Syria prioritizes Iran Judiciary chief vows unabated fight · Farrokh Hesabi. Tehran Times...

Syria prioritizes Iran for rebuilding projects

Will Iran face new crises?

Some security analysts believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran has dealt with the recent unrest quickly and

intelligently. Therefore, the foe did not use all of its energy and decided to use some part of it in the future.

Regardless of whether the analysis is correct or not, it is necessary that the gov-ernment be fully aware of the possibility of crises which there is a ground for them.

The foe has chosen the vulnerable point to create crisis and exploit people’s legitimate and rightful protests, who are concerned about their future living condi-tions. The foe’s think tank is well aware of economic problems, that part of which is because of sanctions and another part is due to mismanagement and incompetence.

The most important factor in creating crisis are people. However, if people do not accompany the foe in carrying out its plans, the effects of its actions will effectively be limited to vandalism and plunder.

It should be noted that since Trump come to power, diplomats, despite making commendable efforts, were not able to pave the way for overcoming deep chal-lenges between Iran and the West and its regional allies. They also failed to lift or halt cruel sanctions against the Iranians.

The Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khamenei, during his meeting with businesspersons and entrepreneurs on November 19, explicitly emphasized this fact and said sanctions will go unabated.

The Leader said the impression that sanc-tions would come to an end in the next one or two years is an illusion. He said with the knowledge of the arrogant front’s position, sanctions will be in place for the foreseeable future and in order to save the economy, one should not wait for the lifting of sanctions or an action by some countries.

Although it cannot be expected that, de-spite unprecedented economic sanctions (economic terrorism), people’s living condi-tions will remain unharmed, certainly there are some solutions that can significantly ease the economic pressure on the people.

Through their epic participation in pro-establishment rallies in the past few days, people have shown that there is a strong bond between them and the country and that they will not compromise on the country’s security and stability. Yet, they rightfully have demands from the authorities. 1 3

A self-made crisis in Iranian football

It should have been the best of news, something to celebrate; instead, the Iranian football federation found itself

confronted by a crisis. Marc Wilmots, who agreed to become the coach of the Iranian national football team On 15 May 2019, posted a cryptic tweet on Monday and claimed that “an intolerable situation” was created by Football Federation Islamic Republic of Iran (FFIRI) for himself and his staff

The Belgian who agreed a three years contract with FFIRI - after Portuguese coach Carlos Queiroz left the team after eight years in charge following Iran’s sem-ifinal exit in the Asian Cup - has suffered back-to-back defeats with Iran against Bahrain and Iraq in the 2022 World Cup qualification. Wilmots, 50, was appointed to qualify the country for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. But after two defeats in four qualifying matches, Iran are only third in Group C. In addition, problems with the payment of Marc Wilmots’s salary persist because of international banking sanctions on Iran.

When Wilmots was selected, the football federation claimed to have signed the best kind of contract with him, not only in terms of financial issues but also regarding the details such as how coaching staff should comply with the terms of the contract, most notably a sufficient time of presence of the manager in Iran. A particular subject of criticism in Carlos Queiroz era was that he did not spend enough time in Iran and most of the time of the year he preferred to live abroad.

But after a while it becomes clear that Wilmots would not agree to restrictions being placed on where he lives. He also accused the federation of serious contrac-tual violations and in his bitter tweet wrote that his lawyers were working on the case.

All this shows that the Belgian and the Iranian Football Federation have reached an impasse in a short time. Nothing is clear at the moment about the future of cooperation between the two parties. Wilmots, an ex-politician, has never talked in such a way as to allow easy and accurate perception or interpretation for the public. However, from his recent tweet it could be under-stood that he is not going to continue working with Iranian football. 1 5

W W W . T E H R A N T I M E S . C O M I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

16 Pages Price 40,000 Rials 1.00 EURO 4.00 AED 39th year No.13539 Wednesday NOVEMBER 27, 2019 Azar 6, 1398 Rabi’ Al awwal 29, 1441

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Navy building modern torpedo-equipped hovercrafts

UN Security Council facing legitimacy crisis

Marc Wilmots breaks silence on Iran’s future 15

Judiciary chief vows unabated fight against corruption

Iran to export 17 domestically-made medicines to Russia

China supports reasonable reform of UN Security Council

TEHRAN — Fight against corruption will continue relentlessly, Judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi said on Tuesday, noting that he will not allow anything to deflect attention from the war against corruption.

Speaking at a meeting with 40 princi-plist legislators, the top judge said, “Fight against corruption and countering the corrupt is a priority that would not be marginalized by any issue or event.”

Campaign against corruption will con-

tinue seriously by rectifying “corruptive structures”, Raisi remarked.

He further said that there is no difference between the capital Tehran with other cities or provinces regarding the anti-corruption measures. “The judiciary will fight against corruption wherever it exists.”

Raisi assumed office as the head of the judiciary in March. His efforts in campaign against corruption has been praised by figures with different political persuasions.

TEHRAN — Seventeen domestical-ly-made medicines, containing high-tech drugs, will be exported to Russia, Mohsen Asadi Lari, director of international co-operation at the Ministry of Health, has announced.

Since last year, negotiations are under-way with the Russian Ministry of Health for medicine trade, he said, adding that a

meeting was also held in Moscow last week in this regard, IRNA reported on Tuesday.

The meeting was held on November 20, attended by deputy health ministers of Iran and Russia in line with the goal of cooperation and within the framework of a daylong seminar on the rules and procedures of registration of medicines and medical equipment in Russia. 1 2

A Chinese envoy said that China supports reasonable and necessary reform of the United Nations Security Council to meet the needs of the times.

“With a collective rise of developing countries being the defining feature, China supports reasonable and necessary reform of the Security Council to meet the needs of the times,” Zhang Jun, China’s perma-nent representative to the United Nations, told the 33rd plenary meeting of the 74th

session of the UN General Assembly on the “Question of Equitable Representation on and Increase in the Membership of the Security Council and Other Matters related to the Security Council.”

“Priority should be given to increas-ing representation and say of developing countries, especially African countries,” he said.

“Most of the UN members are small and medium-sized countries. 1 3

Farrokh HesabiTehran Times journalist

A R T I C L E

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By Faranak Bakhtiari

By Ebrahim Fallahi

Mohammad Ghaderi Tehran Times editor-in-chief

@ghaderi62

EDITORIAL

Iranian, German artists team up for exhibit “Artolog” 16

TEHRAN — A conference was held in Tehran on Tuesday to pay tribute to the children victims of terrorism.

The conference, called Navay-e Parvaneha (literally meaning voice of butterflies), was held in an elementary school on the occasion of World Children Day which is observed on November 20 annually.

November 20 is an important date as it is the date in 1959 when the UN General Assem-bly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It is also the date in 1989 when the UN General assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The conference was attended by representatives from the Association for Defending Victims of

Terrorism (ADVT), the Iraqi embassy to Iran, elementary school students and the families of victims of terrorism.

Masoumeh Karami, head of ADVT the wife of nuclear scientist Masoud Ali Mohammadi who was assassinated in a terrorist bomb attack in Tehran in January 2010, for her part said that Iran is one of the victims of terrorism and home to over 17,000 victims of terrorism.

Thousands of victims of terrorism were mar-tyred by the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization in the country, and they did not care whether they were scientists, teachers, workers, businessmen, mothers or children, she lamented.

She went on to say that Iranian people are always looking for peace, safety and security, and because they have suffered so much of terrorism,

they wish people not to be harmed by terrorist anywhere in the world.

“Islam is based on compassion and against violence, and Muslims must learn compassion while teaching others,” she said, adding, all the children should be contributors to the country’s development and stand against those who want Iran to be vulnerable and not to grow.

Founded in 2007, Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism is a non-governmental cultural institution whose members are the families and children of victims of terrorism. ADVT aims to apply cultural, informative and expressive ways on behalf of the families of terror victims to encounter with terrorist or-ganization.

“Voice of Butterflies” held to commemorate victims of terrorism

TEHRAN — Nearly a year after National Ira-nian Oil Company (NIOC), for the first time, decided to offer crude oil and gas condensate at Iran Energy Exchange (IRENEX) as a new strategy to relief the pressures of the U.S. sanc-tion, unfortunately no more than two million barrels have been sold.

Recently, NIOC revised the regulations pertain to the offering of oil and gas con-densate at IRENEX, for a second time, to encourage more domestic buyers to get in-volved in the trades.

In this regard Tehran Times conducted an interview with Reza Padidar, the chairman of Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture (TCCIMA)’s Energy Committee.

What follows is a gist of the interview. Lack of “futures”

As mentioned earlier, offering oil and gas condensate at IRENEX, so far has not reached the success that the government expected.

In mid-May, after several unsuccessful offer-ings, NIOC decided to halt the process to prepare new guidelines for the later offerings.

However, once gain the new regulations didn’t make a great difference in the trade outcomes and the following offerings were also unsuccessful.

Asked about the reasons for these continuous unsuccessful cycle, Padidar said one of the main barriers in the way of the success of Iran’s oil and gas condensate offering is that IRENEX is not a “futures” exchange.

A futures exchange or futures market is a fi-nancial exchange where people can trade stand-ardized futures contracts; that is, a contract to buy specific quantities of a commodity or financial instrument at a specified price with delivery set at a specified time in the future.

At IRENEX, such trades are not yet allowed, and the sales and offerings are solely made based on instant trade.

“So we can say that the key problem, which also entails almost all the other issues that the traders are facing in IRENEX, is the lack of fu-tures trades,” he said.

In any standardized exchange markets, traders are able to trade their futures contracts instead of being obliged to receive the physical cargo based on and specific time table. 5

‘Lack of “futures”, main barrier in the way of IRENEX success’

See page 4

(L to R) Syrian Minister of Public Works and Housing Suhail Mohammad Abdullatif, Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture Head Gholam-Hossein Shafeie, and Iranian Transport and Urban Development Minister Mohammad Eslami attended the Iran-Syria business forum in Tehran on Tuesday.

Tehran Intl. Sculpture

Symposium wraps up

TEHRAN — The 9th edition of the Tehran International Sculpture Symposium wrapped up on Monday after honoring some Iranian and overseas participants during a ceremony at the Tehran Book Garden.

Five Iranian and 10 foreign sculptors attended the non-competitive symposium, which ran for 23 days in the Abbasabad district, the Beautifi-cation Organization of the Tehran Municipality announced on Tuesday.

Speaking at the closing ceremony, the deputy director of the organization, Mojtaba Musavi, said that the new sculptures will be situated in a new location. 1 6

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TEHRAN — Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran’s

ambassador to the United Nations, said on Monday that the UN Security Council is facing a legitimacy and credibility crisis.

