those who once suppressed the Libyan nation."
Iran's supreme leader, who has the final say on all state matters in Iran, urged Libyans not to allow the U.S. and its allies to dominate their country.
On Tuesday, Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said his country secretly provided humanitarian supplies to Libya's rebel National Transitional Council. Salehi said Iran had sent four medicine and food shipments to the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
"Today they (U.S. and its allies) seek to take advantage of the situation. Nations must be vigilant and wakeful," said Khamenei.
But he made no mention of Syria, where Assad's regime is struggling to contain opposition forces.
In Iran's view, collapse of pro-U.S. governments in Egypt and Tunisia were strong blows to U.S. influence in the region and a new "Islamic awakening."
"Who thought American and Zionist agents in the region would fall one after the other?" Khamenei said. "This is the powerful hand of the Islamic nations,"
Iran has supported Arab uprisings, saying change of governments in North Africa shows a new Middle East is emerging that will doom Israel and break free of American interference.
Iran has sought to portray the popular uprisings as a replay of its 1979 Islamic Revolution which toppled the pro-U.S. shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and brought hardline clerics to power.-AFP

Share |

Iran-Saudi security is linked: Tehran

2011-09-01T18:25:00.000+04:30

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz
Iran believes Saudi Arabia's security is linked to its own security, an Iranian foreign ministry official said Wednesday, reacting to a Saudi allegation that Tehran was "targeting" the kingdom.
"Iran has always wanted the stability, peace and progress of Saudi Arabia," the Fars news agency quoted the unidentified official as saying.
"The security of Saudi Arabia and Iran are linked and the Islamic Republic of Iran believes that the security of Saudi Arabia is like its own security," the official said.
Saudi Arabia's Al-Eqtissadiya daily on Monday quoted interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz as saying that the kingdom, which has been shaken by a wave of bloody attacks by Al-Qaeda, was still threatened by terrorism.
He referred to "Iran and its targeting of the kingdom," but did not elaborate.
The Iranian official expressed "surprise" at such claims, saying they were "baseless and aimed at creating doubts among the countries of the region."
Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia rose sharply in March when Saudi troops intervened in Bahrain to help the Gulf kingdom's Sunni ruling family suppress month-long protests led by its Shiite majority community, triggering angry protests from Tehran.
Tensions between Shiite Iran and its Gulf Arab neighbours have eased in recent weeks, together with a reduction in angry exchanges between the two nations.-AFP

Share |

Irene batters New York, raising fears of flooding

2011-08-28T21:34:00.000+04:30

Officials warned that the storm remained dangerous - as New Yorkers breathed a sigh of relief

Seawater surged into flood-prone areas of New York on Sunday as Tropical Storm Irene hit the city, downgraded from a hurricane but still bringing fierce winds and rain.

Some 370,000 people were ordered to evacuate and streets are eerily quiet, a BBC correspondent says.
At least 11 deaths have been linked the powerful storm.
Irene has already destroyed buildings in North Carolina and Virginia, and left millions without power.
The storm was classified as a hurricane when it swept through the Caribbean last week. Despite the downgrade to a tropical storm, it has still been destructive and disruptive. It is expected to hit Canada on Sunday night.
US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that while there was still a way to go with Irene, the "worst of the storm has passed", adding that the precautions taken had "dramatically decreased" the threat to lives along the eastern US.
But National Hurricane Center director Bill Read warned that heavy rains meant there was still a major flooding risk to river systems, especially in New England.
Storm surge

At the scene

Laura Trevelyan BBC News, Battery Park City, New York

New Yorkers are feeling the full force of now Tropical Storm Irene. I am standing knee-deep in water on the southern tip of lower Manhattan, right behind me is the New York harbour. The storm surge looks about five feet. There has already been flooding in Queens and the question is what damage will that flooding do?
Will it be bad enough to affect the city's underground vaults, the network of subways, of cables that power New York City? You can see why the mayor made the New York subway system shut down, because the subway system is right below the ground level in New York.
The one positive thing is that the tide is beginning to go out now, so that means that the water level will drop by about five feet - so that could offset the storm surge and this may be about as bad as it gets. But the heavy rains will continue, and with those continuing rains comes the risk of flooding. So it is clear why 370,000 people in low-lying areas of the city were ordered to evacuate because who wants to take chances when the water rises to the extent that it has now?

The BBC's Laura Trevelyan, in New York's Battery Park, says the city felt the full force of the storm, whose arrival coincided with a high tide.

The centre of the hurricane moved over New York City at about 09:00 (13:00 GMT), the National Hurricane Center said. The centre is now inland over southeastern New York state.
Some 370,000 people living in low-lying areas of New York City had been told to leave, and the city's public transport system has been closed.
Our correspondent said a feared storm surge affecting New York's Hudson River, was about 5ft (1.5m) high and there are concerns that floodwaters may affect underground New York - its subway system and the network of cables that power the city.
Ocean water has streamed into streets in New York's Queens district, while streets in Brooklyn's Coney Island were also under water. In Manhattan, water from New York Harbour lapped onto pavements in Battery Park, and about 1ft of water washed over the wall of the marina in front of the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Hours earlier, the then Hurricane Irene came ashore in New Jersey, about 100 miles (160km) to the south, where state Governor Chris Christie said he expected the cost of repairing damage to be "in the billions of dollars, if not in the tens of billions of dollars".
Irene has also dumped more than 1ft (30cm) of rain on North Carolina and Virginia, and there were reports of storm surges of nearly 10ft.
The north-eastern seaboard is the most densely populated corridor in the US. More than 65 million people live in major cities from Washington DC in the south to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston further north.

States of emergency were declared in North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. New York's John F Kennedy and LaGuardia airports, and Newark in New Jersey, have shut, with the cancellation of at least 10,000 flights.
While international airports will reopen on Monday afternoon, disruption is likely to extend to later in the week.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett warned that while the storm may be weakening, there was still danger ahead. "The rivers may not crest until Tuesday or Wednesday. This isn't just a 24-hour event," he said.
At least 11 people are now known to have died during the storm, with as many as 4.5 million people affected by power cuts, reports say. Most of those who died were killed either by falling trees, or in accidents relating to the sheer amount of water on the streets.
President Barack Obama cut short his holiday to Martha's Vineyard to co-ordinate efforts to deal with the storm and on Sunday held a video conference for an update on the response to the storm.

Correspondents say the president is very keen to avoid any criticism that surrounded the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina six years ago.

Samantha Mair, a Briton who lives in Manhattan, stayed in her apartment, but went out on the streets and found them "extremely wet".
"There's water everywhere, as people are trying to move it out of their houses and onto the streets, they're trying to get it down the drains but the drains aren't handling it very well," she told the BBC.
"This is my first time witnessing anything like this," student Ryan Narcisse of Roselle, New Jersey, told the BBC. "The street was blanketed with a sheet of water.-bbc

Share |

Sanctions stop Syria from using Visa cards

2011-08-26T16:29:00.000+04:30

The US and other Western governments have called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down
Visa credit cards issued in Syria can no longer be used as of Wednesday, as sanctions against President Bashar al-Assad are imposed
Wissam Abhu Ghazala, the director of a branch of Lebanon’s Byblos in Damascus, told the AFP news agency on Tuesday that clients were alerted by SMS message that they could no longer use their Visa cards in Syria, or abroad if the card was issued in Syria.
Ali Ismail, manager of import-export company Medsea, suspects that the move was initiated by the US and other Western countries who have threatened to impose sanctions on the Syrian regime.
"This is what the Americans call smart sanctions, targeting senior officials of the (Syrian) regime. Which means that either we are all senior officials or it's just a way of punishing all the Syrian people," Ismail said.
The regime's deadly crackdown on anti-government protests over the past five months has caused outrage in the international community.
US President Barack Obama and his Western allies called for al-Assad to resign last Thursday and increased sanctions against the Syrian regime.rfi

Share |

American hikers sentenced in Iran share love of travel

2011-08-21T20:15:00.001+04:30

Friends Shane Bauer, left, and Josh Fattal share a love of learning and exploring, associates say.
The two American hikers, who according to a state TV report Saturday were sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran, are a pair of friends who love to travel and be immersed in other cultures, according to friends and associates.

Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer have been in Iranian custody for two years since they and a third hiker, Sarah Shourd, were detained on spying charges. They had been hiking in the Iraqi Kurdish region and allegedly crossed into Iran illegally.

Shourd, Bauer's fiancee, was released last year because of medical reasons, but Fattal and Bauer face an extended prison sentence.

Bauer was working as a freelance journalist and had been undertaking a yearlong visit to the Middle East at the time of their arrest.

In the Middle East, Bauer planned to spend time "absorbing on the ground whatever he could in the Arab world and offered to contribute stories to us," Sandy Close, executive director of California-based New America Media, told CNN in 2009.

"I think this is a very experienced traveler, a backpack kind of traveler, not somebody who would go to the Ritz Carlton," Close said of Bauer. "[He's] somebody who would go to the hostel, who would operate on a shoestring, as many freelancers do."

Bauer was planning to write a story about elections in Iraqi Kurdistan at the time the trio went hiking near the Iranian border.

"I think he went to [Iraqi] Kurdistan to cover the elections ... and [during a hike] unfortunately didn't know the ground he was walking on well enough to avoid crossing over whatever boundary was there," Close said.

A 2007 honors graduate in peace and conflict studies at Berkeley, Bauer is fluent in Arabic, Close said.

Though he knows Arabic and is comfortable with Arab culture, he doesn't understand Farsi and therefore "would not have been able or, I think, interested in going [into Iran]," Close said.

Fattal graduated from Berkeley in 2004 with a bachelor's degree in environmental economics and policy, the university said.

He shares his friends' love of travel and learning, and was described as "fiercely intellectual" by his friend, Chris Foraker, who spoke to CNN affiliate KVAL in Eugene, Oregon, in 2009.

Foraker said he met Fattal during a study abroad program in 2003, and the two worked together at the nonprofit Aprovecho sustainable living research center in Cottage Grove, Oregon.

