Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said he keeps aware of Iran’s economic situation by talking to his butcher, newspapers reported on Saturday.

“We have hardworking shopkeepers in our neighbourhood from whom I get important economic information because they are living among the people,” Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith, was quoted by Iran’s Sharq daily as saying. “For example, there is an honourable butcher in our neighbourhood who is aware of all the problems of the people and I get important economic information from him,” he said in a meeting with worker unions, Sharq reported. It is not the first time Ahmadinejad has pointed to his local shopkeepers when addressing Iranian economic issues.

Facing complaints about inflation, he told parliament in a budget speech in January that Iranians should pop around to his neighbourhood grocer to buy tomatoes where he said they were much cheaper than the soaring prices he said others were citing.

Ahmadinejad swept to power in 2005 with a campaign that vowed to share out Iran’s oil wealth more fairly. He stages regular regional tours, promising cash to provinces where many previously felt neglected by central government. But economists say his policies of lowering interest rates and doling out Iran’s windfall oil earnings are pushing up inflation, which they say is mainly hurting the poor who the president has said he is most eager to help.

Inflation was running at more than 17 percent in February, when the central bank last released figures for the consumer price index. Economists say prices are continuing to climb, a major grumble among ordinary Iranians. Ahmadinejad has dismissed such criticism, saying inflation is an issue that predates his government and has accused the media of exaggerating the problem.
via reuters

via Daily Times :

via countercurrents.org:

Iran's president said Israel's days are numbered.

"The countdown for the Zionist regime's collapse has started," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the Fars news agency on Sunday. "God willing, we will soon witness the collapse of this regime."

Ahmadinejad further predicted that Israel would "bow" to fighting on the Palestinian and Lebanese fronts. His frequent anti-Israel rhetoric has stoked international concern over the nuclear program in Iran.

Ahmadinejad has made anti-Israel comments in the past.

In October 2005, he caused outrage in the West when he said in a speech that Israel's "Zionist regime should be wiped off the map."

His supporters have argued Ahmadinejad's words were mistranslated and should have been better translated as "vanish from the pages of time" _ implying Israel would vanish on its own rather be destroyed.

PARANOID that a network of U.S. scholars and thinkers is fomenting a velvet revolution, Iran charged three U.S.-Iranian citizens with espionage. If convicted, they could face execution.

The accused are Haleh Esfandiari, the 67-year-old director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Kian Tajbakhsh, 45, a respected social scientist at the New School in New York who has consulted for George Soros Open Society Institute and the World Bank; and Radio Farda journalist Parnaz Azima, 59. The government and various state news agencies have accused these Iranian Americans and their organizations of endangering state security.

The charges are ludicrous. Esfandiari, who has invited scholars and statesmen from Iran to U.S. conferences and events, has been criticized by some in the Iranian-American community as being too soft on the current regime. And not only has Tajbakhsh consulted directly for the Iranian government, but the supposedly Zionist and soft overthrow-obsessed organization he works for, the Open Society Institute, has run all its humanitarian and health outreach programs in Iran with the full cooperation of the Iranian government. Irans government approached the institute in 2003, for example, to provide relief after the Bam earthquake. The idea that any of these people were in Iran to concoct a U.S.-funded insurgent network is especially absurd, given that all three were there on private visits.

These individuals are pawns. Those in Iran who care about the worlds respect should press for their release.

Washington Post

Editorial

Iran Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi said that in order stop illicit between man and women . We should encourage young people to to get temporarily married .

He said Iran should seek to promote the practice with “boldness” and urged seminary scholars to study the matter and come up with ways to “execute God’s command in society.”

Pakistan , India and Iran is on the verge of striking a deal on $7 billion natural gas pipeline project.

The project will help India and Pakistan fulfill their growing energy demand. This will also contribute to regional co-operation and stability.

However, Washington does not want to let this project succeed. It fears that this project will put more money in Tehran’s pocket ,which will help it to finance its nuclear projects.

Analysts say that US stance will backfire because if US try to stop this project. It will loose a major ally on war on terror.

The meeting between US and Iran showed Iran had started to harvest the fruits of its policies while the United States was paying the price of its failure in Iraq.

The meeting is a clear American submission. The United States is ready to cooperate with Iran because the Arabs have refused cooperation in the Iraqi matter.

While Arabs viewed the meeting as a negative development that  shook their trust in Washington

If Arab countries continued to merely complain, watch, and ignore the central Iraqi government, Iraq would become an "Iranian colony for the next 20 years."

The United States and Iran broke a 27-year diplomatic freeze Monday with a four-hour meeting about Iraqi security.