“Now the Council is facing a legitimacy and credibility crisis as well as a serious trust and confidence deficit and is not keeping pace with the significant changes of our time,” Takht-Ravanchi said at a United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York entitled “Question of equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council and related matters.”

He noted that the only way to evaluate the council’s performance is the “principles of justice and international law” which has been stipulated in the UN Charter.

“A short look at the Council’s performance in the past and present reveals that, by any measure, it is not meeting our expectations; its actions have not been consistently in conformity with the UN Charter; it is not truly preventative, democratic, transparent, accountable and rule-based; in many cases, it has been inactive or ineffective; in certain cases, its actions have been ultra vires; and it has been seriously exploited by certain permanent members,” he said.

He also suggested that in order to ensure

justice and rule of law and preserve and promote multilateralism, the council’s reform is neither an option nor an optional choice, rather it is the only solution.

“Nevertheless, none of the five core issues -- namely membership categories, veto, regional representation, the size of an enlarged Council, and Council’s working methods -- which are interlinked and therefore need to be discussed comprehensively within a package-- should be considered less important than the others,”

he added.Elsewhere, he criticized domination of the

Western countries over the council, saying the main regions are poorly represented in terms of number and have less rights and privileges in terms of veto power or permanent membership.

“To date, one-third of UN members have never found a chance to become a Council member while there have been 20 countries that have each served between 10-22 years

in this body,” he said.Takht-Ravanchi said that this

“disproportionality” and “injustice” must be addressed and rectified.

“This is essential in ensuring equal opportunities for all States to become a Council member as well as in preventing the domination of a certain regional or geopolitical group over the Council. As a result of the Council’s reform, it should be ensured that its members decide based not on their own national interests but based on the common interests of the entire UN membership. Likewise, we must not neglect such important issues as the Council’s working methods as they cannot be addressed only through enlarging the Council.”

Elsewhere, Takht-Ravanchi said that the council must also stop increasing the excessive and expeditious resort to its Chapter VII functions.

“Chapter VII must be invoked as a measure of last resort, if necessary,” he said.

For several years, the Islamic Republic of Iran remained under sanctions based on a resolution passed by the UN Security Council enacted under the Chapter VII of the UN Charter, until the Resolution 2231 endorsed the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers, and took the country out of the Chapter VII, according to Press TV.

TEHRAN — Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs

Gholam-Hossein Dehqani on Monday described the U.S. uni-lateral sanctions on Iran as “inhumane” and “shameful”, saying that sanctions are impeding delivery of medicine to victims of chemical attacks.

During his war against Iran in the 1980s, Saddam Hus-sein’s army used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians.

Speaking at the 24th session of the Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in The Hague, Dehqani urged the international community to counter the U.S. sanctions, which he said amount to economic terrorism

and a blatant violation of the CWC.On June 28, 1987, Iraq bombarded four crowded points

of the northwestern Iranian city of Sardasht. During the raid, 119 civilians were killed and more than 8,000 others were exposed to toxic gases. The assault was very catastrophic that caused innumerable problems.

‘U.S. is a threat to intl. peace, security’ Dehqani also said the U.S. is a threat to international peace

and security.He called on the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical

Weapons (OPCW) to enforce a stricter monitoring of the United States in destroying its chemical arms before the deadline expires.

Dehqani also pointed to the Sardasht tragedy and the 22nd

anniversary of a decision to make the CWC legally binding, saying the international aid for victims of chemical attacks are “minimal”.

The deputy foreign minister for legal affairs called on OPCW members to help victims of chemical attacks through a fund set up to collect voluntary contributions for the victims.

Elsewhere, he said that the CWC is an international agree-ment and the Israeli regime’s obstinate refusal to join the body is the key obstacle to enforce the treaty globally.

Dehqani noted that Tel Aviv is in possession of abundant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, calling on OPCW member states to do whatever necessary to force the Israeli regime to join the treaty.

TEHRAN – The fact that from the very first hours

demonstrators separated their path from ri-oters and thugs in the last week’s protests over increase in gasoline price testifies the people’s vigilance and this is admirable, Brig-adier General Ayoub Soleimani, the deputy police chief, said on Tuesday.

On Monday, people poured into Tehran’s main streets in very large numbers to show their allegiance to the Islamic Republic system and deplore rioters who misused the peace-ful protests against increase in gas price to commit acts of violence.

On November 15, the government in-creased gasoline price. However, the legitimate

public protests against the price increase were directed at sowing chaos through targeted attacks on public and private properties, forcing law enforcement forces to step in to stop saboteurs.

The rioters used guns and knives to attack security forces. The IRGC Deputy Chief Ali Fadavi said on Sunday that rioters shot at

people and security forces from a distance of one to one and a half meters. Fadavi said the riots were contained within 48 hours.

Early estimates of an intelligence body showed that a sum of nearly 87,000 protesters and rioters had taken part in protest rallies and gatherings since November 15, when increase in gas price went into effect.



Iran says UN Security Council facing legitimacy crisis

62 tons of drugs have been seized at borders over the last 8 months

TEHRAN – Over 62 tons of illicit drugs have been seized by Iranian security forces at border

areas over the last eight months, Commander of Iran’s Border Police Brigadier General Qassem Reza’ei announced on Tuesday.

Talking to reporters in the southern coastal city of Busheher, Raza’ei said, “In addition to ensuring order and security through carrying out purposeful activities and operations in fight against drug trafficking, the zealous border guards have managed to seize more than 62 tons of illicit drugs along the country’s borders.”

The commander added that the seized amount of illicit drugs in the last 8 months shows a 59 percent increase in comparison to the same period last year.

Iran is in the forefront of the fight against drug trafficking. It has made many sacrifices to protect the world from the danger of drugs.

The border police chief said Iran has lost 3,800 forces in fight against drug smuggling so far.

According to reports, in 2018 alone, Iranian forces carried out 1,557 operations against drug traffickers, seizing approximately 807 tons of different types of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances.

Commander: Navy building modern torpedo-equipped hovercrafts

TEHRAN — Iran’s Navy commander has said that his force is now building a state-of-the-art

model of hovercrafts that are equipped with hidden missiles and torpedo system.

Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi, in an interview with Tasnim published on Tuesday, said “New Pirozan hovercrafts that are equipped with new missile and torpedo systems are being manufactured by navy experts.”

The Navy chief said, “If one stands at the hovercraft’s deck, he cannot see the missiles which will appear only when they are ready to fire.”

Khanzadi said, “Our hovercrafts are also equipped with cutting-edged systems which enable the craft to fire torpedoes.”

The Navy commander further said, “It is not necessary to send an aircraft carrier to face the enemies’ aircraft carries, instead a force can use an effective submarine, including domestically-made Qadir class submarine whose destructive torpedoes can force the aircraft carrier to retreat.”

The rear admiral added, “The Navy is also building heavy destroyers weighting 5,000 up to 7,000 tons which can ship across oceans too.”

Rouhani introduces bill on ‘conflict of interests’ to Majlis

TEHRAN – President Hassan Ruohani intro-duced on Tuesday a new bill on “how to manage

conflict of interests” to the parliament. The bill is concerned with “how to manage conflict of interests in

fulfilling legal missions and rendering public service”.It was initially ratified in the cabinet of ministers a couple of weeks ago. The bill is supposed to go under study and legal process in the Majlis. One of the public rights’ articles entails all officials and public

sector’s staff to observe public interests while they are fulfilling their legislative, judicial and executive authorities in rendering public services.

Based on the abovementioned article, any discriminative, preju-dice and fanatical behaviors in fulfilling legal missions and rendering public service are forbidden.

Sanctions hampering delivery of medicine to chemical victims: top Iranian diplomat

2I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

NOVEMBER 27, 2019 ANALYSIS & INTERVIEW

First A

nnouncement

Tel .: 0098-58-32605344 Fax.: 0098-58-32272487website: www.iranalumina.ir E-mail.: [email protected]

IRAN ALUMINA COen.iranalumina.ir

First A

nnouncement

Tel .: 0098-58-32605344 Fax.: 0098-58-32272487website: www.iranalumina.ir E-mail.: [email protected]

IRAN ALUMINA COen.iranalumina.ir

ONE STAGE TENDER INTERNATIONAL CALL

FOR PURCHASE OF 1000 MT ALUMINUM FLORIDE (ALF3)

TENDER No.: 98/518 DATE.: 24Th ,Nov.,2019

1.Subject.: Iran Alumina Company (IAC) intends to purchase high quality Aluminum Floride (AlF3) in amount of 1000 MT for using in its Primary Aluminum Reduction Smelter Plant through one stage Tender according to following conditions as mentioned in the relevant Tender documents .:

2.: Bid Bond Guarantee.: 42,300Euro/or 5,500,000,000, Rials

3.:Tender proposal.: Since the tendering is to be done in one stage ,thus the eligible Bidders should follow and regard the Tender instructions and present and submit all of required justified documents and the mentioned Tender envelopes in one package together.

4.:Closing Date.: The eligible Bidders should submit their Bids/proposal to the central administration office as mentioned below and also in the Tender documents before 16:00 pm ,local time , on the day Tuesday , 07th January ,2020 .

5.: Opening Date.: 14th January , 2020 on 11:00 AM.

6.: Contact information.: For more details and receiving the relevant Tender documents , the Bidders can refer to the following contact information.

Add.: Km 7 of Sankhast Road, city of Jajarm, Northern Khorasan Province, IRAN, P. O. Box:1135-94415 legal and contractual Affairs .

Tel .: 0098-58-32605344

Fax.: 0098-58-32272487

website: www.iranalumina.ir

E-mail.: [email protected]

IRAN ALUMINA CO

en.iranalumina.ir

ONE STAGE TENDER INTERNATIONAL CALL

FOR PURCHASE OF 2000 MT CRYOLITE ( Na3AlF6 )

TENDER No.: 98/519 DATE.: 24Th ,Nov.,2019

1.Subject.: Iran Alumina Company (IAC) intends to purchase high quality Cryolite ( Na3AlF6 ) in amount of 2000 MT for using in its Primary Aluminum Reduction Smelter Plant through one stage Tender according to following conditions as mentioned in the relevant Tender documents .:

2.: Bid Bond Guarantee.: 58,500 Euro/or 7,600,000,000 Rials

3.:Tender proposal.: Since the tendering is to be done in one stage ,thus the eligible Bidders should follow and regard the Tender instructions and present and submit all of required justified documents and the mentioned Tender envelopes in one package together.

4.:Closing Date.:The eligible Bidders should submit their Bids/proposal to the central administration office as mentioned below and also in the Tender documents before 14:00 pm ,local time , on the day monday Tuesday , 07th January ,2020 .

5.: Opening Date.: 14th January , 2020 on 11:30 AM.

6.: Contact information.: For more details and receiving the relevant Tender documents , the Bidders can refer to the following contact information.