"[Fattal] is a really great guy. We had a really good working relationship with him, and we love him a lot and hope to see him home safe soon," said Aprovecho's Jeremy Roth, who spoke to CNN affiliate KEZI in Eugene at the time of his arrest.CNN

Share |

Syrian forces storm Homs as Assad defies international calls to step down

2011-08-21T20:12:00.000+04:30

An image grab from YouTube is said to show a Syrian army tank in the Khalidiya area of Homs, days before reinforcements were sent in.
Residents of Syria's third city report gunfire in a prison and hospital, and fear a full-scale assault as tanks mass outside

Syrian forces have stormed the country's third city, Homs, a day after at least 34 people were killed in earlier raids, as the troubled country's president defied calls by Barack Obama and European leaders to end the violence and resign.
Reinforcements were en route to the embattled city and residents there described a "terrible" night, with shooting resounding through empty streets and tanks again on the outskirts of town.
One Homs resident told the Guardian that shooting had been heard inside a hospital and a prison in the early hours of Saturday. Residents fear a full-scale assault may be imminent.
International calls for the president, Bashar al-Assad, to leave have sharply intensified scrutiny of his regime and its sustained crackdown against demonstrators, which it continues to cast as a fight against terrorists.
The hardened western stance is set to greatly increase the stakes for Assad, who now faces pariah status among leaders whose attention he had previously coveted.
It has also for the first time raised the possibility of a Libyan-style military intervention, something which had not previously been considered despite five months of violence in which an estimated 2,500 people have died and which have all but shut down the Syrian economy.
A Guardian poll published on Saturday revealed that 82.4% of respondents supported some sort of military intervention in Syria.
A state-owned Syrian newspaper described the calls by the US president – as well as the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and British prime minister, David Cameron – as the "face of the conspiracy" that it claims is being waged against it.
Assad has yet to respond to the western statements, which were delivered on Thursday. However, there are fears that the demands could embolden him, giving him little option but to fight as he struggles to retain control of the hardline police state his family has ruled as a personal fiefdom for more than four decades.
His traditional international support base remains resolute. Iranian support for the Assad regime makes it a key factor in calculations and Russia has said it does not support the call for Assad to leave.
Another one-time ally, Turkey, was on Sunday hosting a meeting of Syrian opposition groups who are attempting to elect a national council, as it too struggles to deal with the increasingly grave situation across its volatile border.
The new body is attempting to position itself as an alternative leadership, in the same way that the National Transitional Council did in the weeks after Colonel Gaddafi was ousted from eastern Libya. That body eventually won international recognition. However, Syria's nascent opposition has struggled to gain momentum.
A high-level United Nations team was due to arrive in Damascus on Sunday to assess the humanitarian situation across the country.
Assad has reportedly told the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs that it can travel to any part of the country it wishes, including Latakia, which was besieged by land and sea during a major security operation earlier in the week.
Before the planned visit to Latakia, a western diplomat said reports had been received of a large-scale clean-up of the al-Ramel Palestinian refugee camp in the city, which was heavily targeted.
"Reports of a clean-up square perfectly with the version of events which the regime is denying," the diplomat said. "But any attempts to whitewash and destroy evidence can only backfire on this isolated regime.
"The evidence in the form of personal testimonies of what happened in Latakia is overwhelming and undeniable. Assad can run but he can't hide from the arm of international law which is closing in on him."
Residents of Hama and Homs reported similar clean-ups by government officials after rampages through both cities by security forces in recent months.
In Homs, the resident who spoke to the Guardian portrayed a city bracing itself for renewed destruction. "There are snipers on all the buildings. The tanks aren't in the centre, but around the edges. There is a general strike and all the shops are closed, nobody is opening. The situation is terrible – even after Assad says there aren't tanks and after Obama tells him to step aside."
The UN last week said it had identified 50 Syrian regime figures who may have committed crimes against humanity. In another sign of mounting international anger, the EU is considering placing a ban on Syrian oil exports, which account for 25% of the country's economy. With industry at a standstill, no tourism, and cash reserves rapidly dwindling, such a move would likely prove difficult for Assad's regime to withstand.-Guardian

****
Syria article launched in error

The story that was at the original URL (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/20/syria-raises-border-tension-turkey) has been taken down.
It was a duplication of an article from June 25 that was launched in error. We apologise for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused.-Guardian

Share |

Time to end Nato's war in Libya

2011-08-21T20:08:00.000+04:30

Nurse at the hosptial in Misrata in Libya looks at a boy injured in the fighting, July 2011.
Whether Gaddafi goes or not, this costly intervention has thwarted peace talks and betrayed its 'humanitarian' mission

In March of this year, the US, France, Britain and their North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) allies launched military operations in Libya under the guise of a "humanitarian intervention". US diplomats and world leaders carelessly voiced unsubstantiated claims of an impending massacre in Benghazi. You hear no such appeals to humanity while Nato, in the name of the rebels (whoever they are), prepares to lay siege to Tripoli, a city of nearly 2 million people.
Libyan rebels are now advancing on the capital city of Tripoli with the aid of Nato strikes; this is sure to result in a real bloodbath, as opposed to the one that was conjured in Benghazi this past winter. Nato is assisting rebels who are blocking food, water and medical supplies from coming into the capital city, and is stopping those who need advanced medical care from travelling to Tunisia to access it. Nato is bombing power stations, creating blackouts, and using Apache helicopters to attack Libyan police checkpoints to clear roads for rebels to advance.
Regardless of whether Muammar Gaddafi is ousted in coming days, the war against Libya has seen countless violations of United Nations security council resolutions (UNSCRs) by Nato and UN member states. The funnelling of weapons (now being air-dropped) to Libyan rebels was, from the beginning of the conflict, in clear violation of UNSCR 1970. The use of military force on behalf of the rebels, in an attempt to impose regime change, has undermined international law and damaged the credibility of the United Nations. Countless innocent civilians have been killed, and Nato air strikes continue to place many at great risk.
So much for the humanitarian-inspired UNSCR 1973 as a means to protect civilians. The people of Libya cannot take another month of such humanitarian intervention.
The leading donor nations of Nato – the US, France and Great Britain – have been free to prosecute war under the cloak of this faceless, bureaucratic, alphabet security agency, now multinational war machine, which can violate UN resolutions and kill innocent civilians with impunity. War crimes trials are only for losers. The prospective conquerors, the western powers and their rebel proxies, will then expect to be able to assert control over Libya's vast oil and natural gas reserves.
The US share of the war against Libya has probably exceeded the $1bn mark. This extraordinary amount of money for an intervention that Americans were told would last "days not weeks" could only be explained by looking at the war as an investment, and at control over Libya's wealth as an opportunity to make a return on that investment. Cynical? Then tell me why else we are at war in Libya.
Viable peace proposals, such as the one put forward by the African Union (AU), have been quickly and summarily rejected. If there is going to be a peaceful resolution of the conflict, the US must work with and empower the AU to ensure regional security. The AU has proposed a peace plan that would facilitate an immediate ceasefire, the unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid, a dialogue between the Transitional National Council and the Gaddafi government, and the suspension of Nato strikes.
The use of force and ultimatums has not worked. As the war enters its sixth month, it is time for the US president and secretary of state to clean up the mess they've created with this needless military intervention, and to work to seriously to bring about a negotiated end to this war.
In June, I proposed a peace plan (pdf) derived in part from the efforts of the AU. This plan calls for an immediate ceasefire and lays out the principles necessary to create a framework to achieve reconciliation and national unity in Libya by a meaningful process. In its June report on Libya, the International Crisis Group stated:

"A political breakthrough is by far the best way out of the costly situation created by the military impasse. This will require a ceasefire between the regime and the Transitional National Council, the deployment of a peacekeeping force to monitor and guarantee this under a UN mandate, and the immediate opening of serious negotiations between regime and opposition representatives to secure agreement on a peaceful transition to a new, more legitimate political order. Nato and those states supporting its military action should facilitate this development, not hinder it."

I have recently received several reports indicating that a settlement was close, only to be scuttled by state department officials. Given that the department of state seems to have taken a singular role in launching the US into this war, it is more than disconcerting to hear that the same agency has played a role in frustrating a resolution to this conflict. There are viable solutions to peacefully end the conflict, if there is a desire to do so.
Continued military action promotes a cycle of violence that will persist whether Colonel Gaddafi is ousted or not. On 19 March 2003, the United States pursued regime change in Iraq. Eight years later, we're still wondering why the people of Iraq are not sufficiently grateful for our intervention, which has resulted in the death of over 1 million of their fellow countrymen and women.
How can we expect this grim manifesto of interventionism to ever result in anything but tragedy? It's time to end the war against Libya.-Guardian

Share |

Syria unrest: World leaders call for Assad to step down

2011-08-18T23:19:00.000+04:30

The leaders of the US, UK, France, Germany and the EU have all called for Syria's President Assad to step down over his suppression of protesters.

US President Barack Obama said: "The time has come for President Assad to step aside."
It marks a significant increase in pressure on Mr Assad for sending in his army against the protesters.
Meanwhile, UN investigators say the use of violence in Syria "may amount to crimes against humanity".
In a report to the UN Human Rights Council, the investigators said the UN Security Council should refer the issue to the International Criminal Court.
Human rights groups believe about 2,000 people have been killed and thousands arrested since March as Syria's security forces - including tanks, helicopters, gunships and snipers - try to quell dissent that has broken out in much of the country.
President Bashar al-Assad has promised political reforms but blames the unrest on "terrorist groups".-bbc

Share |

David Cameron: Police admit they got riots wrong

2011-08-11T21:18:00.000+04:30

David Cameron: 'The tactics the police were using weren't working'

The police admitted they got their riot tactics wrong, the prime minister has said, as he announced measures to help homeowners and businesses.

David Cameron told MPs the riots in cities across England were "criminality pure and simple", but there were "far too few police" on the streets.
He announced a crackdown on facemasks and a review of curfews during an emergency recall of Parliament.
More than 1,500 arrests have been made since the unrest began on Saturday.
The prime minister earlier chaired a meeting of the government's emergency committee Cobra to discuss the violence with cabinet ministers.

From court

Sarah Bell BBC News

A 17-year-old aspiring dancer who handed herself in after seeing her picture in a newspaper was among the defendants at a busy, yet efficient, Westminster Magistrates' Court.
An estate agent and students studying accountancy, journalism and engineering faced the district judge on charges arising from the riots.
The fate of an 18-year-old man who bought sports clothes which had been stolen from JD Sports in Clapham illustrated how seriously these offenders were being treated.
Ordinarily punished by a fine or community service, he was remanded in custody to face the heavier prison sentences of the crown court.
"Given the seriousness of the circumstances" was the repeated refrain of the district judge as she refused bail and sent each defendant to the crown court.
She said her power, to send people to jail for six months, was not enough.

'Riot' courts open for 24 hours

Mr Cameron told MPs that it had become clear there had been problems in the initial police response to the disorder.

Former Cabinet minister Sir Malcolm Rifkind also raised concerns that officers were instructed to "stand and observe looting".
Mr Cameron told MPs: "There were simply far too few police deployed on to our streets and the tactics they were using weren't working.
"Police chiefs have been frank with me about why this happened.
"Initially the police treated the situation too much as a public order issue - rather than essentially one of crime.
"The truth is that the police have been facing a new and unique challenge with different people doing the same thing - basically looting - in different places all at the same time."
The prime minister promised he would do "whatever it takes" to restore order to the streets as he set out a range of measures aimed at helping businesses and homeowners affected by the riots.
They included:

To look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via social media when "we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality"
Plans to look at whether wider powers of curfew and dispersal orders were needed
New powers for police to order people to remove facemasks where criminality is suspected
Courts could be given tougher sentencing powers
Landlords could be given more power to evict criminals from social housing
Plans to extend the system of gang injunctions across the country and build on anti-gang programmes, similar to those in the US
He said the government would meet the cost of "legitimate" compensation claims and the time limit for applying would increase from 14 to 42 days
A £10m Recovery Scheme to provide additional support to councils in making areas "safe, clean and clear"
A new £20m high street support scheme to help affected businesses get back up and running quickly
Plans for the government to meet the immediate costs of emergency accommodation for families made homeless

