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Top Stories
AFP:
"Iran's central bank on Saturday drastically devalued the national
currency's fixed subsidised rate against the dollar, as the Islamic
republic struggles to shore up its faltering economy. The rial has lost
more than two thirds of its value on the open market since early 2012,
when the United States and the European Union imposed harsh economic
sanctions curbing Iran's ability to export oil and conduct financial
transactions. The central bank on Saturday was selling one US dollar for
24,779 rials at the subsidised rate available only to select importers to
procure basic commodities and medicine, according to the bank's website
at http://cbi.ir That rate was a 102-percent
increase from 12,260 rials for one dollar that had been kept artificially
low since January 2012. The new 'reference' rate is still far stronger
than the dollar available to ordinary buyers and travellers at the
unofficial open market, which was 33,200 rials per dollar at
midday." http://t.uani.com/12kMIvz
Iran Human Rights:
"At least 14 prisoners have been executed according to official and
unofficial reports from Iran today [July 6]. Seven other prisoners were
scheduled to be executed today according to unconfirmed reports.
According to official and unofficial reports at least 60 prisoners have
been executed after the Presidential elections in Iran... According to
'Human rights and democracy activists in Iran' (HRDAI) 11 prisoners, five
of them women, were hanged in the prison of Zahedan this morning." http://t.uani.com/12bu2zz
Breitbart:
"The Iranian regime, pursuing a vision of global dominance, has
taken media propaganda to the next level. On July 2, 2007, they launched
PRESSTV, which has turned into an internationally recognized media outlet
with 24 hour English-language programming. Cloaked with a veneer of
legitimacy and the purported transparency of a major news network, PRESS
TV is in reality an appendage of the Iranian government, created to
further embitter its populace against the West... Thanks to pressure
placed by European governments and the tireless efforts from groups such
as UANI (United Against Nuclear Iran), progress has been made towards
limiting PRESSTV's scope and reach. PRESSTV, predictably, blamed the
'Zionist lobby' for this occurrence." http://t.uani.com/12wlVxr
Nuclear Program
Reuters: "The U.N. atomic
agency and Iran may hold a new round of nuclear talks in August,
diplomats said on Monday, in what would be their first meeting since last
month's election of a relative moderate as the Islamic state's president.
If it does take place, the meeting will be scrutinized by the West for
any sign of increased Iranian readiness to compromise in the decade-old
international dispute over its nuclear program after the June 14 election
of Hassan Rouhani. A diplomat in Vienna, where the International Atomic
Energy Agency is based, said he believed the aim was for an IAEA-Iran
meeting in mid-August but that no decision had yet been taken. 'I think
that no meeting in August would be a bad sign,' another Western envoy
said. That would be shortly before the IAEA issues its next, quarterly
report on Iran's nuclear program in late August and ahead of a week-long
session of the U.N. agency's 35-nation governing board in
September." http://t.uani.com/1ageVOa
Sanctions
AP:
"Iran's central bank is allowing most importers to buy local
currency at half the former official price as part of attempts to attract
investors to an economy battered by Western sanctions... The central bank
offered most importers an exchange rate of 24,779 rials for $1 on Sunday,
a day after the official announcement. That compares with the previous
government-set rate of 12,260 rials." http://t.uani.com/16ZIcHz
Bloomberg:
"The Iranian currency appreciated in unregulated trading after the
central bank canceled its fixed, subsidized rate for the dollar. The rial
strengthened to 33,400 to the dollar at 11 a.m. in Tehran from 33,850 on
July 2, marking a 1.3 percent gain, according to rates compiled by Daily
Rates For Gold Coins and Foreign Currencies, a Facebook page used by
businessmen based in Iran and abroad. Iran's currency has appreciated 8.5
percent since the day before the June 14 presidential election that made
Hassan Rohani the country's new head of state." http://t.uani.com/14CZLNf
Bloomberg:
"Iran will try to lure foreign investors with tax exemptions ranging
as high as 100 percent, Iranian Deputy Economy Minister Behrouz Alishiri
said. Foreigners investing in the country's agriculture sector won't have
to pay any taxes, and investments in industry and mining will be exempt
up to 80 percent, Alishiri said yesterday, according to Tehran-based
newspaper Tehran Times. He didn't forecast how much investment the
exemptions would spur. While international sanctions have restricted
foreign investment, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar said in
March that Iran attracted $7 billion from abroad in the Iranian year
ended March 20, compared with $5 billion the preceding year." http://t.uani.com/12m4I93
Platts:
"New US sanctions have blocked two legs of the triangle of shipping
routes that Iran used to operate between the Persian Gulf, East Asia and
Europe, leaving only the Persian Gulf-East Asia route in operation, the
managing director of state-owned Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines
said this week. 'Before the tightening of sanctions, Iran had three
transportation lines -- Asia-Europe, Persian Gulf-Europe and [Persian
Gulf]-East Asia, of which Asia-Europe and Persian Gulf-Europe have been
shut down,' students' news agency ISNA quoted Mohammad Hossein Dajmar as
saying. Iran's trading with Europe had decreased and there had been a
corresponding increase in the country's trade with East Asia.