Add.: Km 7 of Sankhast Road, city of Jajarm, Northern Khorasan Province, IRAN, P. O. Box:1135-94415 legal and contractual Affairs .

Tel .: 0098-58-32605344

Fax.: 0098-58-32272487

website: www.iranalumina.ir

E-mail.: [email protected]

IRAN ALUMINA CO

en.iranalumina.ir

Protestors’ refusal to join rioters admirable, says police official

U.S. sanctions are ‘inhumane’, ‘shameful’, Dehqani says


I R A N I N F O C U SNOVEMBER 27, 2019

TEHRAN — A number of Iranian lawmakers have

called on Minister of Information and Com-munications Technology (ICT) Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi to restore Tehran’s access to the internet through mobile data networks.

In a letter to Azari Jahromi on Tuesday, Tehran’s representatives in the parliament said the continuation of limits on internet access has imposed huge losses on the coun-try’s economy and educational and research centers, according to Mehr.

“Now that peace has been restored with the clever cooperation of the wise Iranian people especially in Tehran, most people, including academics, businesspeople and en-trepreneurs, expect fast restoration of access to the internet through mobile data networks in Tehran province,” the lawmakers wrote.

Earlier this month, protests erupted in some cities in Iran against increasing gasoline price. In certain cases, the protests turned

violent as some rioters clashed with police, using knives and guns.

Rioters damaged public and private prop-

erty and put banks, gas stations, and state buildings on fire.

To control the situation, Iran blocked access

to the internet for days. However, most of the country’s internet access has been restored.

Azari Jahromi has said the internet was shut down due to an order by the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).

However, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Con-trol (OFAC) issued a statement on Friday blacklisting him for what it called his role in “widescale internet censorship,” a reference to a nationwide internet shutdown for se-curity reasons during riots against increase in petrol price.

Azari Jahromi on Monday hit back at the U.S. government for blacklisting him over internet blackout, saying the U.S. measure was based on a “big lie”.

He said that neither he nor the Ministry of ICT has had a role in the Internet blackout or its reconnection in Iran amid the recent unrest, saying it reveals the United States’ lie in this regard.

MPs urge ICT minister to fully restore Tehran’s internet access

Reformist journalist highlightspsychological damage of protests

Seven ringleaders of riots arrestedin Ilam province

TEHRAN — Reformist journalist Abbas Abdi has

downplayed the impact of the financial dam-age of the recent protests as opposed to its “psychological damage”, which he described as a much bigger problem for the country.

“The financial damage of the protests against gasoline price hike is not a major issue compared to its indirect damage,” ISNA on Tuesday quoted Abdi as saying.

“In the future, the consequences of these incidents will not be analyzed by their direct financial damage, because such damage can be compensated,” he said.

Abdi went on to say that the protests harmed the public’s trust in the govern-ment, which can lead to full break-off of the relationship between the people and the government.

The Supreme Economic Coordination Council, which its decisions are approved by the president, parliament speaker and judiciary chief, decided to increase petrol prices after many deliberations, including consultations

with economic experts. The petrol subsidy reform plan went into force on November 15. The decision was endorsed by the Leader.

Based on the plan, every car owner is authorized to buy 60 liters of gasoline per month at a price of 1,500 tomans (35 cents). Any amount beyond that is sold at 3,000 tomans.

The price is based on the official rate of 4,200 tomans per dollar. In the free market, the dollar is currently around 12,000 tomans.

The proceeds from increase in petrol prices are being paid to 60 million citizens, who ac-count for 75 percent of the Iranian population.

Protests erupted in some cities in Iran against increasing gasoline price. In cer-tain cases, the protests turned violent as some rioters attacked security forces with knives and guns.

Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi said on Friday that maintaining security is the most important issue in the country, stressing that the judiciary will not tolerate any threat to the society’s tranquility.

TEHRAN — Chief of Ilam province’s police

said on Monday that his forces have ar-rested 7 ringleaders of the recent riots in the town of Chardaval.

Nour Ali Yari said the arrested individ-uals were handed over to court for trial, Fars reported.

He added that the arrested ringleaders had persuaded people to stage riots, shouted norm-breaking slogans and blocked the streets.

Meanwhile, national deputy police chief Ayoub Soleimani said on Tuesday that his forces will continue efforts to capture the remaining ringleaders of the riots in Iran.

“Now the police and security forces are identifying the leaders and are mak-ing round-the-clock efforts to arrest and introduce the main culprits behind the chaos and destruction of people’s properties,” General Soleimani said.

He also expressed satisfaction that the vigilant Iranian people who were protesting at the gasoline price hike separated their

path from the rioters since the very first hours of the unrest.

Protests erupted in Iran on November 15 after the government announced an in-crease in the price of gasoline, a subsidized commodity that is still cheaper in Iran than other countries in the world.

On Friday, cleric Ahmad Khatami reminded that Article 27 of the Iranian constitution which recognizes the right to demonstrations. The proceeds from price increase is paid in form of cash subsidies to 60 million Iranians, who account for about 75 percent of the population.

The rationed gasoline, which is 60 liters per month, is priced 1500 tomans (35 cents) and any amount beyond that is 3000 tomans (70 cents).

The calculation is based on the official rate of 4200 tomans per dollar. However, the value of dollar, due to the U.S. pres-ident’s strategy of “maximum pressure” against Iran, is almost 2.5 times higher in the free market.

Iran plans to raise Hormuz peace initiative at IMO summit in London

TEHRAN — The managing director of Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization, has said that

the Iranian delegation plans to put forward the Hormuz peace initiative at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) summit in London.

In an interview with the IRIB on Monday, Mohammad Ras-tad said that security in the region must be maintained by the regional countries.

Rastad also said, “The Iranian delegation will stress that the United States, as a member state to the International Maritime Organization, has created limitations for Iran through sanctions and has threatened other countries to cut cooperation with Iran.”

The behavior of the U.S. is against the IMO convention, he lamented.

The summit was scheduled to open on November 25 and end on December 4 in London.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi announced on Monday that three countries have accepted to join Iran’s Hormuz peace initiative.

“Three countries have given written response to Iran’s in-vitation and other countries are studying it,” Mousavi told a regular press briefing.

He did not name the countries.At the United Nations summit in New York in late September,

Iran officially unveiled a proposal for regional security, officially called the Hormuz Peace Endeavour (HOPE).

“Based upon the historical responsibility of my country in maintaining security, peace, stability and progress in the Persian Gulf region and Strait of Hormuz, I would like to invite all the countries directly affected by the developments in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to the ‘Coalition for Hope’, meaning Hormuz Peace Endeavor,” President Hassan Rouhani told the UN delegates.

Foreign Minister Zarif has invited all regional states to join Iran’s initiative for securing the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

In a tweet in September, Zarif said the initiative entails “dia-logue, confidence-building, freedom of navigation, energy security, non-aggression, and non-intervention”.

In a post on his Twitter account on October 15, Zarif renewed Iran’s call to all countries bordering the Persian Gulf to join Teh-ran’s initiative to “forge a blueprint for peace, security, stability, and prosperity” in the region.

In his press briefing, the Foreign Ministry spokesman called on certain Persian Gulf Arab states to abandon reliance on for-eign forces for their security, saying dependence on foreigners is just an “illusion”

“We called on the countries to respond to Iran’s peace-seek-ing call and abandon illusions. We have stressed that pres-ence of foreign countries undermines security and stability. We hope this initiative of Iran would face with positive response,” Mousavi stated.






I R A N I N F O C U SNOVEMBER 27, 2019





Europe could rev up the world economy

As the world’s largest free-trade area, the European Union can reverse its sharply slowing economic growth in the first three quarters of this year to become an important driver of global demand and output.

Such an outcome depends only on Germany and some smaller countries that account for about a third of the EU economy.

Here’s a quick workout of how that process could unfold.

Imagine that Germany agreed to stop stifling the growth of its closest trade partners by deciding to generate more economic output from its huge wealth — 1.7 trillion euro of net foreign assets at the end of 2017 — accumulated with large trade surpluses.

In practical terms, that would mean the use of Germany’s massive budget surplus of 3.2% of GDP to revive its moribund economy growing at an annual rate of 0.6% in the first nine months of this year — a pace of advance that is less than half of Germany’s potential and noninflationary growth rate.

An acceleration of German economic growth would imme-diately trigger an increase in German purchases of goods and services from its European trade partners, most of which are members of the continent’s free trade area.

That’s a significant amount of money. In the first nine months of this year, German imports from Europe came in at 563 billion euro.

The rest of the world — the source of another 265 billion euro of German imports — would benefit, too.

The U.S. exports of this yearThe U.S., in particular, would also have a chance to increase its

puny $45.3 billion exports (data for the first nine months of this year) to Germany. But there would be more U.S. sales because a faster growing German economy would expand all European markets, an area that is currently taking almost a quarter of America’s total exports.

There are two questions now: (1) How important would be the impact of Germany’s faster growth on its import demand and (2) Will Germany accept to stimulate its economy?

Based on the data of the last three years, the German im-port demand is very responsive (or elastic) with respect to GDP growth: A 1% increase in economic growth triggers a 2% increase in import demand.

That would be enough for Europe to celebrate.But hold the champagne, or the German “Sekt,” because Ger-

mans have always steadfastly refused to change their export-driven growth model — less charitably defined as a “beggar-thy-neigh-bor” policy that should have no quarters in a grand project of the European economic and political union.

Yes, Germany — by far Europe’s largest economy — has settled to count on exports to lift itself from a deflationary quarterly growth rate of 0.1% in the year to the third quarter.

The European Central BankInflated rhetoric about a political mission to change that by

a new cast at the European Central Bank is hitting the wall of German warnings. Berlin is very worried about dire effects of negative interest rates, and what they see as speculative horrors of cheap money reflected in Frankfurt’s booming skyline, where prices of luxury real estate soared 10.3% in the year to September.

So, forget about the political mission migrating from an ineffec-tive European Council (forum of heads of state and government), or from a German rubber stamp Eurogroup (a gathering of euro area finance ministers), to the sideshow of unelected technical staff at the ECB.

Germany has never feared any of those political missions. All that Berlin will eventually do is offer loans by recycling its huge net export incomes so that Europeans can continue to buy German products.

An effective political mission could only come from the U.S. But Germans expect no such thing from a country their political establishment and media ridicule in the most derogatory terms.

Why is the U.S. doing nothing to help itself and the rest of the world? And why are the G-7 and the G-20 so useless?

The change is coming, though, with pressures from growing anti-German and euroskeptic right wing political forces in Italy and France. Ominously, that could go much beyond spelling an end to the pretension of European unity.

(Source: cnbc.com)

TEHRAN — Syri-an minister of public

works and housing said that his country puts the top priority on Iranian companies for implementing reconstruction projects in Syria, IRNA reported.