He said: "This is a time for our country to pull together.
"To the law abiding people who play by the rules, and who are the overwhelming majority in our country, I say: the fightback has begun, we will protect you, if you've had your livelihood and property damaged, we will compensate you. We are on your side.
"And to the lawless minority, the criminals who have taken what they can get, I say this: We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done."
Mr Cameron ruled out bringing in the Army, but added: "It is my responsibility to make sure that every contingency is looked at - including whether there are tasks that the Army could undertake that would free up more police for the front line."
He said a reinforced police presence of 16,000 officers on the streets of London would remain in place over the weekend.
Police cuts On Wednesday a deputation of Labour MPs from London went to the Home Office to demand a "moratorium" on plans to reduce numbers in the Metropolitan Police.
And in the Commons, Labour leader Ed Miliband repeated their calls to reconsider police cuts in the wake of the riots.
He said: "The events of the last few days have been a stark reminder to us all that police on our streets make our communities safer and make the public feel safer.
"Given the absolute priority the public attaches to a visible and active police presence, does the prime minister understand why they would think it is not right that he goes ahead with the cuts to police numbers?
"Will he now think again on this issue?"
Mr Cameron insisted the cuts were "totally achievable" without any reduction in the visible policing presence on the streets.
"At the end of this process of making sure our police budgets are affordable, we will still be able to surge as many police on to the streets as we have in recent days in London, in Wolverhampton, in Manchester," he said.
"I think it's important people understand that."
BBC political correspondent Iain Watson said Lib Dem sources had told him there is "absolute coalition unity" on reducing police budgets and the cuts will not be reversed.
Meanwhile, Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, has told the BBC its members have voted unanimously to hold an inquiry into the causes of the riots.
It will also look at the role of social networking, the police response and police resources.
Today marks the second time in less than a month that MPs have been recalled for an emergency session - the first was for the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World newspaper.
In other developments:

More than 90,000 people have signed an online petition calling for anyone convicted of taking part in the riots to lose any benefits they receive
Up to 250 officers were sent from Scotland to help police in the Midlands and North of England deal with rioting and disorder
Police in London say they have more than 100 arrest warrants to work through "in the coming hours and days"
The government launches a website with advice to the public on how to cope with the unrest
Saturday's Premier League match between Tottenham and Everton at White Hart Lane has been postponed

Meanwhile, the Met Police have made a total of 922 arrests and charged 401 people in connection with violence, disorder and looting in the capital since Saturday night.
More than 330 people have been arrested in the West Midlands and a further 140 people have been arrested so far over the trouble in Manchester and Salford.
Courts sat through the night in London, Manchester and Solihull in the West Midlands to deal with people arrested during the four nights of disturbances, with those appearing in court mainly facing disorder and burglary charges.
Mr Cameron said anyone convicted of violent disorder would be sent to prison.
But Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Kavanagh said some officers who had been on the streets had voiced disappointment at the sentences handed out so far.
Mr Kavanagh added that there had since been "constructive conversations" between the home secretary, the Met commissioner and the courts.
London Mayor Boris Johnson praised the police, and insisted the authorities were not "complacent" despite the violence subsiding.
Met Acting Commissioner Tim Godwin paid tribute to his "brave" officers after the meeting, saying they had "faced unprecedented violence and damage and criminality and looting" and that "any suggestion the officers stood back is wrong".
A candle-lit vigil has been held for Haroon Jahan, 21, Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31, who died when they were hit by a car in Birmingham on Tuesday night.
A 32-year-old man arrested on suspicion of murder has now been been bailed pending further inquiries, West Midlands Police said.
Mr Cameron said the deaths were "truly dreadful" and offered his condolences to the men's families.
The riots first flared on Saturday after a peaceful protest in Tottenham over the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, 29, by police.
Mr Cameron told MPs his death was being investigated "thoroughly and independently" by the police watchdog.-bbc

Share |

UK riots: dictatorships around the world use unrest to their advantage

2011-08-11T17:40:00.000+04:30

The Syrian ambassador to the UN has accused the UK of hypocrisy by using the word 'gangs' during the riots, but condemning the term in Syria.
Gaddafi official calls for Cameron to leave after 'uprising' as Syria and Zimbabwe dub UK foreign policy hypocritical

Some of the world's most notorious dictatorships have been quick to turn the smash-and-grab turmoil in England's cities to their own political advantage.
In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi's deputy foreign minister Khaled Kaaim said: "Cameron and his government must leave after the popular uprising against them and the violent repression of peaceful demonstrations by police.
"Cameron and his government have lost all legitimacy. These demonstrations show that the British people reject this government, which is trying to impose itself through force."
And Libyan state television said Cameron was using "Irish and Scottish mercenaries" to tame riots in England.
"The rebels of Britain approach Liverpool in hit-and-run battles with Cameron's brigades and mercenaries from Ireland and Scotland. God is Greatest," said a breaking news caption on its morning program.
Syria suggested David Cameron's problems in recent days had been nothing compared to what had faced the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. "It's very informative to hear the prime minister of England describing the riots and the rioters in England by using the term gangs," its ambassador to the United Nations Bashar Ja'afari told reporters. "They don't allow us to use the same term for the armed groups and the terrorist groups in my country. This is hypocrisy. This is arrogance.
"London, Birmingham, Bristol is only 1% of what happened in some restive areas of my country."
Britain's deputy ambassador Philip Parham's response to the "absurd comparison" was withering. While his government was handling the riots with "measured, proportionate, legal, transparent steps to restore the rule of law", in Syria, "you have a situation where thousands of unarmed civilians are being attacked and killed … Some 2,000 civilians have now been killed, the vast majority of them unarmed."
And hot on the heels of Iran's request for the United Nations security council to investigate the "violent suppression" of those angry at cuts, Zimbabawe's president Robert Mugabe weighed in, saying Britain should sort out its own problems rather than interfering in other countries.
"Let them attend to their problems now that they are experiencing problems, which have dogged other countries before and they have in those circumstances accused those countries of lacking freedom.
"Let them tell us what is happening whether there is lack of freedom or it's something else. Britain now is on fire, London especially and we hope that they will extinguish their fire. They should pay attention to their internal problems and to that fire, which is blazing all over and leave us alone because we do not have any fire here. We don't want them to continue creating unnecessary problems in our country. We want peace … the people of Zimbabwe want peace ."
Meanwhile, in Malaysia, home of student Ashraf Haziq, victim of one of the most shocking attacks during the London unrest, a police chief has used the experience of British police officers in recent days recent days to justify crackdowns on street protest. Deputy national police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said the rioting and looting were "nightmares that we are fighting hard to avoid and prevent".
Protests "should always be avoided as we will never know what it can turn into," Khalid said in a statement on Wednesday. "Praise to God, we are able to avoid these scary and tragic scenes from erupting here in our beloved country."-Guardian

Share |

U.S. lawmakers to target Iran's bank

2011-08-09T03:10:00.001+04:30

U.S. President Barack Obama is called on to take dramatic steps against Iran's central bank
U.S. President Barack Obama is called on to take dramatic steps against Iran's central bank as part of an effort to sideline the regime, lawmakers said.

A letter, put together by U.S. Sens. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said more economic action is needed against Iran.

"In our view, the United States should embark on a comprehensive strategy to pressure Iran's financial system by imposing sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran," a copy of the letter, part of which was published by The Wall Street Journal, stated. "If our allies are willing to join, we believe this step can be even more effective."

The letter is expected to arrive on Obama's desk Tuesday, the Journal notes. More than 90 senators signed the letter.

The report adds that if sanctions against Bank Markazi, the central bank, are adopted, it would nearly lock Iran out of the international market.

U.S. officials say Tehran is using the bank to hide activity involving sanctioned goods and it funnels money to U.S. adversaries in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

Kirk told the Journal he would introduce a measure to effectively force Obama's hand on the issue.

"It's time for the administration to use the tools Congress has provided and choke off (Tehran's) money spigot," added Schumer in a statement.-UPI

Share |

Are Iran's Leaders About to Get Rid of Ahmadinejad?

2011-08-06T01:57:00.001+04:30

Are Iran's Leaders About to Get Rid of Ahmadinejad?
Could Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be facing the ultimate pink slip? Could his job as president be threatened by a severe rift within the Iranian leadership?

The possibility is not as far-fetched as it might sound.

A major rift between Ahmadinejad and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei surfaced after the president's dismissal of the minister of intelligence in April and his subsequent reinstatement by Khamenei.

Ahmadinejad has often said hat he will not remain quiet in light of the arrests of his close associates and the daily attacks against him and his inner circle.

These days in Iran, the supreme leader's supporters refer to the president as the "deviant current," and talk openly of those who abuse power and wealth and seek to deviate from the path of the Islamic Revolution.

In the past, similar condemnations have led to the death penalty or even elimination.

Ahmadinejad has publicly stated that the arrest of any member of his cabinet would be a line in the sand for him. He's warned the Iranian Justice Department to back off or face dire consequences.

It didn't take long, however, for Justice Department officials to respond, saying there is no line in the sand and that any official who breaks the law can, and will be, arrested and prosecuted.

To make sure that Ahmadinejad understood his limitations, the chief commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Ali Jafari, entered the fray by stating that the Justice Department has now commissioned the Guards to deal with the "deviant current."

But it doesn't end there.

Next, the Iranian president made his boldest move yet against the Revolutionary Guards -- the very force that had, until now, secured his presidency. He accused the Guards of being "smuggling brothers" in security and intelligence. He said they earn billions of dollars in illicit profits by conducting their illegal operations from ports around the country. He knows their secrets, he warned, and is ready to reveal much more should the confrontation escalate.

It's true that the Revolutionary Guards have their hands in all aspects of the Iranian economy, with hundreds of billions of dollars being generated from their operations: from the gas and oil industry to automobiles and the imports of basic goods.

Ahmadinejad's threat was not taken lightly and once again Jafari responded with his most serious warning to date. The Guards are in possession of new information, he said, that proves the enemy is intent on creating instability in the country by assassinating top officials. He recounted a similar caution recently issued by the intelligence minister. All officials, he said, should be aware of their surroundings.

The radicals ruling Iran have often used similar statements to send a strong warning to the opposition that they will be taken out should they persist with their position.

The moderates in Iran have often been silenced by just such threats.

However, with Ahmadinejad, that may provide the best solution for Khamenei.

Both the supreme leader and the Guards' leadership supported Ahmadinejad in the fraudulent presidential elections of 2009 when Mir Hossein Mousavi was ordered to stand down and accept defeat, even though he had legitimately won the election. In the ensuing uprising, tens of thousands of Iranians were arrested and tortured, many executed. Thousands remain in prisons across Iran. With the leadership's support of Ahmadinejad in suppressing countless courageous Iranians, the Islamic Republic lost any shred of legitimacy around the world as its cruelty unfolded.

And then the president and the prelate turned on each other.

In the end, the regime may not be able to sustain itself should this internal conflict become even more confrontational.

As I reported recently, the Guards have been ordered by the supreme leader to be ready with an operational plan to take control of all governmental offices, ministries and the presidential administration should the confrontation between the two sides escalate to such a degree that it would pose serious threat to the survival of the regime.

The Guards face their own dilemma, however, because dissent has been growing among its forces since the bloody suppression of the uprising in 2009. Many are supporters of the Green Movement, while many others back Ahmadinejad. The growing rifts could further alienate the very force that has served as the backbone of the regime.

Though the elimination of Ahmadinejad, especially in a violent fashion, would make headlines around the world, it would also provide an easy way out for the radicals ruling Iran. They would then blame "the Great Satan" (aka the United States) and Israel for trying to bring down the Islamic regime. It would also serve to unify the regime's supporters and terrify any opposition from within.

The Islamic mob running Iran has often used this tactic in a time of instability and uncertainty. One only needs to look at the history of the regime where a president, prime minister, parliamentarians and party leaders have all been assassinated before. Each time the regime rallied its supporters, claiming enemies of Islam were always at work to hurt this global movement for the glorification of Allah.