The administration initially rejected proposals by the Iranians and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in Washington to open negotiations about security in Iraq.

Previous attempts to hold direct talks had to be abandoned in the face of opposition from hardliners in Tehran and Washington.

An AP reporter who witnessed the opening of the session said Crocker and Kazemi shook hands.The American envoy called the meeting “businesslike” and said at “the level of policy and principle, the Iranian position as articulated by the Iranian ambassador was very close to our own.”

Dr. William Samii, a longtime Iran specialist currently with the Center for Naval Analyses, says,  "There are powerful forces pushing the two parties into these talks."

One obstacle to any rapprochement between Washington and Tehran is the determination of Iran's most implacable enemies in the U.S. to pursue a more confrontational policy.

Based on  prolonged and vociferous reluctance to engage with Iran, one could certainly question the Bush administration's motives for the Baghdad talks, and suspect that Washington is just going through the motions; that these negotiations are little more than a diplomatic maneuver in advance of military action. If the talks fail, as their narrow agenda all but guarantees, the President could assert that military strikes are justified.

Any military strikes, regardless of their scope or precision, would represent a major expansion of the conflict in Iraq and would prove to be a catastrophic mistake. One hopes, therefore, that the President can be persuaded to step back from the brink.

So what might constitute an alternative course of action?

President Bush needs to formulate a measured and constructive response to Iranian ascendancy -- a painful reality that is more the result of the chaos in Iraq than it is the cause. An alternative to military strikes is bold and imaginative diplomacy -- a more genuine and nuanced approach than the "do-what-we-say-or-we'll- bomb-the-hell-out-of-you" variety the Bush administration prefers.

By Ali Nourizadeh

 Dr Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council [SNSC] of Iran and the official in charge of nuclear program, has tendered his resignation for the fifth time in recent months to Supreme Leader [of the Islamic Revolution] Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian sources have said that the resignation is in protest against what he described in his resignation letter as irresponsible behavior and statements by the president of the republic and his colleagues, which have obstructed the course of the negotiations with the European Union and current steps to ward off threats against Iran and its strategic interests.

Asharq Al-Awsat has more...

via Khaleejtimes :

ELBARADI'S heightened IAEA suspicions regarding Iran, Washington's hints at 'additional pressure' for a 'change in Iran's calculations' and the emergence of nine US warships carrying 1,700 personnel for muscle-flexing military exercises off the Iranian coast collectively bear the fingerprints of a nervous planning for fresh pressure tactics against Ahmadinejad's government.

With the latter predictably sticking to its original stance and the US now more than ever needing a breakthrough in this regard, an analysis of what could follow puts forth interesting scenarios that a changing Middle East might soon be confronted with.

The might of the American navy extends well beyond the immediate waters hosting their massive warships and aircraft carriers. Since this is the largest Gulf-deployment since the Kuwait war, it is effectively a show of extreme seriousness, signalling that preparations can go to any extreme to secure US interests.

However, the cross-currents of the political transition which is underway with a considerable force within the greater Middle East run counter to an extension of US hardware anywhere in the region. Fed up with the Iraq aftermath and the West's limp attempts to address it, even the Saudi leadership is wary of further foreign presence in the Arab heartland, openly describing the occupation as illegal. Now, time has come for the head-on-crash between the irresistible force and the immovable object. ElBaradi's couple-of-years-till-the-bomb warning has already prompted calls for sterner sanctions and a new approach that could mean anything from regime change to aerial strikes on enrichment installments. For the second to materialise, the ships just a few miles down the coast will play a very significant role. But stiff opposition from the length and breadth of a united Arab world will mean both approaches will border on the irresponsible considering America's own long term interests. On the other hand, failure to make Iran budge from its stand will only add to the speed of its waning global, particularly Middle East-specific, significance.

Years ago, George Bush brought his armies to a Middle East where his nemesis Iran was a cornered player. Half a decade of his cleansing created numerous loopholes that Teheran quickly exploited to influence insurgencies in Iraq, control politics in Lebanon, drive a wedge in Israel, raise concerns in Saudi Arabia and dominate the region's politics. All this while, America just comes across as a player desperate for the day's play to end. Caution is needed to avoid further use of force.

via CNN :

"If you think that by bombing and assassinating Palestinian leaders, you are preparing ground for new attacks on Lebanon in the summer, I am telling you that you are seriously wrong."

 

Iran is justified in arming Afghanis. Americans and British forces are encircle Iran.

What are British forces doing in Afghanistan ?  British ruled sub-continent ruthless and now they are trying to stage a come back.

via AP :