Iran Focus
London, 29 Mar – Britain’s Prince Charles is being urged to cancel a planned visit to Iran later this year.
The Sunday Times reported that Prince Charles is considering a visit to Iran this autumn, marking the first official royal visit to that country in more than 40 years.
Struan Stevenson, a former Member of the European Parliament representing Scotland, said in a statement on Tuesday that he was deeply concerned by the reports of the planned visit.
Washington, 29 Mar – Leading foreign policy voices in the United States Congress say they are preparing to fight against an Obama administration effort to provide Iran unprecedented access to US financial resources as part of an expanded package meant to address new demands from the Islamic Republic’s for greater economic concessions, according to several conversations between the Washington Free Beacon and top lawmakers.
London, 29 Mar – The Iranian Supreme Court has sentenced a man to have his eye gouged out after blinding another man in a street fight, The Independent reported on Monday.
The 28-year-old, identified only as Saman, was convicted under Iran’s strict retribution laws after fighting in the street with his then 25-year-old victim when he was 23, the report said.
Saman is said to have claimed that he had unintentionally blinded the man with a metal rod.
Riyadh, 27 Mar – Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said on Sunday that Iran must change its “behaviour” towards his country if it wants normal ties with the oil-rich Sunni kingdom.
Jubeir, speaking at a joint news conference with his South African counterpart, said Riyadh “wants to have peaceful relations” with Tehran and that it had tried to forge closer ties with Iran for more than three decades but “in exchange we received nothing”, AFP reported.
Iran Focus
London, 26 Mar – Iran’s main opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has called on the Austrian government to cancel the upcoming trip by Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.
“The Iranian Resistance considers the planned trip of Rouhani, President of the religious, terrorist dictatorship ruling Iran, to Austria against the highest interests of the Iranian people and the countries in the region and calls on Austrian political parties, parliamentarians and defenders of human rights to cancel this visit”, the NCRI said in a statement.
London, 25 Mar – Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations, has written a commentary in The Wall Street Journal urging the Obama administration not to let Iraq fall into Iran’s hands and suggesting steps forward to help Baghdad out of the crises it currently faces.
The following is the full text of Khalilzad’s opinion piece:
New York, 24 Mar – The Obama administration on Thursday announced the indictment of seven Iranian hackers for a coordinated campaign of cyber attacks on dozens of US banks and a New York dam from 2011 to 2013, signaling an effort by US officials to more publicly confront cyber crime waged on behalf of foreign nations.
The indictment, filed in a federal court in New York City, described the suspects, who live in Iran, as “experienced computer hackers” believed to have been working on behalf of the Iranian government.
Iran Focus
Geneva, 24 Mar – The United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday voted to extend the mandate of the world body’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran.
The decision to extend Ahmed Shaheed’s mandate was adopted by a 20 to 15 vote, with 11 abstentions.
Bold changes in Iraq, including eviction of all “Iranian proxies” who have “contaminated” Iraqi politics and the Iraqi economy, are needed to prevent the country from falling into darkness, argues Struan Stevenson of the European Iraqi Freedom Association.
The following is the text of his article on Thursday in The Huffington Post:
Washington, 24 Mar – The Obama administration paid Iran nearly $2 billion in a ‘ransom payment’ to release US prisoners after at least two years of secret talks between Washington and Tehran, the Mail Online reported.
Five prisoners were freed by Iran in January this year, with a $1.7 billion payment heading from the US to the Islamic republic that day, according to official documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
