Rouhani, 64, has become Iran’s new president-elect with a 51 percent win that allowed him to avoid a run-off. The reformist-backed former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and ex-nuclear negotiator will inherit a country with an economy hit by Western sanctions which are set against Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions. Now that Rouhani is going to head the executive branch of power, “a lot of people inside and outside Iran believe that tensions will be eased and the situation will be calmer and Iran’s economy will flourish,” Emadi told RT. The cleric is believed to have moderate stance on issues like relations with the West and the ‘nuclear file’, he also used to be Iran’s top nuclear negotiator. The West is cautiously optimistic about Rouhani, but getting crippling sanctions imposed on Iran lifted will be a hard task, warns Emadi. “It is tough to convince the Western countries that they have made a big mistake by imposing sanctions against Iranian nation. I would call the sanctions genocidal for hurting ordinary Iranians,” he said. Negotiations between Iran and the West have been practically non-existent in recent years, insists Emadi, but the new president might rebuild the Iranian negotiating team to get to talks with the West in a better way. The latest round of talks on Iran’s nuclear program took place in Kazakhstan in April and brought no breakthrough. Negotiators went back to their capitals declaring “positions remain far apart.” On the other hand, Iran can hardly be expected to drop what it calls its lawful rights. “Iran wants its nuclear rights to be respected. The ball now is very much in the quarter of the Western countries, which have been accusing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration of being stubborn and being not very serious about the talks. Now that Hassan Rouhani will be in office, the West will have no more excuses, they will have to come to [the] negotiation table and talk to Iranians in a serious fashion to solve this problem [of sanctions] once and for all,” Emadi predicted. “But in every negotiation there is a very important element of trust. This element was non-existent in the past several years. Now we might have it in place. There is hope that negotiations will get somewhere at the end of the day,” Emadi concluded. Washington has already announced their willingness to directly negotiate with Iran on its nuclear program, while British and French officials welcomed Rouhani coming to office, because he is a well-known negotiator. On Sunday, despite the election of moderate Rouhani to the presidency in Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the international community to increase pressure on Tehran. “The more pressure increases on Iran so will the chance of ending Iran’s nuclear program, which remains the biggest threat to world peace,” Netanyahu said. … Read More
China – Tiananmen Square massacre heads long list of taboo subjects
For the occasion of today’s sombre anniversary of the bloody 1989 crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Reporters Without Borders reiterates its appeal for the release of journalists, bloggers and campaigners for freedom of expression, in particular those imprisoned for having taken part in, or referred to, the pro-democracy movement. We also call for the Chinese media and Internet users to be allowed to report on all events, including those that scarred May (…) … Read More
Frankfurt riot police charge into marching Blockupy activists, scuffle with protesters
The anti-globalism march was called to celebrate the anniversary of the ‘Occupy’ rallies by blocking the European Central Bank. A demonstration in German’s Frankfurt-am-Main is expected to gather up to 20,000 protesters. Several European capitals are set to see large rallies later in the day. The ECB, which has headquarters at Kaiserstrasse 29, in Frankfurt-am-Main, has promised to remain operational during the planned demonstrations. … Read More
Activist Adam Kokesh Calls on “American Revolutionary Army” to March on all 50 State Capitals
In a statement released from a Philadelphia federal prison, former marine and now imprisoned activist Adam Kokesh called for a new American revolution, complete with an American Revolutionary Army that would march on all 50 state capitals to put the federal government on notice. … Read More
Sweden burning: Stockholm riots & violence enter 4th day
http://www.youtube.com/v/HvmLl331Y0Q?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Read More: Sweden burning: Stockholm riots & violence enter 4th day
Political intrigue hampers honest investigation of WMD use in Syria – Lavrov
He told a news conference in Moscow on Monday, “There are states and external players who think that all means are good if they lead to displacement of the Syrian regime. But the issue of the use of weapons of mass destruction is too serious and no one should play with it. I consider it inadmissible to use this issue and speculate on it.”“The blame for the fact that no one investigates the particular incident that took place on March 19 and that still causes universal concern should be put on the nations that attempt to prevent the UN Secretary General from a simple and direct answer to a simple and direct question,” the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry added.Sergey Lavrov was referring to the alleged chemical weapons attack near the city of Aleppo. The Syrian government said that rebels used a rocket with a chemical warhead killing 25 people and injuring 86. The authorities have asked top UN officials to open an investigation into the incident.However, the inquiry has talled as a group of Western nations are blocking it, insisting an international commission should investigate a different case of supposed chemical attack – near Homs in December for which the rebels blame government forces.The Syrian government has denied entry to a UN team of investigators, saying that it must include Russian specialists to ensure that it is unbiased.Sergey Lavrov noted that “no one has presented any proof for these claims [of a chemical attack near Homs] and the intelligence agencies, including the ones of our Western partners, said that these statements lacked any detailed proof whatsoever.”Lavrov also refuted the reports in the Lebanese media that the Russian stance on Syria had changed. “We can guess that there are people in Lebanon and in a number of other capitals in the region who would like to indulge in wishful thinking,” the minister said while commenting on the possibility of change.“There is no change in our position. From the very beginning we called for everyone who can influence the situation not to take any sides and demand from all combatants to stop violence and start negotiations without any prior conditions. This position remains absolutely consistent in present,” the Russian official stated. … Read More