Making the remarks during an Iran-Syria business forum held at the place of Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture (ICCIMA) in Tehran on Tuesday, Suhail Mohammad Abdullatif said that the Syrian government will offer all necessary facilities to Iranian companies for cooperation in the reconstruction of Syria, so that these companies will enjoy investment opportunities in his country.

He said the agreement signed during the first meeting of Iran-Syria Joint Trade Committee includes establishment of Ira-nian-Syrian joint companies which can do activity in all provinces of Syria.

“We can use Syrian state-run companies to this end”, the minister said, adding that the joint companies can take the projects directly without taking part in any tender.

He said the next step will be setting up a Syrian-Iranian joint bank in Damascus.

The private sectors of the two countries are the main partners of the investment projects, Abdullatif stressed and mentioned

contribution of Iranian private sector to the reconstruction projects in Syria as necessary.

Iran and Syria have been taking major

steps for expansion of their mutual trade ties. The two sides have exchanged nu-merous trade delegations in the past few months and Iranian private companies are

investing in various fields of Syrian econ-omy like providing construction materials especially cement and working on several reconstruction projects.

The first meeting of Iran-Syria Joint Trade Committee was held in Damascus in late-August, during which the two sides stressed their willingness for further ex-pansion of economic ties.

The event was attended by senior of-ficials from both sides including Iranian Transport Minister Mohammad Eslami, Chairman of Iran-Syria Joint Economic Committee Keyvan Kashefi, and Hassan Danaeifar, the advisor to Iran’s first vice president and also the chairman of the Iranian committee on development of economic relations with Syria and Iraq.

As reported, Eslami visited Syria on top of a high-ranking delegation to attend the event and also to discuss expansion of ties with Syrian officials.

In his speech in the meeting, the min-ister called for Iranian private sector’s active participation in reconstruction of the war-stricken Syria, saying that “of course the presence of the Iranian delegation in this meeting is in itself an indication of Iranian private sector’s determination for strong contribution to reconstruction of Syria.”

TEHRAN — During a meeting between the head of Tehran Chamber of Commerce,

Industries, Mines and Agriculture (TCCIM) and Armenian ambassador to Iran the two sides emphasized the need to preserve and expand trade relations between Iran and Armenia under a trade agreement between Iran and Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).

The meeting was held at the place of TCCIMA on Monday and was followed by a conference on investigating the ways to expand bilateral trade held at the same place, TCCIMA portal reported.

As reported, benefitting from barter trade and the facilities provided by Iran-EAEU trade agreement for bolstering trade cooperation between Iran and Armenia was the main issue discussed between TCCIMA Head Masoud Khansari and Armenian Ambassador Artashes Toumanian in their meeting.

The trade agreement between Iran and EAEU officially came into force on October 27.

Expressing his satisfaction over holding the mentioned conference at the place of TCCIMA, Khansari appreciated cooperation of Armenia Embassy in Tehran in terms of facilitating trade between the two countries and expressed hope that Iranian private sector benefit from this condition.

The official further mentioned banking problems as the only barrier for expansion of trade between Iran and its neighbor Armenia and said that TCCIMA, Armenian

Embassy and Iran-Armenia Joint Chamber of Commerce should find strategies to remove this hurdle.

Toumanian for his part appreciated TCCIMA’s action to hold the conference on investigating the ways to expand bilateral trade between the two countries and undefined that the stable ties between TCCIMA and Armenian Embassy has created some appropriate cooperation for removing the problems in the way of trade for Iranian and Armenian

companies.Referring to the old relations between the two neighbors,

the envoy said that Armenia Embassy in Tehran is completely ready to help Iranian private sector.

While the U.S. renewed sanctions on Iran are aimed at isolating the Islamic Republic both politically and economically, Iran’s relations, especially in the economic sectors, with its neighbors are seemed not to be affected by the sanctions.

The northwestern neighbor Armenia is one of the countries preserving and expanding its economic relations with Iran regardless of the sanction condition.

It has been several times emphasized by the Armenian officials as during a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Tehran in late February, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan voiced his country’s willingness to boost cooperation with the Islamic Republic in all areas, including agriculture, transport and tourism.

As previously announced by Iran’s commercial attaché to Yerevan Mohsen Rahimi, the value of trade between Iran and Armenia has hit a record high of $364 million in 2018.

The official put the worth of Iran’s export to its neighbor at $269 million and said that natural gas, petrochemicals, iron and steel, tiles and ceramics, fruit and nuts have been the major Iranian products exported to Armenia in the past year.

Latin America and the Caribbean region saw faster economic and wage growth thanks to a lowering of trade barriers, a new report by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) said.

The study also provides policy recom-mendations to ensure the region is better positioned to take advantage of trade liberal-ization and make its benefits more tangible to citizens.

The average tariff cut of 56 percent that took place in the region between 1990 and 2010 accelerated the region’s average annual per capita GDP growth by 0.6 percent. While the results are positive, the region harbors skepticism on the benefits of more openness,

in part because initial expectations were so high, according to Trading Promises for Re-sults: What Global Integration Can do for Latin America and the Caribbean.

“Trade liberalization did not turn out to be the silver bullet that put us in the same growth leagues as some top-performing Asian economies,” said IDB Chief Economist Eric Parrado. “However, trade has clearly been a positive contribution for the region’s wellbe-ing and development, and we should resist temptations to return to our closed economic policies of decades past.”

The book was edited by IDB researchers Ernesto Stein and Mauricio Moreira. Trading Promises for Results is part of the annual

Development in the Americas (DIA) flagship research publications series that provides analysis and advice to policymakers on key development topics.

Backing more trade by big marginsLatin Americans back more trade by big

margins though support drops sharply when presented with information emphasizing negative consequences such as job losses in vulnerable sectors. The IDB commissioned Latinobarometro to undertake a survey and carry out an experiment to better understand how framing affects perceptions about trade.

Almost three out of every four of those surveyed said they favored increasing trade with other countries, with support running

highest in Venezuela, Honduras and Uruguay. Almost six out of every ten Latin Americans equate trade with more jobs. However, pro-viding information about potential job losses in vulnerable sectors reduced support for trade to 46 percent, from 73 percent.

While liberalization is positive for the economy, it does have winners and losers, with special interest groups linked to im-port-competing sectors often blocking trade reforms. The report provides an in-depth look at trade policymaking processes in the region, and the type of institutional archi-tecture that is more likely to lead to good policy outcomes.

(Source: carribeannationalweekly.com)

By Dr. Michael Ivanovitch


NOVEMBER 27, 20194 E C O N O M Y

COMMODITIES

CURRENCIES

STOCK MARKET

USD 42,000 rials

EUR 46,261 rials

GBP 54,163 rials

AED 11,437 rials

TEDPIX 309643.6IFX 4044.93

Brent $62.76/b

WTI $58.13/b

OPEC Basket $64.56/b

Gold $1,459.45/oz

Silver $$16.99/oz

Platinium $903.95/oz

Sources: tse.ir, Ifb.ir

Source: cbi.ir

Sources: oilprice.com, Moneymetals.com

E C O N O M Yd e s k

‘Iranian companies prioritized for reconstructing Syria’

Doubling non-oil exports to neighbors atop agenda: PBO head

Iran to set up pavilion in IDF Oman in mid-Feb. 2020

TEHRAN — Head of Iran’s Planning and

Budget Organization (PBO) says the gov-ernment is seeking to double the value of non-oil exports to the neighboring countries in the next Iranian calendar year (March 2020-March 2021), Press TV reported.

“Based on the targets set, we (have to) bring the non-oil exports to $48 billion from the $24-billion that we currently have,” Mo-hammad-Baqer Nobakht said on Monday, adding that setting the target had been agreed earlier in the day in a meeting involving high-profile government officials.

Stressing the urgent need for boosting non-oil exports in order to offset the drops in the oil revenues, Nobakht said Iran has been deprived of around $50 billion a year in oil sales income and non-oil exports should compensate for that loss.

Back in August, Iranian Deputy Industry Minister Hossein Modares Khiabani said his ministry has it on the agenda to increase the value of exports to Iran’s 15 neighbors up to $50 billion.

“Our goal is to be able to meet five percent of our neighboring countries’ needs, which would amount to more than $50 billion a year considering the total imports of all the 15 countries which is at least $1 trillion annually,” Modares Khiabani said.

“Necessary planning and investigations have been made for achieving this target,”

he added.Increasing non-oil exports to the neigh-

boring countries is one of the major plans that Iranian government is pursuing in the current Iranian calendar year (began on March 21).

Iran shares border with fifteen coun-tries, namely the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, Oman, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kuwait, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

Based on the data published by Trade Promotion Organization of Iran (TPO), the value of trade with the neighboring countries stood at over $36.5 billion in the past Irani-an calendar year; that is about 41 percent of the country’s total non-oil trade in the mentioned time span.

Iran plans to launch 15 mega export projects to identify more target markets, according to TPO’s former acting head, Mohammadreza Modoudi.

TEHRAN — Iran will set up a pavilion in

Oman’s Interior Design Furnishing Expo (IDF Oman) which will be held in Muscat from February 11 to 13, 2020, Trade Promo-tion Organization of Iran (TPO) published on its official website on Tuesday.

The international exhibit, which is held in Oman International Exhibition Center, is growing steadily 15 percent–20 percent every year, as published on the website of the event.

According to the data released by the Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration (IRICA), the value of trade between Iran and Oman has increased to $870 million during the first seven months of this year from $557 million in the same period of time in the past year.

While the number of Iranian companies registered in Oman was just 263 in 2014 (when President Hassan Rouhani visited Muscat), the figure reached 1,163 by the end of 2018.

Iranian president’s trip to Oman led to the all-out expansion of economic ties between the two countries.

Also, despite the U.S. reimposition of sanctions against the Islamic Republic, Oman is getting closer to Iran both politically and economically. There is also the same approach adopted by Iran, as Iranian companies now prefer

to conduct trade with Oman rather than the United Arab Emirates (UAE), given that the UAE is highly complying with the sanctions.

Iran is somehow replacing some of its previous strategic trade partners such as UAE with Oman, considering the Sultanate as an economic-trade hub.

During the current year there have been many meetings and negotiations between trade and economic officials from the state-run and private sectors of the two sides with the aim of strengthening and expanding bilateral trade ties.

Developing sea transport between the two sides, facilitating visa issuance for Iranian and Omani traders, rising number of Iranian companies in Oman and also more competitive prices of Iranian products in the Omani market compared to the past are some of the major reasons behind expanded economic cooperation between the two countries.




Tehran, Yerevan stress expansion of bilateral trade under Iran-EAEU agreement

Syrian Minister of Public Works and Housing Suhail Mohammad Abdullatif (L) and Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture Head Gholam-Hossein Shafeie attended the Iran-Syria business forum in Tehran on Tuesday.