Accordingly, facilities and assets previously used on the routes serving
Europe were transferred to the East Asia route, Dajmar said. That said, some
Iranian goods were still finding their way to Europe after transshipment
in Arab states along the Persian Gulf, he said." http://t.uani.com/1aglikv
Human Rights
Iran Human Rights:
"Five prisoners were hanged in the prison of Qazvin (west of Tehran)
early this morning July 7, reported the official Iranian media... At
least 65 people have been executed in the first three weeks after the
presidential elections in Iran." http://t.uani.com/10HAgK2
Radio Zamaneh:
"Nasrin Sotoudeh, the jailed Iranian human rights lawyer who had
been granted a furlough, was summoned back to Evin Prison on Sunday July
7. Sotoudeh's husband, Reza Khandan, reports that his wife was given a
four-day leave, which was later extended another 10 days, but she was
finally summoned back to prison. The report indicates that Sotoudeh had
written twice to the prosecutor's office to renew her furlough, but her
requests were turned down. Khandan reports that in view of the election
and the prospect of change in the country, they were hoping that Sotoudeh
would be given an extended leave, which apparently has not been the case.
Sotoudeh has been serving a six-year sentence since September of 2011.
She was arrested in the wave of arrests targeting activists and
journalists following the election protests of 2009." http://t.uani.com/156N3oH
AFP:
"Iran suspects them of spying, but friends of eight Slovak
paragliders detained in May know them as freedom-loving adrenalin junkies
who travel the world to film high-flying documentaries... Iran's judiciary
said earlier this week it was probing nine people -- one Iranian and
eight Slovaks -- whom it arrested for 'illegal activities, including
photographing restricted areas' in the central Isfahan province. Iran
first announced the Slovaks' arrests on May 22." http://t.uani.com/1aQ6j07
Domestic
Politics
AP:
"Iranian state television says the country has opened its own
domestically made national email service. The report aired Sunday quoted
Information and Communication Technology Minister Mohammad Hasan Nami as
saying local experts created the service's software. The report said each
Iranian will be assigned an email address. The country's postal service
will manage the email service. Iran has discussed for years having its
own domestic email service as the government occasionally has blocked
access to foreign email providers like Gmail and Yahoo. The country also
has blocked and made illegal virtual private networks that allow Iranians
to freely use the Internet and access banned websites like those for opposition
groups." http://t.uani.com/14CZ8TU
WT:
"Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said during Sunday's farewell ceremony
that one of his biggest accomplishments while president was advancing the
perception that the Holocaust never happened. 'That was a taboo topic
that no one in the West allowed to be heard,' he said, The Times of
Israel reported. 'We put it forward at the global level. That broke the
spine of the Western capitalistic regime.' Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks were
on the Iranian Fars news agency in Arabic, but they were omitted from the
site's English version, The Times of Israel reported. In another part of
his speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad said the Arab region should ban together and
take revenge on Israel for its leaders' treatment of Palestinians." http://t.uani.com/18IaB8Y
Foreign Affairs
WSJ:
"The fall of Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi presents Iran with a
new challenge: Establishing a relationship with an as-yet-undefined
leadership while distancing itself from past efforts to court the Muslim
Brotherhood... A chorus of Friday prayer sermons across Iran by
representatives of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei slammed Mr.
Morsi and the Brotherhood for choosing not to sever ties with Israel,
honoring Egypt's peace accord with the Jewish state, and maintaining
relations with the U.S. The sermons unanimously said that the people of
Egypt had risen up against Mr. Morsi because he had failed to be
independent from the West and form an alliance with the 'axis of
resistance'-Iran, Hezbollah and Syria." http://t.uani.com/1a47SVo
AP:
"Iran's Foreign Ministry on Sunday criticized the Egyptian
military's toppling of the nation's Islamist president, calling the move
improper in its first official reaction. 'We do not consider proper the
intervention by military forces in politics to replace a democratically
elected administration,' said ministry spokesman Abbas Araghchi,
according to the official news agency IRNA. Egypt's military ousted
Mohammed Morsi Wednesday after four days of mass protests against him.