Ahmadinejad, who truly believes his rise to power was mandated by Allah, should realign his position or he will soon experience the bitter taste of standing on the wrong side of the regime the very regime that he once was part of the very regime that since its inception not only has killed tens of thousands of Iranians seeking freedom, but has shown no hesitation in taking out its own children.-fox

Share |

Iran's 'unremarkable' supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei

2011-08-06T01:47:00.000+04:30

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seen here in 2008, is aged 72

"I have a poor soul, an incomplete body, and the little bit of dignity that you have given me - I will sacrifice it all for the Revolution and for Islam," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in 2009.

In Iran, the word of Ali Khamenei is absolute. For more than two decades he has been his country's supreme leader.
But the outside world knows perhaps only two things about him: he has almost the same name as the man he replaced, Ayatollah Khomeini, and he is overshadowed by the man he outranks - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
When we do see Ali Khamenei he is often delivering a sermon against the US - looking rather forbidding in a black turban and white beard.
But it turns out that this same man also smoked a pipe, likes gardening and enjoys poetry. It is time to get to know the ayatollah.
Cleric at 11 Ali Khamenei was born in 1939 in the northern city of Mashhad - the holiest city in Iran.

He is a very ordinary man and I think that's the key for his success”

Mehdi Khalaji Biographer

He followed his father and became a cleric. It was not an easy choice. He grew up during the rule of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah was a secular monarch who viewed religion as ancient and suspicious.

"Khamenei became a cleric when he was very young, at the age of 11," said Mehdi Khalaji, who is writing a biography of the ayatollah.
"He wore the clerical uniform which was very difficult for him when he was playing with children on the streets. People were mocking him because of the special period in which he was living in Mashhad. He had a very difficult life."
But Ali Khamenei kept going. He got married and had six children (we have pictures of his sons, but none of his wife or daughters). Some members of his extended family now live outside Iran.
His nephew, Mahmood Moradkhani, is in exile in Paris. He remembers his uncle as a quiet man who loved poetry.
"He was very nice and sociable," said Mr Moradkhani.
"Interestingly though, in my memories he was unremarkable. He didn't stand out in any way. He was very ordinary. For example, people from Mashhad have poetic tendencies. All Iranians have a poetry notebook, and we all love the arts."
The marxist and the cleric In his early years, Ali Khamenei also liked to smoke cigarettes and even a pipe - a very unusual habit for a religious man.
He also supported the Shah's main enemy - exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The ayatollah wanted to bring Islamic rule to Iran.
Ali Khamenei tried to spread the ayatollah's message inside the country. For this the shah's police arrested him six times.
During the 1970s, Marxist groups were also trying to get rid of the shah. So, the cleric Ali Khamenei ended up sharing a prison cell with Houshang Asadi, a young communist. The cleric and the communist got on quite well.
"He was a very good man," said Mr Asadi.
"He joked about very, very small things that [had nothing to do] with sexuality."
"Did you ever think he would end up as the supreme leader of Iran?" I asked.
"Never and never and never and never," Mr Asadi replied.
Hostage crisis But 1979 changed everything. The Shah fell. Ayatollah Khomeini stepped off the plane from Paris, and founded the Islamic Republic. Iran was to be ruled by clerics. And Ali Khamenei was one of them.
The 40-year-old became a member of the new ruler's inner circle. He was made leader of Friday prayers in Tehran.
He was even sent to play a part in the defining event of the Revolution - the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran.
Iranian students held more than 50 US diplomats hostage. The hostages included political officer John Limbert. One afternoon, five months into his captivity, he had an unannounced visitor - Ali Khamenei.
"It wasn't a meeting that I requested," remembers John Limbert.
The two men spent about 10 minutes talking. Their conversation was recorded by Iranian state TV.
"What I wanted to do was use what I knew of Iran and Iranians as a kind of leverage against him," said Mr Limbert.

"So when he said for example, 'Do you have any complaints?' I said, 'Well the students have overdone traditional Iranian hospitality. I know that Iranians do not want their guests to leave but this is really ridiculous.' He was clearly not a stupid person. He knew that I was taunting him."
After the bomb But soon Ali Khamenei had bigger things on his mind. In June 1981, an opposition group tried to assassinate him. A bomb hidden inside a tape recorder detonated while he was giving a news conference. He lost the use of his right arm.

It's [difficult to believe] that this very young, modern Iranian population is going to be willing to be ruled by a Supreme Leader”

Karim Sadjadpour Carnegie Endowment

"I was in pretty bad shape after the attack," Ali Khamenei later told an audience in Tehran, "because no-one thought I would survive.

"I felt that I was at death's door. In the days that followed, I thought 'Why have I survived?' And it dawned on me that our heavenly God wanted me to survive for a reason."
While he was still recovering he was elected president. It was a powerless, thankless job. During these years he was seen as a dogged, faithful follower.
Then in June 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini died. Clerics met to pick a new leader. Ali Khamenei emerged as an inoffensive consensus candidate.
He was only 49 years old. But he looked much, much older. He was chosen in order to follow the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini - not to suggest his own.
"He is a very ordinary man and I think that's the key for his success," said his biographer Mehdi Khalaji.
"He planned everything, he thought about everything. When he became a leader he had nothing.
"One of the main things he did was a very precise and subtle plan to empower the Revolutionary Guard after the Iran-Iraq war and by relying on them and empowering them he consolidated his own power and became a very strong leader."
Absolute power Ali Khamenei now has the same absolute power as the shah had in the 60s and 70s. But he leads a very different life from the last ruler of the Pahlavi dynasty.

When you [become] a dictator your ears are closed, your eyes are blind”

Houshang Asadi Former fellow prisoner

The Shah travelled around the world and enjoyed banquets and horse-drawn carriages. Ali Khamenei never leaves Iran. His greatest extravagance appears to be tending to a small garden - one photo shows him happily using a plastic watering can.

Ali Khamenei's former cellmate Houshang Asadi has watched the ayatollah's assumption of absolute power with great disappointment.
In the 70s, the cleric and the communist had fought together for an end to the rule of the shah. Now the communist believes that his former cellmate has betrayed the cause for which the two men once fought.
"He changed from a man who fought for freedom to a dictator, now Mr Khamenei is more of a dictator than a shah," he said.
"If you met him now what would you say to him?" I asked.
"First I say, 'I don't know you. Who are you Mr Khamenei?' Because when you [become] a dictator your ears are closed, your eyes are blind - you can't see anything and you can't hear anything."
Last leader? But the ayatollah retains the loyalty of the Revolutionary Guard - the force that keeps him in power.
Ali Khamenei has now ruled Iran for twice as long as Ayatollah Khomeini before him. He is 72 years old. When he dies, will Iran search for its third supreme leader?
"It's increasingly difficult to believe in the 21st Century that this very young, modern Iranian population is going to be willing to be ruled by a supreme leader who purports to be God's representative on Earth," said Karim Sadjadpour from the Carnegie Endowment in Washington DC.
"So I think it's certainly within the realm of possibility that Ayatollah Khamenei will be Iran's last supreme leader."
But the ayatollah will fight to pass on the system he inherited.
If there is any conflict within him, it is hidden well away. If he has any doubt, Ali Khamenei will not share it.
He has been a cleric for 60 years, and the guardian of a religious revolution for more than 20. In the end, it is to God alone that the supreme leader feels he must answer.-bbc

Share |

Syria violence: New protests after crackdown in Hama

2011-08-06T01:41:00.000+04:30

The BBC's Jim Muir reports on Syrian state TV showing images of deserted streets with makeshift barricades

Tens of thousands of people have protested across Syria, days after the bloody crackdown on the city of Hama where the opposition had taken control.

Video said to be of Damascus showed crowds in a central district chanting: "Hama, we are with you until death" and "[President] Bashar [al-Assad] leave".
At least 13 protesters were shot dead by security forces on Friday, reports say.
In a broadcast from Hama, state TV said the city was under government control.
Hama residents and human rights groups accuse the army of killing more than 100 civilians in a bombardment of the city, which has become a focus of the protests against Mr Assad's rule.
As many as 2,000 people may have been killed by security forces since opponents of President Assad's autocratic rule took to the streets in March.
Protesters were inspired by the successful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Mr Assad has promised reforms, but blames the violence on "armed criminal gangs" backed by unspecified foreign powers.
Access to events in Syria has been severely restricted for international journalists and it is rarely possible to verify accounts by witnesses and opposition activists.
Marching in the heat

Activists had called for more protests after prayers on Friday, with one web user posting a message saying: "God is with us, are you?"
Video posted by activists purports to show protesters marching through the Midan district of the Syrian capital, close to the Old City.
Clapping their hands, they chanted: "We don't want you Bashar."
In another district of the capital, Qadam, protesters carried a banner reading: "Bashar is slaughtering the people and the international community is silent."
Security forces opened fire with live ammunition and tear gas in several cities, activists said.
At least 10 people were killed in the Damascus suburbs of Irbin, Moaddamia and Dumeir, and three in the city of Homs.
Abdel Karim Rihawi, head of the Syrian League for the Defence of Human Rights, told AFP news agency that 30,000 people had marched in the city of Deir al-Zour despite extreme heat.
Numbers were down on previous Fridays, when hundreds of thousands turned out for protests. Correspondents say this is probably because it was the first Friday in the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn until dusk and go outside less.
Earlier, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused security forces of killing some 2,000 people since March.

'New shelling'
point of protests, told reporters that there had been more gunfire and shelling early on Friday.
Snipers and tanks have been firing on civilians and food and medicine supplies are running low, witnesses say.
But the Syrian TV report showed pictures of armed men hiding behind cars and claimed the army had quelled a rebellion.
The report showed deserted streets with flimsy barricades and piles of rubble. Later, the reporter went into buildings that appeared to have been destroyed in an explosion.
The UN Security Council issued a statement this week condemning the crackdown.
Russia, traditionally an ally of Syria, also joined the criticism, with President Dmitry Medvedev saying Mr Assad would "face a sad fate" unless he urgently carried out reforms and reconciled with the opposition.
The BBC's Jim Muir in neighbouring Lebanon says Mr Medvedev's statement may give the government pause for thought, but there has been no change in the attitude on the ground.-bbc

Share |

Reward for thirty (30) years of alliance with the west.....

2011-08-04T13:02:00.000+04:30

عکس / حسنی مبارک در دادگاه در داخل قفس

Share |

Iran resolved to keep up PJAK attacks

2011-07-29T15:38:00.000+04:30

Iranian border guards will continue their assault on Kurdish militants until Iraqi officials deploy troops to secure the border, an Iranian commander said.
Iranian forces have been fighting the militant Party for Free Life of Kurdistan, or PJAK, for weeks. Tehran said recently it has around 5,000 troops stationed on the northwestern border with Iraq.
An unnamed senior military commander told the official Islamic Republic News Agency that border operations would continue against PJAK until Iraqi or Kurdish forces secure the border.
Brig. Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, a ground forces commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, told state-funded broadcaster Press TV recently that more bilateral cooperation was needed to control Kurdish militancy in the region.

