As the European Union prepares to ban Iranian oil and the United States turns the screw on payments, oil executives and policymakers say China and Russia stand to gain the most and Western oil firms and consumers may emerge the biggest losers. Iran will continue to sell much the same volume of oil - 2.6 million barrels per day or around 3 percent of world supply - but almost all of it will flow to China, they reason. And being pretty much Iran's only remaining customer, Beijing will be able to negotiate a much reduced price.........."You cannot predict what they (Iran) will do and how much they will discount their oil. But it will certainly cause more and more discomfort to the Iranian economy," .........Russia too stands to ga...
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Indian cultural bonds with Iran are deep — it could be argued that, just a few centuries ago, the main centers of Persian literature and civilization were indeed in what’s now present-day India. These days, Tehran and New Delhi are solidly united in their mutual hatred of the Pakistani-backed Taliban in Afghanistan.

"I do think the path we're on - the economic sanctions and the diplomatic pressure - does seem to me to be having an effect," Dempsey said. "I just think that it's premature to be deciding that the economic and diplomatic approach is inadequate."

The Sharif University spokesman said Atarodi was engaged only in civilian research. “The fact of the matter is that he was just a professor, and he was trying to buy some equipment for his lab, and the equipment was very, very simple, ridiculously simple stuff that anybody can buy,” the spokesman said. In the most recent incident, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a chemist and official at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant, was killed by a car bomb Jan. 11, reportedly while on his way to a memorial service for a scientist slain a year earlier.......The U.S. and Isra...
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The rates will rise to 21 percent, up from 12.5 percent, to encourage people to put their rials in the bank instead of selling them. Still, it was unclear if the move would ease anxiety.

Limited military options, such as airstrikes against nuclear facilities, are "oversold as to their ability to end or even significantly delay Iran's nuclear program," the report said. Limited bombing campaigns would be "unlikely to destroy Iran's main capability" to produce weapon-grade uranium, it said..............Other more violent covert operations strategies, particularly the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and engineers, have "serious downsides and implications," such as high risks of Iranian retaliation through militant attacks which could be directed against civilian targets. The United States has emphatically denied any involvement in the assassinations. The report said that since thousands of spec...
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It is difficult to imagine that the E.U. members who adopted the decision on sanctions are unaware of this possible dynamic. Indeed, the very fact that British and French warships accompanied the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on its passage through the Straits and back into the Gulf — in brazen defiance of Iranian warnings — imply the opposite: that E.U. governments, especially the two with the greatest force projection capabilities, are perfectly cognizant of the possible consequences and are prepared to deal with them.  And that suggests that the European Union, notwithstanding its economic travails, is experiencing its own “spring” in foreign and defense policy and that those who tended in the past to dismiss it as a flaccid talking shop capable of little more ...
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The public discussion in the West addressing Iran's nuclear programme has mainly relied on threat diplomacy, articulated most clearly by Israeli officials, but enjoying the strong direct and indirect backing of Washington and leading Gulf states. Israel has also been engaging in low intensity warfare against Iran for several years, apparently supported by the United States, that has been inflicting violent deaths on civilians and disrupting political order in Iran.............Instead of welcoming this constructive step back from the precipice, Washington castigated the agreement as diversionary, contending that it interfered with the mobilisation of support in the Security Council for r...
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The debate over Iran takes for granted that the country soon will have nuclear weapons and would use them. The debate back in 2002-'03 over Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of nuclear weapons did the same. After the United States had gone to war against Iraq, no such weapons were found to exist. The actual winner of the war that followed the American invasion of Iraq was Israel, which saw Iraq, its principal regional rival, destroyed at no cost to itself. The military victor of the war, but politico-strategic loser, was the United States, which destroyed Iraq, a country in no position to harm the United States, at a trillion-dollar cost, enormous human suffering and waste, and the effect...
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It seems to me that more than a few of those Americans who are pushing for war with Iran place Israel’s national defense priorities above own own–not just neoconservatives, but evangelical Rapturians and politicians like Newt Gingrich (funded by Sheldon Adelson–a classic Israel Firster, in that, by all reports, the only issue that motivates his largesse is a Likudnik view of Israel), and Rick Santorum, who has actually said that he wants to bomb Iran. They’re dangerously wrong; they have an inalienable right to be foolish; they even have the right to place Israel’s national security concerns first. But  such people go disgracefully overboard when they designate those of us who disagree with them as “anti-Semites.”............Calling David Petraeus anti-semitic because he implied that...
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The recent arrests are seen as part of an Israeli crackdown on the movement and activity of senior Palestinian figures, which is thought to be connected to moves towards reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. Israel strongly opposes Palestinian reconciliation, believing it will give Hamas greater influence.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the powerful Guardians Council, is Iran’s oldest man. No one knows when he was born. He is said to have been on planet Earth before all of us, even before Adam and Eve..."...“Jannati has a copy of the Torah signed by Moses,” is how one joke goes......... Another one has Jannati speaking to scientists: "For you the Big Bang is just a theory," he says. "For me it's a memory.”.....In a similar vein, another joke has Ayatollah Jannati talking to the Fars news agency about his memories of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Yochanan Locker, as incoming air force commander.  Locker is known to support an IDF attack on Iran.  He is also known to be favored by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, another advocate of war. Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, known to oppose an attack, neither wants to be dictated to by the prime minister, nor saddled with a key subordinate who will subvert his own command by advocating war with Iran.

“The Brazilian president has been striking against everything that Lula accomplished,” Ali Akbar Javanfekr, who has worked as Mr. Ahmadinejad’s top media adviser, said in an interview published Monday by Folha de São Paulo, a leading Brazilian newspaper, in which he compared Ms. Rousseff to her predecessor and political mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.