TCCIMA Head Masoud Khansari (L) and Armenian Ambassador to Iran Artashes Toumanian met at the place of TCCIMA on Monday.

Trade liberalization has boosted Latin American and Caribbean economies


E N E R G YNOVEMBER 27, 2019

TEHRAN – Iran Oil, Gas and Petrochemical

Products Exports Union (OPEX) is going to hold the first international exhibition of Iranian oil, gas and petrochemical industries downstream sector (Intl. Iran Downstream Show) during February 2-4, 2020 at Tehran Permanent International Fairgrounds.

As reported by the portal of Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture (ICCIMA), the exhibition will be held in collaboration with ICCIMA along with other organizations, bodies and entities related to this industry.

Introducing and presenting the capabilities of the private sector in the oil, gas and petrochemical industries downstream sector, creating an appropriate environment for enhancing the communication and awareness of the companies, active in these industries, and providing opportunities

for international interactions in the field are reported to be the main goals of the exhibition.

Back in October, the first meeting of the exhibition’s policy-making council was held in which representatives of private oil, gas and petrochemical companies, Iran and Tehran chambers of commerce, public relation office of National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), Trade Promotion Organization (TPO) and representative of Iran International Exhibitions Company discussed organizing and managing the exhibition.

Forming committees for B2B specialized meetings, knowledge-based companies and start-ups, public relations and information and international affairs, exports, communication with government agencies and related business environments such as banks, stock exchanges and insurance were among the discussed issues in that meeting.

1 Offering methods vs. market realitiesAnother important reason for the failure of the oil offering at

IRENEX is that the government did not consider the realities of the Iranian market and the conditions of the traders in setting the regulations and guidelines for the offerings.

for instance, based on the NIOC new guidelines the least amount of purchase is set to be 35,000 barrels while the least amount that a vessel in Iran would transport (to be economically justifiable) is 700,000 barrels, he explained.

So the buyers would have to wait several weeks or even months for their cargos to reach the minimum range for shipping which is 700,000 barrels; and this is not efficient in any sense, since the market changes on a daily basis.

According to the new revisions, applicants have to initially pay six percent of the value of the contract in the form of rial or other acceptable foreign currencies and in case their bidding is accepted they must pay another 20 percent to finalize their purchase and the rest would be paid within three months before loading the purchased cargos.

Another problem which the buyers were facing was the short period of time within which they had to load their cargo after finalizing their purchase.

Brokers and credit linesYet another problem was regarding the limitations pertain

to the brokers approved by IRENEX that would do the financial transactions for the buyers.

“Since currently the number of brokers approved by IRENEX

for making the financial transaction do not exceed 18 or so,” he explained.

According to Padidar, in most of the stock markets around the world, brokers are able to open credit lines for certain traders so that they could make their purchases and do their payments in the exchange market without losing any time.

“However, this is not the case for IRENEX and its affiliated brokers, there are no credit lines allocated for the Iranian buyers who participate in IRENEX trades and they need to make all the necessary payments themselves within the timeline determined by NIOC,” he said.

The solutionsAs we discussed some of the problems regarding the offering

of oil in Iran’s energy exchange, the solutions to these problems seem to be self-explanatory.

According to the chairman of TCCIMA’s Energy Commit-tee, the new revisions and the new guidelines presented by the oil ministry could make a significant difference in the future of IRENEX.

“It is very important, if the necessary changes are considered and included in the procedures, it would be a very positive step toward a better future for IRENEX trades,” he said.

Some changes have already been made in the new revisions, for instance the amount of the advance payment, the time table and due-dates for the payments and loadings are also recon-sidered; however, some bigger issues are still remained to be taken into account.

The private sectorAs the final question, I asked the official about the private

sector’s expectations from the government regarding facilitating the participation of their participation in the country’s oil industry.

According to the official, one of the most important steps that the government could take in order to encourage the par-ticipation of the private sector in the oil trade would be to pay its debts to them in the form of oil, gas condensate or other oil products which are being offered at IRENEX.

Padidar believed that the private sector would eagerly welcome such an idea, since in fact they are not sanctioned and could trade the mentioned crude oil or condensate for their necessary raw materials and basic goods.

“In this way, both the government and the private sector would benefit mutually and it will also promote more trades at IRENEX,” he said.

French EDF Group announced Monday that its renewable energy subsidiary EDF Renewables entered into a strategic partnership with Egypt’s KarmSolarin the development of solar power distribution in Egypt.

KarmSolar is a developer and supplier of solar power in Egypt, and it plays a role in the emerging solar Independent Power Producer (IPP) market. The company secures

PPAs and solar distribution contracts with large commercial, agricultural and industrial clients.

KarmSolar currently holds a portfolio in Egypt close to 170 MW of solar PV plant projects in operations, under construction and advanced development. These solar projects take part in achieving the Egyptian government’s target that aims at generating 42 percent of its electricity from renewable

resources by 2035, according to the EDF announcement.

The company clarified in a press release that upon this partnership its subsidiary will inject capital to take a strategic equity stake in KarmSolar through a reserved capital increase.

“This investment will allow KarmSolar to implement its ambitious development plan in the country, which includes expanding its

portfolio of solar plants and providing power to commercial, agricultural and industrial clients through Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) or distribution contracts,” it stated.

In addition, this investment contributes to EDF Group’s goal under the CAP 2030 strategy to double its renewable energy capacity worldwide to 50 GW net between 2015 and 2030, according to the company.

(Source: egypttoday.com)

Intl. Iranian downstream oil industry expo slated for Feb. 2020

E N E R G Yd e s k

Like it or not, Saudis stuck with OPEC even after Aramco public offeringSaudi Arabia’s planned initial public offering of its state oil company, Saudi Aramco, is stirring speculation that it could spell the end of the price-controlling cartel known as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). But such analysis misses a crucial point.

On the surface, it makes sense that the future of Saudi participation in OPEC is in question after its state-owned oil company is listed. After all, a publicly-traded Aramco will be under investor pressure to increase short-term profits and boost shareholder dividends, some-thing it doesn’t have to worry about now. The demand to maximize profits will increase as more shares of Aramco are offered to private investors, especially if the Saudi Royal Family seeks a second listing on large foreign exchange.

Upping production would be a natural way for Aramco to respond to demands for more profits. Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, currently produces about 10 million barrels a day. Still, Saudi Arabia has roughly 2 million barrels a day of spare capacity – oil that could be poured onto the market in a matter of weeks if the Saudis choose to.

Aramco has a competitive advantage over other oil-producing re-gions due to its meager cost of production. In its 658-page prospectus for investors, Aramco touts breakeven costs of under $10 a barrel – the world’s lowest. Its closest competitor, the United Arab Emirates which spends $20 to produce a single barrel of oil. The Russians must pay $40 per barrel, and in the prolific shale fields of the United States, the cost is close to $50 a barrel.

An increasing number of market watchers, including the Inter-national Energy Agency (IEA), are concerned oil demand around the world could start to shrink as soon as 2025. It would make sense for Saudi to try to increase its share of the global market before a slowdown arrives. The kingdom currently provides about 10 percent of the 100 million barrels a day global oil demand. It could quickly increase its slice of the pie by dumping lower-cost oil on the market if it thought those resources might become stranded in a fossil-free future.

The stakes are enormous for Saudi Arabia, which sits on 266 billion barrels of reserves – the largest proven supply of low-cost conventional oil in the world.

Alliance with other nationsIt’s easy to see then how Riyadh might reconsider its alliance

with the other member nations of OPEC, which has been un-der voluntary production cuts since the start of 2017 to support higher oil prices.

The challenge for Saudi Arabia is that any move to capture a greater share of the market by increasing output means a lower price for every barrel it producers, reducing the value of its resources.

It is a lesson U.S. shale producers know all too well. Competition has driven down the cost of production in West Texas and other U.S. shale plays, saving American consumers billions of dollars annually, but shaving profit margins in the process. As revenue from pro-duction shrinks, companies invest less in finding new oil reserves. Eventually, as cheap oil becomes more difficult to pump, oil prices rise, and exploration budgets follow suit. Boom and bust, it’s the cycle of the oil sector.

OPEC has historically acted as a brake on oil prices, with some notable exceptions. It’s in the interest of OPEC members to moderate the price of oil so that it remains high enough to support healthy profits but not so high that consumers start clamoring for alternatives like electric vehicles.

Global oil markets are oversupplied thanks to an abundance of non-OPEC production, led by U.S. shale but also from Brazil, Norway and now Guyana.

Few observers see this “era of abundance” ending anytime soon. New drilling in the U.S. shale sector is slowing down, which will lead to more moderate growth rates in the future. U.S. producers are unlikely to hit the 1.6 million barrels a day of new production in a single year again as they did in 2018. But the sector will continue to grow – just slower.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects U.S. oil production to expand by 1.3 million barrels a day this year and a further 1 million barrels a day in 2020, taking U.S. output to an average of 13.3 million barrels a day.

(Source: forbes.com)

‘Lack of “futures”, main barrier in the way of IRENEX success’


ANALYSIS & INTERVIEWNOVEMBER 27, 2019

N.I.O.CNational Iranian

Drilling Company

تهران تایمز نوبت اول 98/9/5نوبت دوم 98/9/6

( Foreign Procurement Dept.)More of this & other tenders are accessible by click on: www.nidc.ir http://sapp.ir/nidc_pr

Call for public tender (First/Second publish)- RetenderOne Stages tender

Second Announcement

Subject of Tender: Tender No. Description

FP/05-98/093 P/F:MH POWER TOP DRIVE Tender descriptions:

Estimated value (Rial/Euro)

Tender No. /Indent No.

Registration No. through national electronic tendering

system The Tender holder

12,857,160,000(Rial)

Tender No.: FP/05-98/093 Indent No.:08-22-9745210 3,219,872

National Iranian Drilling Company

Qualitative evaluation of tenderers Qualification process will be done in plain mode in offers opening session according to

presentation of valid practice certificate / legal documents (certificate of corporation/ supply announcement up to latest changes) which should be related to tender subject.

Method 1- Applicants which have more than 4 in process contacrts with NIDC are not allowed to participate in this tender .

2- Applicants which have more than 2 in process contacrts with NIDC in similar subject ( exclusively same subject) are not allowed to participate in another tender

Purchasing & Submitting The distribution of the documents will be started one day after the publishing of second advertisement and ended on the following tenth day thereof

Tender Document Distribution by Company

Hall No.:113, 1th floor, Foreign Procurement Dept., National Iranian Drilling Company, Airport square, Ahwaz, IRAN 061-34148659 ----

Room No. 431, 4th floor ,Oil central building No.8,Yaghma alley, Jomhori Islami st., Tehran – Iran

Distribution Place

Submitting one original Bank Fund Receipt in the amount of 510,000 Iranian Rials under account number 4001114004020491( Shaba No. IR 520100004001114004020491) in name of “NIDC Incomes Centralized Fund” issued by I.R. of Iran Central Bank.

