Reuters: Iran has been using front companies to skirt international export controls and purchase a graphite compound that can be used in nuclear and conventional arms, an Iranian exile said on Friday. The latest allegation from Alireza Jafarzadeh, an Iranian dissident who has reported accurately on Iran’s hidden nuclear facilities and activities in the past, comes days before the European Union meets Iran’s top nuclear negotiator in Geneva to persuade Tehran not to resume sensitive atomic work.
AP: Iran is circumventing international export bans on sensitive dual-use materials by smuggling graphite and a graphite compound that can be used to make conventional and nuclear weapons, an Iranian dissident and a senior diplomat said Friday. Graphite has many peaceful uses, including steel manufacture, but also can be used as a casing for molten weapons-grade uranium to fit it to nuclear warheads or to shield the cones of conventional missiles from heat. 
AP: European-led talks aimed at getting Iran to abandon nuclear activities are “very fragile,” with negotiators discussing economic, technical and political cooperation, France’s foreign minister said Monday. Michel Barnier would not elaborate on the proposals in an interview with The Associated Press. 
Iran Focus: Washington, D.C., May 20 A report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch on an Iranian opposition group was factually erroneous, politically motivated, and the result of an investigative process so flawed as to call into serious question the honesty and integrity of those who issued it, the groups counsel in the United States said. 
Reuters: Iran’s Islamic system has been abused to deny the president real power, sapping public interest in next month’s election, the country’s top dissident cleric says. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, an architect of the Islamic revolution, 
Iran Focus: London, May 20 A British parliamentary group expressed its profound concern at the publication of a report by Human Rights Watch containing unsubstantiated allegations against the Iranian Resistance and the Peoples Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) and called on the rights group to retract the report, which it said does not stand to scrutiny. 
AP: As political change takes hold in several Middle Eastern countries, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that Iran’s leaders “should not consider themselves immune” from such developments. The United States and other nations have complaints about Iran’s government that go beyond the current international effort to stop Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon, Rice said. 
London, May 19 A recent report by Human Rights Watch against the main Iranian opposition group would not stand to scrutiny in a court of law, according to a London-based legal expert. Masoud Zabeti, President of the Committee of Anglo-Iranian Lawyers, which has organised a number of seminars 