BBC: As soon as I saw a picture of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s new president, I knew there was something faintly familiar about him. And it was not because he was mayor of Tehran, because, like many other Western journalists, I have been barred from visiting Iran in recent years. Then, when I read a profile of him in the English-language Tehran Times, I realised where I must have seen him: in the former American embassy in Tehran.
Iran’s new leader: a familiar face?
Iranian vote makes world tension likelier, editorials say
AFP: European newspapers said Monday that new international tensions, particularly over nuclear issues, seem inevitable following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian presidency. Rome’s La Repubblica said the triumph of what it called “black Islam” and a return to the obscurantist past puts Iran at the heart of international tensions, with the risk of military strikes by the United States or Israel if Ahmadinejad goes ahead with an alleged project to built nuclear weapons.
Iran ultra-conservatives vying for new cabinet seats
Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Jun. 27 With more than a month to go before Irans newly-elected president has to announce his cabinet, political factions in the ultra-conservative camp are waging a tough battle to win over the key posts in the incoming administration. Senior ultra-conservative figures close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have already made it clear that cabinet nominations will not be for Ahmadinejad alone to make.
Iran ultra-conservatives vying for new cabinet seats
Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Jun. 27 With more than a month to go before Irans newly-elected president has to announce his cabinet, political factions in the ultra-conservative camp are waging a tough battle to win over the key posts in the incoming administration. Senior ultra-conservative figures close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have already made it clear that cabinet nominations will not be for Ahmadinejad alone to make.
Tehran Whispers
Iran Focus: Tehran (Iran) Jun. 27 – Decades of authoritarian
rule have forced Iranians to develop innovative ways of expressing themselves. Iran Focus reporters in the sprawling capital gauge the daily mood as seen or heard in graffiti, jokes, comments, and so on.
Middle class threatened by victory of hardliner in Iran
Daily Telegraph: Middle-class Iranians are considering their future after the election of a president who has vowed an affirmation of the values of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Among those already thinking of leaving the country are those who gave up comfortable lives in the West to reconnect with their homeland, or make money, or both.
Hardliner in Iran has oil market spooked
Daily Telegraph: The world’s jittery oil markets are on high
alert after alarming language by the new hardline leader of
Iran, and fresh warnings that the price of oil could soon reach $100 a barrel. Crude reached historic highs of $60 dollars a barrel last week, causing a sell-off in global equities.
Iran’s new president walks a hard line
USA TODAY: The election of Tehran’s mayor as Iran’s president consolidates power under supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and will bolster those in the United States who argue against engagement with Iran’s theocratic regime, some Iran analysts say. The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “very much strengthens the sense here that there is no use dealing with Iran,” said Shaul Bakhash, an Iran expert at George Mason University in Virginia.
EU policy in jeopardy
Financial Times: The election of a new hardline president in Tehran is likely to complicate the Islamic Republic’s engagement with the European Union just as the UK, France and Germany prepare to make a detailed offer to Iran on curbing its controversial nuclear programme. Although Iranian officials have quickly moved to ease concerns of a change in policy on the nuclear front, European officials yesterday warned that the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the ultra-conservative mayor of Tehran, had made the European policy of engagement, whether on the political, economic or nuclear
front, harder to pursue.
UK fears return to the bad old days in Iran
The Guardian: They didn’t want to do it, but after everything
that had happened, officials in the British embassy in Tehran had to bite the diplomatic bullet.