Submitting format Request for the purpose of receiving Tender Documents.

Submitting Method

14 Days after the last time of Purchasing. Closing date

Documents Receiving Method Hall No. 107, 1stfloor, Tender Committee, Operation building,

National Iranian Drilling Company, Airport square, Ahwaz, IRAN. Tel: +98-61-34148580 +98-61-34148569

Address

Tender Guarantee 643,000,000 Rial / 5,36 Euro Regarding Tender No

FP/05-98/093 Value of guarantee

Bank guarantees or guarantees issued by non-bank institutions that obtain activity license from the central bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Submitting one original Bank Fund Receipt under account number 4001114006376636 ( Shaba No. IR 350100004001114006376636) in name of “NIDC saving account” by the central bank of Islamic Republic of Iran.

Type of guarantee

Tender Guarantee and quotation should be valid for 90 days and extendable maximum for one time in initial validity duration.

Duration of credit & quotation

TEHRAN TIMES

Iran’s LeadingInternational Daily

Advertising Dept

021 -430 51 450Tel:

N.I.S.O.C

1398.5139

TENDER NO. : 01-31-9680047National Iranian South Oilfields Company(NISOC) intends to purchase the following goods

First Announcement

NATIONAL IRANIAN SOUTH OILFIELDS COMPANY AHVAZ-IRAN

تهران تایمز : نوبت اول 98/9/6 نوبت دوم 98/9/9 Public Relations www.shana.ir www.nisoc.ir

FOREIGN PURCHASING DEPARTMENTBldg. No. 104, Material Procurement Management Complex

Kouy-e-Fadaeian Islam (New Site), Ahvaz, Iran Tel. No.: 061 341 24644 Fax No.: 061 3445 7437

Vendors who intend to participate in aforesaid tenders are requested to send their “ Intention to participate” letter via Fax to the following number along with their resume according to Qualitative Assessment Form no. 1, available at: WWW.nisoc.ir , not later than 14 days after the second announcement, otherwise, their requests for participation in the.tender will be disregarded The applicants should have relevant background in supplying the required goods and capability to provide and submit.a bid bond of 6,143 EURO or 773 ,095,338 RIAL, in favor of NISOC Tender documents including the materials thorough technical specifications and Qualitative Assessment Forms can be accessed via: WWW.nisoc.ir-material procurement management tabONLY ACCEPTABLE DELIVERY TERM IS D.D.P. NISOC’S WAREHOUSE, AGHAJARI.IRAN PAYMENT TERM IS C.O.D. SUBSE-QUENT TO NISOC’ S MATERIAL APPROVAL NO ADVANCE PAYMENT WILL BE PAID

N.I.S.O.C

نوبت اول

NATIONAL IRANIAN SOUTH OILFIELDS COMPANY AHVAZ-IRAN TENDER NO. : 01-31-9680047

National Iranian South Oilfields Company(NISOC) intends to purchase the following goods Items Material Description Quantity

50

PARTS FOR “ BROWN BOVERI-SULZER” GAS TURBINE TYPE NS70 2242 NOS

FOREIGN PURCHASING DEPARTMENT Bldg. No. 104, Material Procurement Management Complex


Public Relations WWW.shana.ir www.nisoc.ir http://iets.mporg.ir

روابط عمومی شرکت ملی مناطق نفت خیز جنوب

9/9/98نوبت دوم 6/9/98تهران تایمز : نوبت اول

Oil prices slipped on Tuesday on concerns about eco-nomic growth and fuel demand as uncertainty remains about the ability of the United States and China, the world’s biggest oil users, to agree a preliminary deal to end their trade war.

Brent crude futures LCOc1 were down 5 cents at $63.60 at 0725 GMT, after rising 0.4% in the previous session.

West Texas Intermediate crude futures CLc1 fell 9 cents to $57.92, having risen 0.4% on Monday.

Top trade negotiators from China and the United States held a phone call on Tuesday morning, China’s

Commerce Ministry said, as the two sides try to hammer out a preliminary “phase one” deal in a trade war that has dragged on for 16 months.

“Oil traders remain hopeful a trade deal will get signed,” said Stephen Innes, chief Asia market strat-egist at AxiTrader.

“Still, the lack of clarity around the tariff rollbacks, which is the key to economic growth and bullish for oil, continues to somewhat cloud sentiment.”

China and the United States are “moving closer to agreeing” on a “phase one” trade deal, the Global Times - a tabloid run by the Chinese Communist Party’s

official People’s Daily - reported earlier.Still, the Global Times report noted that Washington

and Beijing had not agreed on specifics or the size of rollbacks of tariffs on Chinese goods. Beijing’s insistence that Washington roll back the Trump administration’s tariffs has been a major sticking point.

On the supply side, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meets on December 5 at its headquarters in Vienna, followed by talks with other oil producers, including Russia, that have agreed to reduce output to support prices, a group known as OPEC+.

(Source: reuters.com)

Oil prices slip as U.S.-China trade deal talks seek breakthrough

French EDF renewables partners with Egypt’s KarmSolar

ANTIWAR —Think of it as a small miracle of sorts.

This country has now been at war continuously for 18 years, ever since President George W. Bush and his top officials announced a “Global War on Terror” within days of the 9/11 attacks and, not long afterward, launched the invasion of Afghanistan. Iraq, of course, followed. And Somalia. And Yemen. And Libya. And Syria. And drone strikes that have never ended across a vast region of the planet. And the building up of a Special Operations force of 70,000 – bigger than the militaries of many countries – and the creation of an Africa Command (AFRICOM) after which the war on terror spread across that continent, too. And so it’s gone, and continues to go, as hundreds of thousands die and millions are displaced. And that “war” (an ever-more complicated and unsettling set of conflicts) has in its own way come home, too, not just in the arming of America’s police with weaponry straight off those distant battlefields or the creation of militarized SWAT units across the country, but in those endless ceremonies “honoring” the troops at sporting events of every sort, in the constant growth of the national security state, and the continual padding of the Pentagon budget.

Despite all of this, Americans have generally done a remarkable job of ignoring those grim wars. Since the invasion of Iraq, almost no Americans have taken to the streets in protest. The costs of the war on terror are seldom discussed. Those ever-spreading conflicts – and their never-ending nature – are generally an unacknowledged background fact of American life, which is why the Costs of War Project at Brown University is indeed a small miracle of sorts.

Visit its website and you can actually check out estimates of the true costs of America’s forever wars (at least $6.4 trillion that didn’t go to infrastructure repair, health care, or anything else that matters domestically) or an accounting of deaths of every sort from those conflicts (approximately 800,000 soldiers, civilians, journalists, contractors, etc.), and so much more. It’s an eye-opening accomplishment in a country that would rather look the other way and we at TomDispatch are proud that we’ve published articles by its co-director, Stephanie Savell, exploring the never-ending costs of those wars. And we’re no less proud today to feature a piece by one of that project’s founders, Andrea Mazzarino, the co-author of a new book on the subject of their costs, War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, she writes about how they have come home to her, not just as a researcher but as a military spouse and a mother. It’s a reminder that America’s twenty-first-century wars, while fought thousands of miles away, are also far closer at hand than we like to think. ~ Tom

There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort through the life I’ve chosen.

I am the co-editor with Catherine Lutz of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new volume of social science research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. At the same time, I am a practicing therapist-in-training and I specialize in working with veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Through the scholarly research I review and the veteran clients I have seen, I am committed professionally to bearing witness to the human costs of America’s forever wars, and to alleviating suffering where I can.

I am also married to a submarine officer in the Navy. We are so fortunate in so many ways. We have two beautiful children, pets, loving friends, and extended family. We both have graduate degrees. While our finances take hits from relocations without adequate job and childcare support, we don’t face the continuous fears that many military families experience when a loved one is sent into a war zone. In many respects, my family’s life does not look like that of most American military families profiled in my book.And yet I have misgivings.

During one of my husband’s deployments, I was relieved to hear our 2-year-old son talk about war in a way that, despite his innocence, was more nuanced than the usual tales of “sacrifice,” “honor,” and “fighting terror” that one hears routinely in the mainstream media and in local command newsletters.

It was spring 2017 and we had just seen Kim Jong-un displaying one of North Korea’s new missiles on the TV news. Our son asked me what a war is. I gave my best explanation and his reply, undoubtedly garnered from preschool discussions about conflict resolution, was: “They don’t use words? They hit?”

Sort of, I told him. I did my best to explain what a weapon was, a description I suspect that many of my liberal mom friends would balk at. In our military community, however, such imagery is all around us. Real missiles and replicas are, for instance, often used as decorations lining the streets of naval bases or as lampposts or even wall hangings in military family households.

My son did his best to take it in. Later, at the waterfront near our home, he tossed a piece of his donut into the ocean and told me it was for his father who, he insisted, was under the

water “playing hide-and-seek.” Of course, he doesn’t connect the relentless training and deployments characteristic of our military life with the fighting of war itself, though our family feels the strain and implicit sense of danger in our daily lives.

In writing my recent book on the costs of this country’s post-9/11 wars, I learned about Afghan war widows who use heroin to make it morally possible to live amid grief and poverty after seeing their spouses and children killed; about NGO workers who leave their own families, facing threats of kidnapping and death, to aid refugees in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands. And I read about the experiences of the million war-wounded, ill, or traumatized American combat veterans, the sorts of patients my therapy will someday (I hope) help, who have sought health care and social support and so often come up desperately short.

As I do this, there’s always a low buzz of guilt somewhere in my gut, even about my own voluntary, unpaid work in support of other military spouses, even after I’ve relinquished travel assignments in my work as an activist that would have compromised my husband’s security clearance, even as I abide by harsh security restrictions in my personal life. I worry, in other words, about aiding the very military that, 18 years after the 9/11 attacks, still continues to rack up war’s costs without an end in sight.

The Costs of War at HomeI see firsthand trends affecting all

military communities in the United States. Deployments during these wars have come more frequently and often last longer than in past American wars. The specter of death by suicide hangs over all our lives, because everyone in such communities knows someone who has died that way or has threatened to do so.

In 2012, for the first time in our history, American service members began to die by suicide at higher rates than civilians. Today, they are more likely to take their own lives than to perish in combat. As anthropologist Kenneth MacLeish points out, military suicides are most prevalent among those who have deployed to our war zones just once or not at all, or who left the military involuntarily with a “bad paper discharge” or other than honorable discharges of some kind. Moreover, mental illness is rampant among active-duty military service members. According to the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness, in 2014 roughly one in four active-duty service members showed signs of mental illness, including mood and trauma disorders such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety (though this figure is conservative, given that the study did not include the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries among combat vets. Many soldiers seek relief from the stresses of training and combat through alcohol and other drugs and, in our military community, it’s common knowledge that seeking professional support for such problems can place you at risk of social stigma.