‘EU won’t offer salvation for Iceland’ – debate
Iceland applied to join the EU under current center-left government in July 2009, with the formal negotiations beginning a year later. But the talks are most likely to be stalled if the center-right Independence and Progressive parties will take power in the country after the Saturday’s vote. Icelandic MP and founder of the Rainbow Party, Atli Gislason, believes that Iceland will lose more than it’ll gain from becoming a part of the European Union.“We’re internationalists and would like to trade with all the world, not only isolated Europe. It’s little part of the whole world, not so little, but still a little one,” he told RT. The Gislason stressed that even UK-proposed reform of the EU, aimed at making the Union more flexible, won’t make him and his colleagues in the Rainbow Party to change their mind. “I think we’ll lose our independence [if Iceland joins the EU],” the MP explained. “We’ll lose our influence in the northern part of the Atlantics and we’ll not rule the fisheries and resources. We’ll have only 23-mile fishing line, the EU will rule everything else in their free market way, which I don’t like.” Iceland, which took a devastating blow in the 2008 economic crisis, is widely seen as a recovery success story. The country has showed steady economic growth and falling unemployment rates, but the ruling center-left Social Democratic Alliance participate in parliamentary election with zero chance of success.“There are two sides on this,” Gislason said. “Banks and money owners are happy, but families and homes aren’t. We have more poverty now than four, five, six years ago. We have flats going on auctions. Many people have lost their capitals and their flats after the crisis. So the homes are having it bad and it’s the main issue now in the election.” Doctor Steven Mccabe from Birmingham City University also thinks that Iceland’s comeback after the 2008 crisis would’ve been impossibility if it was an EU member state. “There was talk about the EU, but I think that’s out of the question. They realized that their best stretch in for recovery is to remain isolated or to be independent. Europe doesn’t offer salvation,” he said.“What Iceland does have is the fact that it’s on the edge of the world. It’s an isolated nation and indeed is an island.” “It effectively, as we say in the UK, stuck its fingers on the rest of the world and said: we’re not giving you your money back. What can you do, short of invading Iceland, which was never on the agenda. It has been able to look at its own ends, look after itself. For other European economies, such as Ireland, Portugal and others – they’re much more interlinked in Europe. Iceland isn’t. So, what it’s been able to do is reinventing the sort of things it’s good at – its indigenous industries (fishing, farming, aluminum smelting),” Mccabe added.Iceland has no future without European currencyBut not everybody sees the EU membership as a disadvantage for Iceland, with Director of the Centre for European Studies at Bifrost University, Eirikur Bergmann, saying that the European currency is essential for the country to go with its economic recovery. “One of the main problems in the country is the currency,” he said. “Even though the economy has turned around quite a bit, there’s an underlying difficulty with operating such a small currency like the Icelandic krona, which is only backed with 300,000 people and isn’t sustainable. Iceland is thus locked behind capital controls and this distorts very much the economic growth in this country. And Iceland desperately needs to break out of these constrains. One was of doing that is to join in a stronger, bigger currency. A currency that’s actually tradable abroad, which Icelandic krona isn’t at the moment.” “So, the EU question is really a question of sort of re-joining the international economy. But it depends very much on how it’ll be done and what sort of agreement Iceland could strike with the EU on accessing the Union and adopting the currency. This is the main underlying problems still unsolved in Iceland. That’s the problems of currency and debt burdens on ordinary households. If we can get those two out of the way, Iceland is heading for the remarkable recovery,” Bergmann, who was on the Assembly that revised the Icelandic constitution after major anti-crisis protests back in 2008, added.Economics professor at the University of Iceland, Thorolfur Matthiason, has called the EU membership “a very complicated question”, but agreed that the country would, eventually, have to give up on the krona to insure economic stability in the future.“You have to remember that Iceland is a very small nation. We are only 320,000. So there are things that we will have problems with,” he said. “And one of the biggest problems that we’ll have in the future concerns our currency. We have tried to run a free-floating currency in the smallest currency area in the world for the Icelandic krona. And that was directly and indirectly the cause for how big the banks got, eventually, in the collapse. There are long-term considerations that are rather different from the short considerations at this point of time.” … Read More
