Articles

By: Laurence Norman, Nour Malas and Benoît Faucon April 6, 2014
Difficulties Could Hinder Negotiations for a Comprehensive Agreement
Iran has been unable to withdraw much of the unfrozen oil revenue it was to receive under a November interim nuclear deal, a possible complication for efforts to end the decadelong standoff over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

The problems were outlined in interviews with nearly a dozen Western and Iranian officials and diplomats, bankers and lawyers with knowledge of the issue.

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theguardian.com, Monday 7 April 2014
The popularity of consumerist culture has raised dowry expectations to unrealistic extremes

It drives poor families into the clutches of organ harvesters and loan sharks, compels betrothed couples to spend years in pre-marital purgatory, and pushes a nation known for strong family values to the brink of a population crisis. Still, for some Iranians, losing a kidney or signing off on a Faustian bank loan is a lesser evil than the dishonor, or aberoorizi, of failing to provide an acceptable dowry for their daughters.

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By Ben Armbruster on April 7, 2014 at 12:50 pm
A group of Israeli experts last week laid out what they believe would be a “reasonable” final nuclear deal with Iran, namely allowing Iran some civilian enrichment capacity, widening the time it takes for Iran to build a nuclear weapons should it choose that path, and making sure the Iranians come clean about its past nuclear weapons work.

“From my point of view,” said retired Israeli Defense Forces Brigadier General Shlomo Brom at an event last week sponsored by the Center for American Progress and Molad, a progressive Israeli think tank, “a reasonable deal is a deal that lessens the break out time so there will be enough time to react if Iran will decide to break out towards a nuclear bomb.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”
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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.

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