AFP: Venezuela has signed a deal with Iran to build over 10,000 homes in three central states of the South American nation in a billion-dollar investment package that signals the two country’s increasingly close ties.
Iran to help build houses in Venezuela
UN rights investigator urges Tehran to grant visit
AFP: The UN’s newly appointed human rights investigator to Iran called Wednesday on Tehran to allow him to visit the country to examine alleged rights violations there.
Companies trading with Iran hidden by U.K.
Bloomberg: The U.K. government is determined to keep secret British companies that applied to sell goods with potential military uses to Iran, saying international banks are under U.S. pressure to drop them as clients.
Iran claims progress speeding nuclear program
Wall Street Journal: Moves by Iran to deploy more-advanced centrifuge machines for the production of nuclear fuel are raising new concerns that Tehran could significantly shorten the time it would need to produce nuclear bombs.
Abandoned allies?
New York Post: Some 3,400 innocent Iranian dissidents now living in a camp in Iraq are in imminent danger of being slaughtered. These men, women and children — members of Mujahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Mujahedin, a longtime Iranian opposition movement — trusted America’s promise to protect them. But the gradual US withdrawal from Iraq leaves that promise in doubt.
ANALYSIS-India, Iran buy time to find other oil partners
Reuters: India and Iran’s mechanism to end a seven-month-old stalemate over oil payments could keep U.S. pressure at bay long enough for the two countries to work out a long-term separation that would change oil routes through Asia and the Middle East.
Iran-Turkey trade soars by 72%
Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Aug. 03 – Bilateral trade between Iran and Turkey reached $7.762 billion for the first half of 2011, up from $4.499 billion for the same period in 2010, a rise of more than 72 percent.
Iran parliament approves Qasemi as oil minister
Reuters: Iran’s parliament approved President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s candidate as oil minister on Wednesday, putting a military commander who is under international sanctions in charge of production in the world’s fifth biggest crude exporter.
Exclusive: Sanctions trap billions of Iran petrodollars in Korea
Reuters: Iran could have nearly $5 billion of cash trapped in South Korea by the end of the year as sanctions stop it repatriating money from oil sales, Korean government sources with direct knowledge of the situation told Reuters on Wednesday.
Iran parliament set to approve new oil minister
Reuters: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s candidate to be Iran’s new oil minister looked set to win a vote of confidence on Wednesday, easing a power struggle between the president and a hostile parliament.