PJAK is considered a close affiliate of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which was blamed for killing Turkish soldiers near the border with Iraq last week.
Hassan Abdullah Hassan, a mayor in a border town in Sulaimaniya province, told the United Nations' humanitarian news agency IRIN recently that villagers along the border with Iran are paying the price for the conflict.
Iraqi satellite channel al-Sumaria reported Thursday that Baghdad is frustrated with Iran's actions along the shared northern border.-UPI

Share |

Libya rebel chief Younes' killing: Unanswered questions

2011-07-29T15:30:00.000+04:30

Gen Abdel Fattah Younes was an ally of Col Gaddafi for many years

Mystery surrounds the circumstances of the killing of Libya's rebel military commander, Gen Abdel Fattah Younes, a day after he and two aides were shot.

Rebel leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil said they had been killed by gunmen after Gen Younes was recalled from the front for questioning by judges.
He said the ringleader of the attack had been held but he gave no details about his identity or the motive.
It is not disclosed where the attack happened; nor where the bodies are.
The general - a former interior minister who had served at the heart of Col Muammar Gaddafi's regime since the 1969 coup - joined the rebels at the beginning of the Libyan uprising in February.

The BBC's Ian Pannell in the rebel-held city of Misrata says his defection was seen as a coup for the opposition, but there had been rumours that he had kept contacts with the Gaddafi leadership.

Mr Jalil announced the general's death late on Thursday, and said the head of the group of men who killed him had been captured.
Mr Jalil, who heads the rebel National Transitional Council, did not say who the assailants were or where the attack took place.
Although the bodies of Gen Younes and his aides have not been found, Mr Jalil said there would be three days of mourning in their honour.
Gen Younes was due to appear before a panel of judges in the rebel capital, Benghazi.
The exact nature of the questions he was facing is also unclear. Mr Jalil said they regarded military operations.
Some unconfirmed reports said Gen Younes and two aides had been arrested earlier on Thursday near Libya's eastern front.
Shortly after the announcement of their death, gunmen entered the grounds of the hotel in the eastern city of Benghazi where Mr Jalil was speaking, reportedly firing into the air before being convinced to leave.
Divisions in Benghazi

Analysis

James Reynolds BBC News, Tripoli
There are a lot of questions about exactly what happened on Thursday and what the sequence of events was. We're told that Gen Younes had been due to appear before a panel of rebel judges to answer a number of questions on a military matter. We're not entirely sure what that was.
In a conflict like this where there are not many facts and one side of the country is fighting another, we tend to get an awful lot of rumours and suggestions.
For what it's worth, some of the ones we're hearing is that there was a worry among the rebels that the military campaign was not going very well. They wanted to question the general.
Some of the speculation we're hearing in Tripoli, coming from Col Gaddafi's side, is that the general was simply not trusted by the rebels.

Abdel Fattah Younes

Helped Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi take power in the 1969 coup that ousted King Idris
Close advisor to the Libyan leader for four decades, rising to the post of general and training Col Gaddafi's special forces
Appointed interior minister
Quit the government on 22 February 2011 and defected to the rebels - one of the earliest such moves by a senior official
Appointed as the opposition's military chief in April, but faced mistrust due to his past ties to Col Gaddafi

Earlier on Thursday, rebels said they had seized the strategically important town of Ghazaya near the Tunisian border, after heavy fighting with Col Gaddafi's forces.

They reportedly took control of several other towns or villages in the area.
The rebels are struggling to break a military deadlock five months into the uprising against Col Gaddafi's rule.
Rebels control most of eastern Libya from their base in Benghazi and the western port city of Misrata, while Col Gaddafi retains much of the west, including the capital, Tripoli.
Late on Thursday AFP news agency reported explosions shaking the centre of Tripoli, as state TV reported that planes were flying over the Libyan capital.
Nato, acting under a UN mandate authorising military action for the protection of civilians, has carried out regular air strikes in the Tripoli area.
Our correspondent says his death will feed international suspicions that the rebel cannot be trusted.
South Africa's ambassador to the UN on Thursday warned that supporters of the rebels were in danger of violating UN sanctions and criticised calls by Western governments for Col Gaddafi to stand down.
The BBC's Barbara Plett at the UN says the growing trend to grant diplomatic recognition to the Libyan rebels is facing opposition on the Security Council.
About 30 countries have recognised the NTC.

bbc

Share |

Rape shame of the US military

2011-07-23T19:20:00.000+04:30

Jamie Leigh Jones, who lost a civil lawsuit against private military contracting firm
A US female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by an enemy. Yet most cases go unreported

Last week, Jamie Leigh Jones lost a civil lawsuit against her former employer, the private military contracting firm KBR. Jones had accused several of her colleagues of violent gang rape, to which KBR responded by insisting she settled the matter through private arbitration rather than a civil court. It took four years for Jones to be granted her day in court. After two days of deliberation, a federal jury decided that her claims were untrue.
Although Jones's case was thrown out, it touched upon a prevalent – yet gravely underrepresented – problem within the US military. According to military reporter Adam Weinstein, a US servicewoman is twice as likely to be the victim of rape as her civilian counterpart. In fact, a US female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by an enemy. Worse still, the Pentagon estimates that as many as 90% of sexual assault cases in the military go unreported.
Nancy Gibbs, a journalist for Time magazine, moots numerous explanations for the lack of attention given to sexual assault cases in the military: an overly macho culture; the fact that those in charge are solely focused upon winning the war; the well-trodden ground of victim-blaming. Whatever the reason, the outcome for Jones makes the prospect of reporting assault even more intimidating for US servicewomen. KBR's defence attacked Jones's character, depicting her as a "self-promoter" who had fabricated her case to pave the way for a book and movie deal.
Ultimately, the jury's verdict is final and has been accepted by Jones's attorney. But exoneration for KBR doesn't mean that the US military is even-handed in its treatment of women. It doesn't mean that silencing of sexual assault victims is not an endemic problem. A jury may have decided that Jones wasn't a victim of rape. But that doesn't mean the victims don't exist.
• This article was amended on 22 July 2011 to remove repeated text.-Guardian

Share |

At least 91 killed in twin shooting and bomb attacks in Norway

2011-07-23T18:38:00.000+04:30

Smoke billows from a building in Oslo
Twin shooting and bomb attacks in Oslo and a nearby island have killed at least 91 people, according to a new death toll released by Norwegian police Saturday. Police have charged a 32-year-old suspect over Norway's deadliest tragedy since World War II.
As harrowing testimony emerged from the holiday island where scores of youngsters were mown down by a gunman dressed as a policeman, Norway's premier said the country would emerge stronger from the "cruel act of violence".

"Never since the Second World War has our country been hit by a crime on this scale," Jens Stoltenberg told journalists in an early morning press conference as police searched for more bodies on the idyllic Utoeya island.
While there was no official confirmation of the suspect's identity, he was widely named by the local media as Anders Behring Breivik.
Police commissioner Sveinung Sponheim confirmed that the suspect was a 32-year-old Norwegian who had posted anti-Muslim rhetoric online.
According to the TV2 channel, the arrested suspect has links to right-wing extremists and possessed two weapons registered in his name.
Other Norwegian media reported that he described himself on his Facebook page as "conservative", "Christian", and interested in hunting and computer games like World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare 2.
The attacks on Friday afternoon were western Europe's deadliest carnage since the 2004 Madrid bombings.
While there had been initial fears they might have been an act of revenge over Norway's participation in the campaigns in Afghanistan and Libya, the focus shifted when it emerged the suspect was a native Norwegian.
Speaking alongside the prime minister, Justice Minister Knut Storberget said there was no reason to raise the threat level.
Security was tightened across potential target sites in the capital, but police lifted an advisory that had urged residents to stay home.
Seven of the victims were killed in a massive explosion which ripped through government buildings, including Stoltenberg's office and the finance ministry, in downtown Oslo.
But it is thought that the bomber then caught a ferry to nearby Utoeya wearing a police uniform.
According to witness testimony, he claimed to be investigating the bomb attack and began opening fire with an automatic weapon after beckoning youngsters towards him.
Witnesses described scenes of panic and horror among the 560 people attending the youth camp. Some who tried to swin to safety were even shot in the water, according to witnesses.
Among the wounded was Adrian Pracon, who was shot in the left shoulder as the gunman opened fire.
Speaking to Australia's ABC network from hospital, he said the scene on the island was like a "Nazi movie".
"He was shooting people at close range and starting to shoot at us. He stood first 10 metres from me and shooting at people in the water," he said.
"He had an M16, it did look like a machine gun. When I saw him from the side yelling that he was about to kill us, he looked like he was taken from a Nazi movie or something.
"He started shooting at these people, so I laid down and acted as if I was dead. He stood maybe two metres away from me. I could hear him breathing. I could feel the heat of the machine gun.
"He tried everyone, he kicked them to see if they were alive, or he just shot them.
Another young survivor, Jorgen Benone, said: "People were hiding behind stones. I saw people being shot... I felt it was best to stay quiet, not to run into the open.
"I saw (the gunman) once just 20 to 30 metres away from me," Benone said, adding that he then swam to safety and was rescued by a boat.
Norwegian police said they feared there could also be explosives on the island and officers were combing the island. Their updated death toll on the island released on Saturday morning stood at 84.
Stoltenberg had been due to give a speech on Saturday to the 560 people attending the youth camp on the island, organised by the ruling Labour party.
"Utoeya is a place I have visited every summer since 1974. I have known joy, commitment and safety there. Now the place has been through brutal violence and a paradise for youth has been turned into hell in a few hours," he said.
The prime minister said Norway, one of Europe's most peaceful countries, would not be intimidated.
"People have lived through a nightmare that very few of us can imagine," he said. "The coming days will show who is responsible and what kind of punishment they will get.
"The message to whoever attacked us, the message from all of Norway is that you will not destroy us, you will not destroy our democracy and our ideals for a better world."
There was widespread international condemnation with US President Barack Obama saying the attacks were "a reminder that the entire international community has a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring."
The Norwegian capital is a well-known symbol of international peace efforts and home to the Nobel Peace Prize.-rfi

Share |

Iranian actor arrested en route to women's World Cup

2011-07-18T04:28:00.000+04:30

Iranian actress Pegah Ahangarani has been arrested while travelling to the women's World Cup in German
Pegah Ahangarani, a supporter of the country's opposition, was due to go to Germany to participate in TV coverage