Araghchi said that supporters of Morsi should not give up their efforts
to reinstate him. Elections and not 'the streets' should not decide who
is president of Egypt, he said. 'Islamists and revolutionaries should not
be frustrated,' Araghchi said. On the other hand, he said, 'We do not see
the recent events in Egypt as a defeat for Islamic awakening.'" http://t.uani.com/1d7bqWl
Opinion &
Analysis
Ray Takeyh in
WashPost: "For Western officials trying to determine
what kind of leader they'll face in Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, his
thoughtful 2011 memoir reveals much about the man who will lead the
Islamic republic. Published in Iran and available only in Persian, the
book covers Rouhani's time as the country's chief negotiator on nuclear
policy, from 2003 to 2005. The man who jumps out of these pages is an
establishment figure with a deep commitment to the Islamic republic and
its nuclear aspirations, a man who will beguile the West and preserve as
much advantage as possible for Iran. Historians often suggest that Iran's
clerical regime resurrected the shah'satomic infrastructure after Iraq
invaded the country in 1980. In this telling, deterrence and self-defense
are at the core of the Iranian nuclear calculus. But Rouhani says the
revolutionaries' attraction to nuclear science actually began when they
were still lingering in exile. In 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
and his disciples appeared certain to assume power, an Iranian scientific
delegation journeyed to Paris and implored the aging mullah to scrap the
nuclear program, which was exorbitant and inefficient. The cagy Khomeini
ignored such pleas. A year before Saddam Hussein's armies attacked Iran,
Khomeini had decided to preserve his nuclear inheritance. During the
initial decade of the Islamic republic, the regime's preoccupation with
consolidating power and prosecuting its war with Iraq eclipsed other
priorities. Still, Rouhani describes a determined effort to secure
nuclear technologies from abroad and complete the fuel cycle. Those
efforts were redoubled during Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's presidency
in the early 1990s and were sustained by the reformist president Mohammad
Khatami. Indeed, Rouhani is at pains to disentangle nuclear policy from
Iran's contentious politics, insisting that all governments should share
credit for the program's progress. 'I respect all individuals who in the
path of nuclear empowerment have taken important steps,' he notes. And
throughout, he sticks to the argument that the nuclear program is for
peaceful purposes. Rouhani spent much of his tenure negotiating with the
three European powers - Britain, France and Germany - over what kind of
nuclear program Iran was allowed to have. The signature event of his time
as a negotiator was his country's voluntary suspension of its program in
2004. Those were heady days in the Middle East, with America's
shock-and-awe campaign in Iraq intimidating other recalcitrant regimes,
such as Iran's, into accommodation. 'No one thought that Saddam's regime
would fall in three weeks,' Rouhani recalls. 'The military leadership had
anticipated that Saddam would not fall easily and that America would have
to fight the Iraqi army for at least six months to a year before reaching
Saddam's palace.' Yet, the proximity of American guns behooved the
theocracy to act with caution and halt its nuclear activities. Still,
Rouhani has spent the past decade slyly suggesting that Iran used the
suspension period to establish the technological foundation that enabled
the nuclear program's subsequent progress. I suspect that such claims are
overstated; Iran's suspension was a product of fear and thus fairly
comprehensive. Instead, the gains Iran has made since the program resumed
are a tribute to the ingenuity of its scientific establishment, which is
often - and unwisely - discounted by the West. Whatever political support
Rouhani has among Iran's reformers, he is not one of them; political
freedom has rarely been a priority for him. (During the late 1990s, when
Khatami and his allies were seeking to expand individual rights and
strengthen Iran's anemic civil society, Rouhani was indifferent to their
efforts.) Still, unlike many militant ideologues, he belongs to a more
tempered wing of the theocracy that sees the nuclear debate in the larger
context of Iran's international relations... However, Rouhani's case is
not without its contradictions. He insists that Iran can expand its
nuclear program while reclaiming its commercial contracts, even though
today Iran stands in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions
and cannot reenter the global economy until it meets U.N. demands. Tone
and style matter, but what awaits President Rouhani is the hard trade-off
of dispensing with critical aspects of the program in exchange for relief
from sanctions." http://t.uani.com/12dBoGc
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Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against
Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear
Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the
Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive
media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with
discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please
email Press@UnitedAgainstNuclearIran.com
United Against Nuclear
Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a
commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a
regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons. UANI is an
issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own
interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of
nuclear weapons.
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