Mehdi Arabshahi, was president of the largest student organization in Iran, the Daftar Tahkim Vahdat, and a former political prisoner who fled Iran after being held in solitary confinement for 100 days. He and Gissou Nia, Executive Director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, discuss the status of human rights in Iran.
April 2, 2014 – 1:23pm, by Marianna Grigoryan
Natural gas flares at a processing facility of the South Pars gas field near the Iranian town of Kangan in January 2014. Armenia recently announced an agreement to increase its import of natural gas from Iran to two billion cubic meters per year – an increase of 75 percent.
Mystery is swirling around a deal to boost Iranian natural gas exports to Armenia: why does the Kremlin seem to be going along with the idea?
On March 19, Armenian Energy Minister Armen Movsisian announced that Armenia plans to increase its imports of gas from neighboring Iran to 2 billion cubic meters per year, an increase of nearly 75 percent over the current annual volume. In exchange, Armenia would export electricity to Iran.
By Nazanin Kamdar (source: Rooz Online)
The Iranian regime has named tens of streets, circles, schools, universities, etc in his name across the country.
As conservatives in Iran have been increasing their criticism over staffing changes at the country’s Atomic Energy Organization which some media characterized as the “expulsion of nuclear scientists,” the former director of the agency Fereidun Abbasi whose appointment to head the organization during Ahmadinejad’s tenure caught all observers by surprise, revealed that Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan who has been called “the nuclear scientist martyr” by Iranian authorities and all official media, was not a scientist at all but was involved in commercial activities. Thirty two year-old Roshan and his driver were killed in a terrorist attack in January 2012 in Tehran.
Gareth Porter’s new book challenges years of the West’s claims about Tehran’s nuclear program.
By Kelley Vlahos • April 1, 2014
Can he prove it? Well he’s got 300 pages representing at least six years worth of work to try to get you over to his side. Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published this year by Just World Books, is not just some ham-fisted polemic. It’s a journalist’s read: dense with interviews, reports, citations, notes. He finds obscure sources that would otherwise be lost to history. He pokes holes in unquestioned news stories, and exposes what he believes is an orchestrated campaign by the U.S. and its ally, Israel, dating back to the 1979 Islamic revolution, to prevent Iran from developing a non-weaponized nuclear power program.
The former vice president also calls criticism of the NSA “hogwash” and rips the “increasing strain of isolationism” in the GOP.
By Andy Kroll and David Corn | Tue Apr. 1, 2014
What do former Vice President Dick Cheney, billionaire megadonor Sheldon Adelson, and Republican activists and funders talk about—and applaud—when they’re behind closed doors at a Las Vegas hotel? Bombing Iran.
Speaking about the possibility of Iran developing a nuclear weapon, Cheney dismissed Obama’s negotiations with Tehran, and he recalled a dinner meeting he had in 2007 with Israeli General Amos Yadlin. Yadlin had flown in the Israeli Defense Force’s mission in 1981 that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, and he was the country’s military intelligence chief in 2007 when the Israel Defense Forces obliterated Syria’s nuclear reactor in the Deir ez-Zor region. Recalling his conversation with Yadlin, Cheney said, “He looked across the table over dinner, and he said, ‘Two down, one to go.’ I knew exactly what he meant.”
Read More »
By Barbara Slavin March 31, 2014
In what some Iran watchers see as a trial balloon, Robert Einhorn shares ideas on the terms of a final deal with Tehran.
In publishing his ideas, Einhorn — who left the Obama administration less than a year ago and retains close ties to chief U.S. negotiator Wendy Sherman and other administration officials — illustrates that the fate of a long-term nuclear agreement with Iran rests not just on the negotiators meeting in Vienna but also on how political elites in the United States and Iran approach the compromises required to reach an accord. U.S. officials have compared the process of broadening the current six-month interim agreement to solving a Rubik’s Cube, in which changing one part affects all others.
Financial Times 26th March, 2014
Washington is “bullying” UK banks into refusing to support legal exports to Iran, costing British companies hundreds of millions of pounds in lost sales, senior politicians claimed at Westminster on Wednesday.
While US exports to Iran have been rising, Washington is suspected by British parliamentarians of using extraterritorial threats to hinder UK companies wanting to legally export food, pharmaceuticals and medical devices to Iran.
MoreOn this topic Bank stress tests focus on shocks Lenders seek to ease levy burden Scheme to boost small business lending UK ‘challenger’ banks plan £10bn listingsIN UK Politics & Policy Former ‘spad’ says ministers kept in dark Farmland and business tax reliefs double Miliband tries to charm small business UK census to be mainly online from 2021Jack Straw, the former Labour foreign secretary, and Norman Lamont, former Tory chancellor, claim Washington’s behaviour is a direct challenge to British sovereignty.
khalijefars News, Blogs, Art and Community