A popular Iranian actor and outspoken supporter of the country's opposition movement has been arrested in Tehran after attempting to travel to Germany to take part in coverage of the women's World Cup.
Pegah Ahangarani, 27, was scheduled to go to Germany to participate in TV programmes about the Fifa tournament, but was picked up from her home in the capital by security officials on Sunday.
Ahangarani fell foul of the Islamic regime when she publicly campaigned for opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi in Iran's 2009 presidential elections, but escaped arrest until recently because of her widespread popularity.
She is the second woman to have been arrested in recent weeks in connection with the women's World Cup in Germany. Maryam Majd, a prominent Iranian photographer and activist who had campaigned for women to be allowed to enter stadiums to watch football matches in Iran, was arrested in late June before going to Germany, where she wanted to work on a book about women and sport.
Within days of Ahangarani going missing, Deutsche Welle – Germany's international broadcasting service, which had invited her to Berlin – confirmed she had been arrested. "The Farsi-language service of Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcasting service, has learned from people close to the actress that Ahangarani has been arrested," the German news organisation said. "Deutsche Welle had set up a blog for Ahangarani, who enjoys broad popularity in Iran, to report on the women's World Cup soccer championships currently being held in Germany."
At least four other women rights activists have been arrested in recent weeks, including Mahnaz Mohammadi, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, Zahra Yazdani, a journalist, and campaigners Maryam Bahrman and Mansoureh Behkish.
Ahangarani, the daughter of acclaimed Iranian filmmakers Jamshid Ahangarani and Manijeh Hekmat, has repeatedly pushed boundaries in her career as a young actor playing roles in a country where women are obliged to cover themselves from head to toe.
At 15, Ahangarani featured in a controversial film, The Girl in the Sneakers, which touched the then taboo issue of a rebellious girl who wanted to have a boyfriend in an Islamic society. Girls in Iran are not allowed to have boyfriends, although the majority of young people rebel against it in today's Iran.
According to Deutsche Welle, officials in Tehran have confirmed that Ahangarani is currently being held by the security agents of the Revolutionary Guards.
Ahangarani has contacted her family once since her arrest, when she told them she was unaware of her whereabouts or the charges against her. No information was available on where she was being held or whether she had access to legal representation.
The London-based human rights organisation ARTICLE 19 has called on Iran to release Ahangarani and Mohammadi.
"ARTICLE 19 calls on the Iranian government to immediately release Mohammadi and Ahangarani, and other artists and activists unjustly detained," Agnes Callamard, the executive director, said. "The authorities must clarify the reasons for their arrests and ensure that the women have access to legal representation."
In recent years, several filmmakers and actors have been arrested or sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Director Jafar Panahi received a six-year prison term and 20-year ban on filmmaking last year, along with Mohammad Rasoulof, who was also sentenced to six years in jail. Ramin Parchami, a prominent actor, remains in custody after he was arrested in protests staged in February in solidarity with the uprisings in the Arab world.-Guardian

Share |

Bahrain opposition bloc al-Wifaq 'to quit national talks'

2011-07-18T04:22:00.000+04:30

Bahrain's majority Shia community has long complained of discrimination

Bahrain's biggest Shia opposition bloc says it is planning to pull out of talks set up by the Sunni-led government in the wake of pro-democracy protests.

A spokesman for the group, al-Wifaq, said the national dialogue was not serious and they would not be attending Sunday's session.
The bloc had complained that the opposition had been granted too few seats in the talks.
The dialogue was launched on 2 July.
An al-Wifaq spokesman said the decision to abandon the national dialogue would be put to the Wifaq leadership for ratification.
"We have tried but without success to make it a serious dialogue," the spokesman told the French news agency, AFP.
Announcing the start of the talks earlier this month, King Hamad Bin Issa Al Khalifa said all options were on the table.
The discussions follow months of anti-government protests in the Gulf kingdom that left more than 30 people dead.
Hundreds of opposition supporters have been jailed.
Al-Wifaq has said it is not seeking the fall of the government in Shia-majority Bahrain but is seeking reform.bbc

Share |

Iran establishes international crude oil exchange on island in Persian Gulf

2011-07-14T18:15:00.000+04:30

Iran establishes international crude oil exchange on island in Persian Gulf
Iran has established an international exchange for crude oil in a free trade zone on the Persian Gulf island of Kish.
During a ceremony marking the launch, Ali Salehabadi, who oversees Iran’s exchanges, said the market would supply crude in the Middle East. He invited international traders to participate.

Iran ranks second in output among OPEC countries and controls about 5 percent of the global oil supply.
It has sought to wield its oil resources as a bargaining tool in its standoff with the West over its nuclear program.
Iran planned the crude market in 2005 and established an exchange for other oil products in 2008.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Share |

Iran tightens online censorship to counter US 'shadow internet'

2011-07-14T17:23:00.000+04:30

Banned in Iran: Facebook and Twitter are among the sites outlawed by the Islamic regime
Tehran fury at 'internet in a suitcase' prompts upgrade to web filtering system blocking forbidden websites

ran has stepped up online censorship by upgrading the filtering system that enables the Islamic regime to block access to thousands of websites it deems inappropriate for Iranian users.
The move comes one month after the United States announced plans to launch new services facilitating internet access and mobile phone communications in countries with tight controls on freedom of speech, a decision that infuriated Tehran's regime and prompted harsh reactions from several Iranian officials.
The upgrade had at first appeared as a relaxation of the censorship machine. Iran's online community said on Monday that filtering was temporarily lifted for the entire country, giving users access to banned websites such as Twitter and Facebook. But hopes for an end to censorship were dashed when news agencies reported later in the day that the respite was due to the process of making the upgrade.
Despite the filtering, many Iranians access blocked addresses with help from proxy websites or virtual private network (VPN) services. The upgrade is aimed at stopping users bypassing censorship.
More than 5 million websites are filtered in Iran. Media organisations including the Guardian, BBC and CNN are blocked, though access to the New York Times website is allowed. On Google, the Farsi equivalents for words such as "condom", "sex", "lesbian" and "anti-filtering" are filtered out.
Iran is believed to be worried about the influence of the internet and especially social networking websites as pro-democracy activists across the Middle East use them to promote and publicise their movements.
Iran's semi-official Fars news agency quoted an unnamed official as saying: "The ministry of communications and information technology is strengthening the filtering system and recent disruptions were the result of this upgrade."
At the same time, Nasimonline.ir, an agency that publishes short Twitter-style bursts of news, said it had received information that "a new filtering system that targets Google and Yahoo search engines" had been installed and tested on Monday.
"I think that the new upgrade in the filtering system is a signal from Iran that the regime is prepared to stop any attempt by the US to challenge the country's online censorship," said an Iranian who spoke to the Guardian by phone from Tehran on condition of anonymity.
The New York Times reported last month that the Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy what is known as "shadow internet" or "internet in a suitcase" by spending $2m (£1.25m) on secretive projects to create "independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries". The aim is to provide services that allow "wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global internet" in support of dissidents in countries that have tightened their grip on freedom of speech.
In reaction to the US move, Iran's intelligence minister, Heidar Moslehi, was quoted by Fars as saying: "We had predicted these actions, such as the internet in suitcase, and we have planned proper ways to combat them."
In an interview with the semi-official Mehr news agency, Iran's minister for communications and information technology, Reza Taghipour, accused the US of "cyber terrorism" for its plans to launch "internet in suitcase".
In April, the Tehran government announced that it intended to launch "halal internet", a country-wide intranet and a parallel network that conforms to Islamic values with the ultimate goal of substituting for the global internet.
Iran's opposition believe that Iran is buying its filtering technology from China. In September 2009 Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards, a body under the direct control of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, purchased 51% of the Telecommunications Company of Iran, which monitors internet filtering in the country.
Guardian

*** Iran, Israel and Arabs trade barbs at EU nuclear meeting
Senior officials stuck to their talking points at a Brussels seminar but at least they stayed in the same room

As advertised, senior Iranian, Israeli and Arab representatives gathered in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday last week to discuss the prospect of a WMD-free zone in the Middle East.
The Iranian delegation was led by Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, while the Israeli contingent was led by Jeremy Issacharoff, an ambassador and a deputy director-general for strategic affairs at the foreign ministry. Virtually the entire Arab world was represented at a similar level at the EU-brokered meeting, with the only significant exceptions of Libya and Yemen, who have pressing problems back home.
The good news is that the everyone managed to stay in the same (rather large) room for the duration of the off-the-record discussion. The bad news, according to participants, is that the large number of speakers meant that few speakers had time to go beyond the obligatory finger-wagging directed at their opposite numbers. One delegate said:

There wasn't much of substance. Usually there is time to get the venting out of the way and move on to more interesting issues, but this was so large that there was really just time for set pieces...All the same it was a good effort by the EU. If it had been done earlier it might have been more helpful.

The other big disappointment was that Gary Samore, President Obama's advisor on nuclear disarmament and proliferation, did not show up to make his scheduled keynote speech. He pleaded commitments back in Washington, but it was hardly the show of support from Washington that the idea of a WMD-free zone needs if it is to survive.
There are now serious doubts whether a formal conference on the issue can be arranged, as agreed at last year's NPT Review Conference in New York, in time for next year. The US argues that the host government should also provide an international 'facilitator' for the conference, but that cuts down the choice of facilitator.
The short-list for host countries is Finland, the Netherlands and Canada at the moment, but I have so far seen no names of would-be facilitators. There seems to be some disagreement over whether the position should be filled by a well-known statesman figure, who can get access to heads of government, or an effective behind-the-scenes diplomat, who would have time to plug away at the issue non-stop. A decision is due to be taken by September. If it is not, the 2012 conference will be in real danger of not happening.
Update: Just got a riposte from EU officials that the event was more productive than this blog made it sound, and that delegations from Iran, Israel and Arab states did go beyond their talking points to exchange views particularly in sessions on regional confidence-building and on regional implementation of non-proliferation measures. One official said: "There were too many people, but that was because so many people wanted to come, but as a first attempt to get Israelis, Iranians and Arabs in the same room and talking, it was a good result."-Guardian

Share |

What would happen if the US went broke? )What would happen if the US went bust?)

2011-07-07T23:23:00.000+04:30

The US is in major debt and can't agree what to do about it, what would happen if they went broke?
Greece may have staved off default for another few months, but as protestors leave the streets of Athens, global attention has moved to the US and its enormous debt problem.
The US is the richest country in the world, so it follows that its credit limit is the largest. But Uncle Sam has run up incredibly large bills in recent years and it is now close to the top of its credit limit.

But the US has its own central bank and Treasury so it could just mint new coins and notes if it ever ran out of money, right?
Well, that is technically correct but US politicians in Congress are supposed to act as the US's bank manager and set its credit limit (they also spend the US's money, so one could argue that it's a fairly lax system).
In recent years Congress has raised the debt ceiling because of some exceptional circumstances like the subprime crisis and the financial sector bailout in 2008/2009. But now that the recovery has taken hold the Republicans in Congress want to start paying the debt away.
That's all fine except that the US is hitting its latest debt ceiling and needs to borrow more money. But Congress is in deadlock.
The scale of the problem
The US needs an extension on its $14.3 trillion credit limit
urgently. As anyone who has racked up debt on multiple credit cards will know, the more you owe the more you need to borrow just to pay back your original debts. This is where the US now finds itself.
The biggest economy in the world needs Congress to give it the green light to tap the markets for more cash to pay debt redemptions and coupon payments that are due to be repaid in the coming months.
Since these tally up to more than $500 billion, the extension will have to be fairly hefty to ensure the US's finances are sustainable in the future.
If Congress says no then expect carnage in the financial markets. Already one of the major credit rating agencies has said it will immediately cut the US's credit rating to default; it is currently rated triple A and considered the safest security in the world to hold in your portfolio.
With no money the US government would not be able to pay public sector workers, pensions, disability allowance; schools and hospitals may have to close their doors.
Congress has shut down before because the debt ceiling hasn't been extended, but this time is slightly different.
Debts have never been this big and credit rating agencies have never threatened to cut the US sovereign debt rating to a D - worse than Greece.
The fallout
A US debt crisis would also reverberate across the globe. Most of the US's debts are held overseas. Almost a quarter are held by China and 20% is held by Japan. The UK is the next biggest holder with 7% and oil exporters are the fourth largest with nearly 5%.
If the US stopped making payments on its obligations then its creditors would suffer. Not only would these countries not receive the money they were due, but this could disrupt their cash flows and impact their economies.
If the US's credit rating was slashed then it would most likely send yields sky high and since bond prices move inversely to yields the value of the debt they hold would also tumble.
So investors would be hit twice: firstly the value of their investment would fall through the floor and then they wouldn't get the money they expected to receive.
It's unlikely there would be many people willing to purchase US debt after this, so Congress needs to put ideological differences aside and look at the practicalities of what defaulting means.
If you have $14 trillion in debt, you shouldn't anger your creditors.
Even if Congress does raise the debt ceiling in the coming weeks, the wrangle up on Capitol Hill has already eroded the US's debt's status as a risk-free asset.
No country is entirely free from the risk of default, even one as rich as the US. From now on investors may start to price in a political premium to US debt, which could make it more expensive for the US to borrow in the future.
We are now in a period whereby excessive debt loads will not be tolerated by investors, so the US needs to toe the line and gets its fiscal house in order or else pay the consequences.-Forex.com