And don’t forget military families either. Training and fighting both take a toll on us, too. What modest figures we have on the subject make the point. For example, as anthropologists Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger point out in our book, among servicemembers who entered the military between 1999 and 2008, the more months spent deployed, the more likely they are to divorce, with the vast majority of such divorces occurring soon after returning from deployments.

Local reports of domestic violence in military communities suggest that the problems leading to such divorces are only growing, though documentation on the subject

is unreliable. It wasn’t until 2018 that, under pressure from Congress, the military made domestic violence a crime under its own legal code. Deployments of nine months or longer or frequent redeployments leave spouses at greater risk of depression, anxiety, and sleep problems, which, in turn, often affect the mental and physical health of their children as well.

Young children with deployed parents visit the doctor more frequently for behavioral health issues than those whose parents have not been deployed. Yet, as many spouses like me have discovered, community-based physicians are often unprepared to help in such situations, tending instead to blame the behavioral and mental-health issues of children on their parents or even on the children themselves, while not making referrals to services that could help (often, sadly, because there are none in the community).

“They Were as Hard Off as Me and I Was Killing Them”

Such collective problems are, of course, experienced individually and I’ve felt many of them in my own life. My spouse, for instance, departed for sea tours at moments when most of our family’s ducks were anything but in a row, whether it was a matter of childcare, work schedules, my health needs, or our other family obligations. Our son, for instance, has trouble sleeping because he was sad and scared for his dad, given what he hears in passing about Syria, North Korea, and – from other well-meaning military spouses and our own extended family – his own father’s attempts to “keep us safe” from unnamed others who might want to harm us.

I’m edgy and uneasy, knowing that my husband’s commander, a combat vet, has been angry at our family because I refused at one point to volunteer to work with a spouses group. When our house gets broken into, mid-deployment, and I’m alone with our toddler and pregnant, I wonder briefly if payback could have been involved before I dismiss the thought.

After I have our second child, a woman from the base with no mental-health or social-work training calls me weekly to ask about my baby’s health and safety. When I request that she stop, she refuses, telling me the same commander has ordered her to check in on each new mother in his command during deployment. I receive capitalized, hysterically punctuated emails from this woman warning all spouses not to jeopardize national security by talking to anyone about the submarine’s movements or, for that matter, emailing anything to our partners that they might find “distressing,” even details about a family member’s illness. Repeatedly, I am reminded that the U.S. is fighting a war on terror and our individual problems should never get in the way of that.

Things aren’t exactly a cakewalk between deployments either. It seems that, wherever I go, I find stigma, not support. For example, shortly after giving birth, I consulted a psychiatrist for help with post-partum depression. He was the only psychiatrist within 30 miles of our town who accepted military health insurance. Upon meeting me for the first time, he asked me to sign paperwork allowing him discretion to commit me to a psychiatric hospital “because military spouses often get psychotic during deployments.” I decided to tough it out rather than see him again.

And I try to keep in mind that my problems don’t add up to much, given the true costs of war out there. As a start, it’s a stretch to draw comparisons of any sort between an educated, white millennial family here and those who

directly pay war’s costs like combat vets or, above all, civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other American war zones. As my co-editor Catherine Lutz and others have shown, though, combat and the home front are connected in unexpected ways.

If you spend 18 years fighting wars you grossly underestimated how to pay for, if you embark upon those wars without first considering alternatives like diplomacy, if you assume that social support for this country’s wars and those fighting them will come from military families that are patriarchal ideals from the white 1950s, and if you imagine an enemy – terrorism – that could be anywhere at all any time at all, then you’re already in a battle that’s going to prove unwinnable and morally unnerving for everyone involved.

I obviously can’t speak for how people from groups in this country more vulnerable than mine think about our never-ending wars and their costs, but my guess is that at least some of them feel connections to those in the war zones far more intimately than I do, no matter how hard I try. I will never forget a neighbor of ours, a Mexican-American Vietnam vet whom I would find smoking on our street when I completed my daily runs. One evening, when we were chatting, he told me that what haunted him most was how many of the rural, poor Vietnamese he’d shot at looked more like him than most of the American officers in his unit. “They were as hard off as me and I was killing them,” he suddenly said, tears in

his eyes. Among veterans, he’s not alone in feeling an affinity for those on the other side.

On Bearing WitnessWhen Catherine Lutz, Neta Crawford, and

I first founded the Costs of War Project at Brown University in 2011, we took a close look at the kinds of public assumptions we wanted to upend. As a start, we wanted to show that, contrary to the Bush administration’s stated rationales for invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, Washington had not effectively protected human rights – not to safety, liberty, or for that matter freedom of speech – nor brought “democracy” with us into those distant lands. Instead, by then, those countries had already seen spikes in gender-based violence and the deterioration of the most basic protections that led to everything from the collapse of prenatal care to the killing of civilians to the kidnapping of journalists, aid workers, and academics.

We wanted to go beyond the Pentagon’s focus on the deaths of American soldiers and focus instead on the tens of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi military deaths that had taken place and especially the soaring death rates of civilians in those lands. And, of course, we wanted to show that our grim wars should not be described in sterile terms via the usual imagery of families embracing upon a smiling service-member’s return or the by-then-familiar photographs of neat coffins draped with flags being carried out of planes by uniformed service members as spouses (usually white, female, and non-disabled) looked on sadly.

That, we knew, was not the essence of America’s already ongoing war on terror. My colleagues and I wanted people in this country to refocus on the staggering death and injury rates that only grew as the years passed, the ever-more-crippling ways in which all sides learned to kill and injure, and the long-term mental-health effects of arduous family separations.

A therapist mentor once taught me that, when working with veterans who have PTSD, I should, as he put it, “Ask them to start their story a little before they think it began and have them keep going even after they think it’s over.” My colleagues and I wanted to do that when it came to our wars, focusing not just on the obvious newsworthy photographs that tended to appeal to the American psyche, but on the missing context in which those photographs were taken. That’s the best way I can think of to describe the purpose of our new book (and our future work). None of us should stop trying to refocus in that way, not until America’s war story is declared over – and not even then, given how long the costs of war are likely to take to play out.

One sunny afternoon in May 2011, as Catherine Lutz and I sat in her office in Brown’s Anthropology Department sifting through media images for the initial launch of the Costs of War website, we happened upon a video of a screaming young Iraqi child with open burn wounds covering his face and body, a relative clutching him in her arms as they hustled through a crowd. Gunshots and explosions were audible in the background. The before, the after, the neighborhood where the violence was taking place, the weapons used, who was even fighting whom – none of that was evident from the clip.

By Andrea Mazzarino and Tom Engelhardt

NOVEMBER 27, 20196I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

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6/9/98نوبت دوم 5/9/98تهران تایمز نوبت اول



ANTIWAR — The manufacture and sale of “transparent armor” to the Department of Defense to protect personnel operating military vehicles has long been a mature industry in the United States. When the Department of Defense issued a series of U.S. Army contracts for windows to be in-stalled in “mine-resistant ambush-protect-ed” all-terrain vehicles known as “MRAPs” in 2014, it wasn’t seeking cutting-edge, technological advances. Rather, it want-ed competent contractors to bid (through “source approval requests”, or SARS) on making transparent armor according to a government-developed and owned “secret recipe.” This item was so routinely procured, inventoried and installed that it even had its own “stock number.”

For the newly opened Israeli subsidiary Oran Safety Glass in Greensville County, there were only two major challenges it would face if it won competitive bidding for the contracts. The first was that the US government owned not only the “recipe” but also specifications about the threats against which the glass would protect as well as the ballistic testing procedures for the glass. This is US government classified information at the SECRET level. Oran Safety Glass in 2014 did not have an officially designated “facility clearance” for handling such clas-sified information. It also had no way to efficiently procure the materials needed to produce transparent armor to the specifi-cations in the government’s “secret recipe.” Neither of those obstacles prevented OSG from bidding on and lowballing US industry leaders. OSG won five contracts between October 2014 and 2015.

In 2015, one of those US industry leaders, Schott Government Services, contacted the Army and requested production control bal-listics testing of OSG’s shipments. The Army soon discovered that most of the OSG man-ufactured armor was “out of specification.” Alarmed, the Army formally notified OSG that such products manufactured by means other than its own “recipe” would be considered unauthorized and non-compliant.

OSG responded that it was producing a different recipe after it developed internal concerns about the availability and quality of M-ATV compliant raw materials. The M-ATV is a vehicle developed by the Osh-kosh Corporation for the MRAP program. OSG argued that after performing tests on its own “recipe” it found that its already-de-livered, out-of-spec products produced out of compliance with the contracts “did not affect performance” and that it had even submitted its own recipe to the Army as a SAR for future sales.

The US Army was placed under enormous pressure by OSG’s actions. Some of OSG’s products had already been installed on vehicles and any supply chain issues would delay its supply lines. The product was desperately needed. That much is known with certainty. What is not known is whether OSG rallied any friends within Congress, the Department of Defense, or elsewhere to cut a deal with the buyer. What is certain is that a sweetheart deal was indeed made.

On June 4, 2015 the US Army approved OSG’s new recipe, which relieved the press-ing problem of the already received and installed transparent glass armor. The Army didn’t cancel any of OSG’s contracts.

However, on June 24, 2015 it ordered that any future OSG deliveries would have to comply with the original US government owned “secret recipe” specified in the con-tract. It also ordered OSG to make cash and in-kind payments to cover additional government costs incurred for handling and processing “nonconforming goods previously delivered.” But it allowed OSG to extend deadlines on “all outstanding deliveries.”

OSG’s competitors were livid, and Schott even sued over the contract. But the litigant could not convince the presiding judge that there was any prejudice in the actual issu-ance of the contract. The legal standard for prejudice is establishing that if it had not been for a procurement process error, they could have won the contract. Since Schott was—unlike OSG—not low-balling and intending to manufacture and deliver non-compliant products, their prices were so high that the legal standard intended to prevent prejudicial awards could not protect them.

The fact that particular contracts are for MRAPs is a government secret. So, the five contracts cannot be identified from within publicly accessible listings of payments that have exact dollar amounts related to con-tracts awarded to OSG. However, military contract databases do reveal that in 2016, in an uncharacteristic move, OSG repaid the US government $4.7 million. It is not known if any American military personnel whose lives depended on non-compliant OSG armor, ever paid the ultimate price over Oran’s contracting malfeasance.