Share |

FBI arrests UK teen in hacking probe<'Hack' youth could face extradition>

2011-06-21T22:42:00.000+04:30

A British teenager suspected of masterminding a global computer hacking plot from his bedroom could face a fight against extradition to the US.
Ryan Cleary was arrested at his detached family home in Essex as part of a Scotland Yard and FBI probe into LulzSec, a group claiming responsibility for hacking attempts on the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, the US Senate and the CIA.
Neighbours who witnessed the dawn police swoop spoke of their shock as the "very bright" 19-year-old university student was questioned.
Detectives believe Cleary was a "major player" with LulzSec, which has also claimed security breaches at games firms Nintendo and Sony.
As American authorities were kept closely informed over the "pre-planned intelligence-led operation", lawyers said US prosecutors may demand he faces justice across the Atlantic.
Mark Spragg, an extradition lawyer at London-based firm Keystone Law, said: "If the charges on which he was arrested would result in a sentence in excess of 12 months, then potentially it would constitute an extradition offence."
LulzSec is said to have established itself as a formidable splinter group to Anonymous, the hacking group embroiled in the WikiLeaks fallout.
The group was believed to have initially targeted only US broadcasters, including PBS and Fox, and gaming firms.
But the Twitter page @LulzSec recently declared its intention to break into government websites and leak confidential documents.
Soca, the UK national law enforcement unit dubbed the British FBI, was forced to temporarily take its website off-line on Monday after LulzSec bombarded it with traffic to stop other users accessing it.-ASP

Share |

Russian minister to travel to Iran for Bushehr nuclear power plant launch

2011-06-20T20:16:00.000+04:30

Iranian ambassador to Moscow Reza Sajjad
Iranian ambassador to Moscow Reza Sajjadi said Saturday that Russian energy minister will visit Iran early August for launch of Bushehr nuclear power plant, the semi- official ISNA news agency reported.
"Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko accompanied by a team is to travel to Iran to join launching ceremony of Iran's Bushehr nuclear facility," Sajjadi told ISNA.
"No definite date is set for operation of the power plant, but Russian State Nuclear Energy Corporation (Rosatom) has expressed its readiness to launch the nuclear facility early August," he was quoted as saying.
The Russian delegation first will attend Iran-Russia joint commission to focus on oil, petrol and transportation agreements and then will fly to Iranian southern city of Bushehr to launch the power plant, said ISNA.
On May 31, Iran's Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said that his country was getting ready to connect Bushehr nuclear power plant to the national grid in one month.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said earlier in the month that Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant will be operational within weeks.
Construction of the Bushehr plant was started in 1975 by several German companies. However, the work halted when the United States imposed an embargo on hi-tech supplies to Iran after the 1979 revolution. Russia signed a contract with Iran to complete the construction in 1998.
Completion of the plant's construction was postponed several times by mounting technical and financial challenges and pressure from the U.S..
Also, the director general of Russian Foreign Ministry for Middle East Affairs is to arrive in Tehran on Monday for talks with Iranian officials on Middle Eastern and North African issues, said ISNA on Saturday.-news.xinhua

Share |

Iran FM threatened with impeachment

2011-06-20T20:13:00.000+04:30

Iran's foreign minister is under fire for naming Mohammad Sahrif Malekzadeh as a deputy foreign minister
A number of Iranian MPs threatened on Sunday to impeach Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi for appointing an aide to the president's underfire chief of staff as one of his deputies.
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.
A number of influential deputies in the conservative-dominated parliament reacted the next day by calling for the impeachment of Salehi.
"We hope that Salehi will sack Malekzadeh as soon as possible ... and rebuff the current of deviation's pressure," said one of the MPs, Mohammad Dehqan, quoted by Mehr news agency.
"If he does not, the majlis (parliament) will go for impeachment."
Ultra-conservatives, the Shiite clergy and the elite Revolutionary Guards have repeatedly called for Mashaie's dismissal, accusing him of leading "a current of deviation" and of exerting too much influence over the president.
Ahmadinejad has so far adamantly defended his aides, including Mashaie.
The threatened impeachment of Salehi, in a letter posted on the majlis website, said Malekzadeh's appointment was against the national interest.
"Such an appointment jeopardises the nation's interests ... This person is on the verge of being arrested as (the judiciary) is investigating him over financial and non-financial cases," it said.
Salehi, who appeared before the majlis national security and foreign policy commission on Sunday, in reply to a question on whether an impeachment was raised at the session, said "it was not an important issue."
"This matter should be investigated," he said, asked if Malekzadeh's appointment was discussed, according to state television's website.
"Salehi told us it is not in the interest of the country to have someone at the foreign ministry who has a criminal record, and if his (Malekzadeh's judicial) cases are confirmed, then he will sack him," Zohereh Elahian, a member of the commission, told Mehr news agency.
She added that the impeachment call would remain on the table.
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 rift between Ahmadinejad and ultra-conservatives surfaced in mid-April when he challenged a ruling by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vetoing a decision by the president to sack Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi.
Ahmadinejad then withdrew from public life for 10 days, igniting a bitter dispute with the conservatives supporting the supreme leader.
Ayatollah Khamenei has since repeatedly called on all factions to rein in their attacks on the president and his aides.
The row between the government and parliament has also heightened in recent months over the budget, the scrapping of state subsidies and a project to streamline the cabinet.
The parliament is even considering moves to officially question Ahmadinejad, after ultra-conservative lawmaker Ali Motahari said about 90 MPs had signed a petition to do so, according to media reports.-AFP

Share |

Iran defense chief in Kabul as Afghans eye security

2011-06-20T20:06:00.000+04:30

Iran's defense minister made a landmark visit to Afghanistan on Saturday to bolster ties as Kabul prepares to assume security control from NATO-led forces and Washington seeks to wind down its almost decade-old tenure.
Majority Shi'ite Iran and majority Sunni Afghanistan share a long border and history, and Western powers have alleged that Tehran's involvement included supporting the Taliban insurgency to compete with U.S. influence. Iran denies that charge.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran considers Afghanistan's security as its own security, has put a lot of effort toward stability in Afghanistan and will continue to help in this regard," Iranian state broadcaster IRIB quoted Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi as saying.
Vahidi's visit, during which he met Afghan counterpart Abdul Rahim Wardak, was the first by an Iranian defense minister in 92 years, according to IRIB.
"On this trip I hope to witness the expansion of defense ties between the two countries," Vahidi said.
Wardak's ministry said the two discussed challenges such as terrorism, drugs and arms smuggling, crime and border security.
"Both Islamic countries emphasized that according to their common faith, culture, language, historical and social values, they will respect each other's independence, territorial integrity and national sovereignty," it said in a statement.
In coming months, foreign troops will hand security control in parts of Afghanistan to the national police and army, launching a years-long process that Western nations and Kabul see giving Afghans all security control by the end of 2014.
President Barack Obama is also expected to announce soon how many troops he plans to withdraw starting in July, as part of a commitment to begin reducing the U.S. military presence and meeting the 2014 security transition goal.
The United States is on the verge of announcing a "substantial" drawdown, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Friday. There currently are about 100,000 U.S. troops, up from about 34,000 when Obama took office in 2009.
While Iran will be happy to see the start of a drawdown in U.S. troops, it is concerned about drug smuggling from Afghanistan -- the world's biggest exporter of opiates -- and the presence of al Qaeda in the region.
U.S. military officers have long alleged Iranian support for the Taliban. Britain said this year that NATO had identified a cache of weapons seized in Afghanistan as coming from Iran and destined for Taliban insurgents.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has acknowledged that his office receives "bags of money" from Iran, which he says is a form of aid that helps cover presidential palace expenses.-Reuters

Share |

Iran successfully launches satellite into space

2011-06-17T05:50:00.000+04:30

Iran successfully launched its Rassad-1 satellite into space on Wednesday, the country's Arabic-language television channel Al-Alam said.
"It was launched by the Safir rocket and put into orbit 260 kilometres (163 miles) above the Earth," the television said. "It is capable of photographing the Earth."
The report said Rassad-1 (Observation-1) can revolve 15 times around the Earth every 24 hours, and that it has a two-month life cycle.
Iran, which has outlined an ambitious space programme in the face of Western concerns, put a satellite into orbit in 2009 and sent small animals into space in 2010.
Western powers fear that Tehran could develop a missile capability under cover of its space programme which could be used to deliver nuclear warheads.
Iran denies it has any ambition to develop an atomic bomb and insists both its space and nuclear programmes are entirely peaceful.
Originally scheduled to launch in August 2010, Rassad was constructed by Malek Ashtar University in Tehran, which is linked to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards.
In February, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled four new prototypes of home-built satellites Iran hopes to launch before March 2012.
Iran in February unveiled what it said were prototypes of four new home-built satellites -- Rassad, Fajr (Dawn), Zafar (Victory) and Amir Kabir-1 and also the engines of a Safir-B1 (Ambassador-B1) rocket, news reports said.
The country does not have an operational satellite of its own but Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi announced in December that two satellites, Fajr and Rassad-1, would be launched by the end of the current Iranian year to March 20.
Tehran says it aims to send an Iranian into space by 2020.
Fajr is a reconnaissance satellite constructed by the defence ministry, while Amir Kabir-1, details of which were unavailable, is built by Tehran's Amir Kabir university.
Iranian media reports have said the Safir-B1 rocket can carry a satellite weighing 50 kilograms (110 pounds) into an elliptical orbit of 300 to 450 kilometres (185 to 280 miles-AFP

Share |

Ahmadinejad calls for regional security alliance to counter US influence

2011-06-17T05:48:00.000+04:30

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad joins his Kazakh, Afghan, Russian and Tajik counterparts at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit.
Iran's president calls on Shanghai Cooperation Organisation members to unite against western 'colonialists and enslavers'

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called for a security alliance of several former Soviet nations and China to form a united front against the west.
Ahmadinejad's address to heads of state at the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), in Kazakhstan could deepen suspicions that the bloc is intended as a counterbalance to US influence across the region.
In a summit declaration signed by all the member states, the organisation also attacked missile defence programmes.
"The one-sided and unlimited development of missile defence systems by one government, or a narrow group of governments, could cause damage to strategic stability and international security," the document says.
Much of Ahmadinejad's speech was devoted to an exhaustive series of thinly veiled accusations against unnamed western countries, which he described as "enslavers, colonialists [and] invaders".
Opening his address, he said: "Which one of our countries [has played a role] in the black era of slavery, or in the destruction of hundreds of millions of human beings?"
The SCO was formed in Shanghai in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, to address religious extremism and border security in central Asia. In recent years it has attracted interest in full membership from Iran, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its scope has since broadened to economic issues.
Iran's entry into the SCO has been resisted by the existing members, who worry that its membership would lend the group a more explicitly anti-American quality, a concern that Ahmadinejad was seemingly unwilling to allay.
Russia has been an active opponent of US-backed plans to create a missile shield in Europe and might have been behind harsh comments against the proposal in the summit declaration. Moscow sees the US missile defence plans as a potential threat to security. It has agreed to consider Nato's proposal to cooperate on the missile shield but insists the system is run jointly.
Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, who is also participating in the summit, the SCO's 10th, renewed calls for the US to respect his country's sovereignty. In recent months the president has become increasingly strident in his criticism of Nato air strikes affecting Afghan civilians, describing the western-led alliance as being at risk of becoming an "occupying force".-Guardian

Share |

The world can only watch as Iran implodes from within

2011-06-16T19:37:00.000+04:30

Two years after the disputed reelection of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Tehran streets that seethed with protest for months are quiet. But the silence belies the increasingly chaotic and rowdy struggle for control within the corridors of power - a contest in which those Iranians who risked their lives to protest two years ago have no clear favourite.
The key political contest today pits Ayatollah Ali Khamenei against Mr Ahmadinejad, the president behind whom (at great risk to the prestige of his office) the supreme leader threw his weight two years ago. The struggle has raged in the open for months, and it's far from certain that Mr Ahmadinejad will get to finish his current term of office.
The president, believing that Ayatollah Khamenei had become dependent on him after the 2009 election debacle, began to steadily and directly challenge the authority of the clergy the moment he returned to office.

Mr Ahmadinejad and his closest allies alarmed the clerics by seeking to refashion the state's ideology on nationalist - rather than Islamist - lines, and to shift its centre of political power from the clergy to the presidency.
The clerics are also outraged by Mr Ahmadinejad's religious populism. Appealing to a less educated poorer population, he claims a direct connection with Shiism's hidden 12th Imam, the messianic Mahdi, and as such claims that he doesn't need clerical supervision to govern on Islamic principles.
In April, when the president fired a pro-Khamenei intelligence minister, the supreme leader saw an opportunity to put Mr Ahmadinejad in his place, and remind him that his authority as president is no greater than that of his hapless reformist predecessor, Mohammed Khatami.
So Ayatollah Khamenei reinstated the fired minister, prompting Mr Ahmadinejad to stay away from work for 11 days - in unprecedented public defiance of the supreme leader's authority. The president was forced to retreat as more and more power centres, including from the Revolutionary Guards, lined up behind the ayatollah.
A torrent of public attacks on Mr Ahmadinejad and his allies followed, with the president's key aide and preferred successor, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, being arrested and charged with using "sorcery" in pursuit of his political agenda. And the head of Revolutionary Guards warned that "deviations" driven by "djinns, fairies and demons" would not be tolerated.
Thus was the climate in which Mr Ahmadinejad found himself being booed after his speech on the June 4 anniversary of the death of the revolution's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Parliament, meanwhile, controlled by Mr Ahmadinejad's conservative rivals, is looking to press criminal charges for his attempts to take over the oil ministry. Ayatollah Khamenei is believed to want the president to finish his term, but in a humbled lame duck capacity.

While some reformists are happy to see the supreme leader turn on Mr Ahmadinejad, the ayatollah remains hostile to reform and has given them little reason to hope for better days even if he manages to bring the president to heel.
The same goes for Western powers. The Washington Post's David Ignatius suggested recently that the split was a result of Mr Ahmadinejad's camp reaching out for a nuclear deal with the US, implying that America needed the Iran president to prevail. Others, such as Washington-based analyst Geneive Abdo, argue the opposite - that Ayatollah Khamenei, despite his hostility, is preferable because he is averse to confrontation.
But the power struggle is not driven by relations with the West, nor will its outcome necessarily change Tehran's strategic consensus. Iran analysts Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi recently noted that Tehran sees the Arab Spring as weakening its US and Saudi rivals, which reinforces their aversion to a deal at this time.
"Iranian government reluctance to negotiate with America has not necessarily been rooted in an ideological opposition to the idea of talking or improving relations with Washington," they argue. "Instead, hard-liners in Tehran fear that any relationship with the US would require Iranian acquiescence to (a) status quo" that they believe is growing steadily weakerThat leaves Western powers facing a major problem - at least to the extent that their Iran focus remains centred on its nuclear programme. There's little reason to expect Tehran to change course on matters of national security any time soon. Still, despite Iran's defiance on uranium enrichment, the assessment of the US intelligence community remains that Iran is not currently building nuclear weapons, and has taken no decision to do so.
"We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons," the US director of national intelligence, General James Clapper, reported in February. "Iran's nuclear decision-making is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran."
In the coming weeks, we can expect the drumbeat of pressure to intensify, as the Obama administration looks to press for new sanctions. It will grow even louder if the Republicans make an election issue out of Iran's continued defiance.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh recently wrote that senior intelligence sources tell him of a "discrepancy between the available intelligence and what many in the White House and Congress believe to be true" about Iran's nuclear activities. And Israel's recently retired Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, publicly castigated the Iran hysteria being cultivated by the Netanyahu government, warning that it was creating panic and fuelling consideration of military action against Iran.
Mr Dagan said he's not expecting Israeli military action in the next two years. Nor is Iran likely to bow to Western demands in that time. It's business as usual, then, even as the regime in Tehran implodes.-The National

Share |

Concerns over democracy dominate as Turkey votes

2011-06-11T14:57:00.000+04:30

The last time Turks voted in a general election in 2007, opponents feared the socially conservative ruling party was turning Turkey into an Iran-style Islamic state.
With voters on Sunday expected to keep Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party in office for a third straight term, critics and some analysts now worry about that less but fear that the future course of democracy may be at stake.
A rising power with a vibrant, free economy and a U.S. ally that aspires to join the European Union, Turkey is held up as an example of marrying Islam and democracy and has been an oasis of stability in a region convulsed by "Arab Spring" uprisings.
AK has also overseen the most stable and prosperous period of Turkey's history with market-friendly reforms, and begun membership talks with the EU while opening new markets in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
With the economy notching up impressive growth rates, investors have been sanguine about Turkey's politics so long as there is no return to the cycle of coups and economic crises that plagued the country in the latter half of the 20th century.
The chances of another coup -- there have been three since 1960 while a fourth government was forced to resign in 1997 -- appear remote given that AK has clipped the army's powers.
But Turkey's economy is overheating, driven by a booming consumer demand, and some economists believe it is seriously vulnerable to imbalances.
Erdogan, whose party controls the government and parliament and who last year won a referendum to overhaul the judiciary, says if he wins by a big enough margin this time and achieves a "super majority," he will rewrite Turkey's constitution.
Many fear such a move will polarize society and distract the government from pursuing the needed structural reforms.
"HIDDEN AGENDA" GAINS LESS TRACTION
Scaremongering suggesting the AK has some hidden Islamist agenda is gaining less traction these days.
"If we did have a hidden agenda this would be the best kept secret on earth because people have seen us in action for the past nine years," Egemen Bagis, Turkey's minister for European affairs, told Reuters at a marina built for the new rich on the outskirts of Istanbul.
In disarray since AK first swept traditional parties from power in 2002, the secularist Republican People's Party (CHP) opposition has changed tactics. It talks less of an Islamist takeover and more on the dangers of Erdogan subverting democracy by gaining control of all levers of the state.
The CHP's new leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu accuses Erdogan of intolerance and of leading a "wiretapping government" to keep political rivals in check, and has criticized AK for a widening wealth gap despite years of record growth and low inflation.
Critics raise their voices over the high number of journalists in jail under AK -- Erdogan once sued a cartoonist who characterized him as a cat -- and say that if AK wins a two-thirds majority Turkey will head toward autocracy.
"The elections in 2007 were an ideological contest between secularists and conservatives," said Sinan Ulgen, from the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies.
"There has been an evolution in Turkish society and in the opposition of what secularism means and that has allowed the debate to move forward, but it doesn't mean the ideological schism is over," Ulgen said.
NEIGHBOURHOOD PRESSURE
In this country of 74 million, the perennial question of Islam versus secularism is never far from the surface.
Following the collapse of the theocratic Ottoman Empire in World War I, the founder of the republic, Kemal Ataturk, pushed radical secular reforms including banishing religion from government, criminalizing the use of the fez and changing the alphabet from the Arabic to the Latin script.
Turks boast that women in Turkey were allowed to vote before the French thanks to Ataturk, though they remain woefully under-represented in parliament by European standards.
But in just nine years under the AK party, religious Turks who were the underdogs of society under previous secular governments have come into their own across the country and displaced the secular, Westernized elite from power.
Generals, the self-proclaimed guardians of secularism, are now confined to barracks; the wives of Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul assertively wear headscarves; government receptions where raki and whiskey are not served no longer make headlines.
Some Turks say "neighborhood pressure" -- showing piety in dress or fasting during Ramadan -- gets you government jobs and contracts. Some say the call to prayer from mosques is louder under AK and surveys show more women wear headscarves.
The government has made alcoholic drinks more expensive while trying to introduce tougher laws on sale and consumption, particularly to discourage young drinkers.
Education, in a country of 75 million with an average age of 28, is a big issue. Teachers complain that more pious colleagues are being favored for jobs at state schools.
"I am scoring high in the teachers' exam, but imams get the appointments," Ebru, a 26-year-old teacher in Izmir, told Reuters as she drew anxiously on a cigarette.
The debate is over whether this anecdotal evidence is proof of that the AK represents an Islamist Trojan Horse or merely shows of greater openness and plurality in a society where conservatism has always been the dominant trait.
"Headscarves are more visible because of the urbanization and the emergence of a conservative middle class occupying new spaces, but it's clear AK is pushing a more conservative social agenda that restricts lifestyle choices," said Fadi Hakura, from the London-based Chatham House think tank.
Accusations that the police is filled with supporters of an Islamist movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim preacher who re-based to Pennsylvania for fear of a crackdown at home in the late 1990s, appear particularly sensitive.
Three months ago a well-known journalist, Ahmet Sik, was put in detention for writing a book that repeated the allegations. Police sought to destroy copies of the unpublished book, but Turks can still find it through the Internet.
Tens of thousands protested in Istanbul in May against Internet censorship and plans for a new filtering system, due to be introduced on August 22, under which users must sign up for one of four filters -- domestic, family, children and standard.
Turkey has previously banned access to various websites, including YouTube for more than two years, under court orders imposed for infringing decency laws.
Erdogan, a devout Muslim who does not drink or smoke, denies his party is imposing any lifestyle choices.
"I may have established a position in my own word, my own family, against alcohol. We are a conservative democratic party. Our personal position on some issues is clear but imposing our personal approach on the whole of society is repression," he said in a recent interview.
Yet many still do not believe him. AK evolved from banned Islamist parties and Erdogan served a brief jail sentence for Islamist agitation.
"The way I dress has unconsciously become more conservative. Even when I go to the most modern neighborhoods of Istanbul I have to think twice before wearing miniskirts or shorts because I'm afraid of being harassed," said a woman in her 30s as she shopped in a posh mall on the European side of Istanbul.
"I think another four years under AK government would do serious or maybe even irreversible harm to secularism."-Reuters

Share |