2009-2018 annual OSG revenue from U.S. government military con-tracts in steep decline ($ million) Feder-al Procurement Data System

From the perspective of US taxpayers and residents of Greensville County in Virginia, there are a number of problems with the way OSG does business that are unique to its status as a recipient of massive amounts of funding orchestrated by the Virginia Israel Advisory Board. VIAB is presently the only taxpayer funded state government Israel export promotion council in the US Some VIAB board members hold equity stakes and positions as corporate officers in Is-raeli companies or joint ventures seeking

to start operations in Virginia. Others are long-term officers of the American Isra-el Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other national Israel affinity and lobbying organizations.

Most news reports about Oran portray the opposite of reality. One year 2019 re-port, from the Area Development Online news organization ran the headline, “Oran Safety Glass Expands Greensville County, Virginia, Manufacturing Complex.” A far more accurate headline would have been, “Greensville County Expands Oran Safety Glass Complex.” Initially VIAB and Oran played every angle to squeeze millions in funding out of the state and county, all so Oran could be well-positioned to submit its fraudulent bids for US military contracts. Oran is now one of VIAB’s most cherished projects, and is prominently featured in its promotional materials, as mentioned in VIAB meeting minutes:

We are marketing ourselves in Isra-el, [and] created a brochure. Leveraging United Airlines direct flight[s]. Using mass media organizations. We are focused on doing a campaign geared to the Kibbutz industry. A lot of innovation in water and technology has come from that niche (i.e. Drip Irrigation and desalinization). We have one kibbutz business that came to Virginia, Oran Safety Glass in Emporia, currently employing 150 people. They sell their glass to the military and Caterpillar tractor, they sell back to Israel through foreign military funding, and to the ci-vilian market. A tiny Kibbutz company has expanded exponentially. Sometimes it takes a known person that is trusted to guide these small companies to take interest in the US.

Leading mass media organizations do factor heavily in VIAB’s self-promotion. The Washington Post featured customers of Sun Tribe Solar as alternative ener-gy leaders, without mentioning that the companies that own it do business in Israeli occupied territories. While the “known person” remains unknown,” VIAB brought along five major campaign contributors on former Governor Terry McAuliffe’s 2016 delegation to Israel. During the trip Virginia representatives signed a Memorandum Of Understanding

(PDF) turning Virginia Tech into Sabra Dip-ping Company’s uncompensated US sales and marketing division while pledging additional funding to Israeli companies.

Oran’s state subsidies from Virginia were delivered in three phases. The first, they funded Oran startup operations in Vir-ginia, and then two expansion phases as defense contracts were expected to pour in. In July of 2006, a performance agreement was executed between Oran, the Virgin-ia Economic Development Partnership, the Tobacco Commission and Greensville County. The parties agreed that in exchange for government support OSG would make a $4.1 million capital investment to start production in Virginia and create 45 new jobs within 30 months.

In 2007 the Greensville County Indus-trial Development Authority leased five and a third acres of land and an 82,800 square foot industrial building for ten years to OSG. The County obtained grants to perform a nearly $600,000 upgrade to the facility, including two separate To-bacco Commission grants in the amounts of $100,000 and $125,000, a $50,000 Emporia/Greensville Industrial Develop-ment Corporate grant, as well as $125,000 from the Governor’s Opportunity Fund. The project also applied for a Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development “Virginia Enterprise Zone Real Property Improvement Grant” of $125,000.

Greensville County even agreed to go into debt to bring in OSG by securing a loan for $400,000 from the Virginia Small Business Finance Authority to cover any “Phase I” cost

shortfalls. There were cascading effects. Oth-er entities such as the Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative also agreed to go into debt by up to $400,000 to build out infrastructure necessary to supply electricity to OSG. The county also waived water and sewer connection fees in the amount of $20,000 and $4,300 in building permitting fees. The government parties showered another quarter million in “job creation grants,” “training and recruitment incentive grants” and free classroom space for “pre-employment testing and training” to assist in the creation of a workforce for OSG. On December 17, 2017, the Greensville County Industrial Development Authority fi-nally “sold” the manufacturing facility which it carried on its books as a $1,140,000 asset, to Oran Safety Glass for a price equivalent to the outstanding loan balance on the property, or $436,644.

Excluding military contracts, Oran is known to have received close to $3 mil-lion in government economic development subsidies. In return, Oran was supposed to provide jobs with solid pay and a boost to tax revenues, but there is no independent evidence that it is meeting any of its per-formance benchmarks. An examination of records released by Greensville County under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act reveals the county has only once attempted to claw back funds over non-performance and has little incentive to or capability to probe too deeply. However, with Oran’s military contracts in steep decline, local stakeholders could soon begin to press Oran’s government subsidizers to respond as to whether Oran has jeopardized the county’s financial viability.

Perhaps the issue of greatest concern to Virginians, other Americans and the rest of the world are the incentives created by OSG and other Israeli military contractors VIAB is herding into Virginia. Ever more military conflict in the Middle East is good for them. Less conflict is bad. With military contracts at Oran in seeming eclipse, the likely result of Pentagon mistrust of Oran’s past contracting practices, there is new pressure on VIAB, their fellow operatives at AIPAC and the wider Israel affinity ecosystem that supports Israeli military contractors, and the government of Israel to do something. Israel clearly has the ability to create new demand for weapons production that even top-tier US military contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin do not. What could be better than for the US to respond to additional Israeli demands for on-the-ground military action against Israel’s rivals? Or sending more heavy armor into Syria? Or launching new armored ground campaigns against Iran or even inside Iraq that benefit Israel, Oran Safety Glass, and the new horde of other Israeli military contractors streaming into Virginia under VIAB’s guidance?

Fraud at Israeli military contractor oran safety glass

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PARTS FOR “COOPER-BESSEMER” GAS TURBINE TYPE COBERRA-182 SERIAL NOS. SN-401.2.3.4.5 AND 6 RT RP FITTED TO COMPRESSOR TYPE RB7-6B.SERIAL NOS 1045-48-51-53 RC

60 NOS


Kouy-e-Fadaeian Islam (New Site), Ahvaz, Iran Tel. No.: 061 341 23455Fax No.: 061 3445 7437




NOVEMBER 27, 20198I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

PRIVATE PARKING LOTJahan Hotel (Exelsior) – Rahimzade Alley – Taleqani

Crossroads – Valiasr St. Tell: 66476855

I n d i a n R e s t a u r a n t

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S C I E N C ENONEMBER 27, 2019

Thousands of planets could be orbiting around black holes just like we orbit the Sun, according to scientists.

Researchers have long thought that planets are formed from pieces of fluffy dust that settle in a disc around a young star. Those protoplanetary discs then form into planets, like our own Earth.

But new research suggests that it might be possible for them to form not around their own sun but instead around a black hole. They might come into existence in far more extreme environments, new work suggests, and a black hole could be home to thousands of planets.

“With the right conditions, planets could be formed even in harsh environments, such as around a black hole,” says Keiichi Wada, a professor at Kagoshima University in Japan.

Rather than exploring the normal protoplanetary discs, researchers looked at heavy discs around supermassive black holes that sit in the heart of galaxies. Those

discs can be incredibly vast, and so could the planetary system that grows out of them.

“Our calculations show that tens of thousands of planets with 10 times the mass of the Earth could be formed around 10 light-years from a black hole,” said Eiichiro Kokubo, a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan who studies planet formation, in a statement. “Around black holes there might exist planetary systems of astonishing scale.”

Just one of the discs around a supermassive black hole can have as much as 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, in the form of dust, the researchers suggest. That is a billion times the mass of a protoplanetary disc.

That material could eventually form into planets, the researchers found, over the course of hundreds of millions of years.

There is no way of detecting such planetary systems around a black hole, and so no way to know for sure whether planets of this kind have yet formed.

(Source: The Independent)

Thousands of planets could be orbiting around black holes

Delays, cost overruns by Boeing and SpaceX could ice out NASA from the ISS, officials warnGovernment oversight officials issued a scathing report about delays in NASA’s commercial crew program, warning that Boeing and SpaceX are facing “significant safety and technical challenges” with their spacecraft — which could leave NASA astronauts stranded on the ground next year.

The report, published Thursday by NASA’s Office of Inspector General, also said that the space agency unnecessarily allocated $187 million to Boeing. As a result, the OIG estimates that NASA will pay roughly $90 million per seat to fly its astronauts on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.

That’s more than the space agency has paid Russia for use of its Soyuz capsule, which the United States has relied on to ferry people to and from the International Space Station since 2011. Soyuz seats have cost NASA up to $86 million, according to OIG, and $55.4 million on average.

OIG estimates SpaceX’s Crew Dragon will cost NASA about $55 million per seat for the first six missions.

NASA and Boeing both pushed back on the assertion that Boeing was awarded additional money unnecessarily. NASA said it’s currently working to purchase more seats from Russia to ensure its astronauts won’t be left without a ride to space next year if the commercial crew program encounters more delays.

NASA tapped SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to build vehicles capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The two companies were awarded fixed-price contracts worth $2.6 billion and $4.2 billion respectively, and both spacecraft were slated for completion by 2017.

SpaceX and Boeing told CNN Business Friday that they now expect to be ready for their first crewed missions in early 2020.

In a statement, Boeing disputed the OIG claim that seats aboard Starliner will cost $90 million. That calculation was based only on what NASA has agreed to pay for the first six flights, and for NASA to pay a premium for those missions when Boeing agreed to speed up Starliner production in 2016 to meet the space agency’s scheduling needs.

“The final prices agreed to by NASA and Boeing were reviewed and approved by numerous NASA officials at the Kennedy Space Center and Headquarters, culminating in a 29-page price justification memorandum for the record,” NASA said in a letter responding to the OIG report.

But OIG’s report argues that NASA allocated the extra funds based on “flawed assumptions.” Essentially, the oversight officials say, Boeing was paid to help fill a schedule gap that was, in part, the company’s own fault.

Shortly after that, the OIG report says, the space agency purchased more seats aboard Russia’s spacecraft to close that same schedule gap--and bought those seats from Boeing. (The company had the right to sell Soyuz seats as part of a settlement Boeing previously reached with a Russian manufacturer.)

(Source: CNN)

Clear, conductive coating could protect advanced solar cells, touch screens

MIT researchers have improved on a transparent, conductive coating material, producing a tenfold gain in its electrical conductivity. When incorporated into a type of high-efficiency solar cell, the material increased the cell’s efficiency and stability.

The new findings are reported in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT postdoc Meysam Heydari Gharahcheshmeh, professors Karen Gleason and Jing Kong, and three others.

“The goal is to find a material that is electrically conductive as well as transparent,” Gleason explains, which would be “useful in a range of applications, including touch screens and solar cells.” The material most widely used today for such purposes is known as ITO, for indium titanium oxide, but that material is quite brittle and can crack after a period of use, she says.

Gleason and her co-researchers improved a flexible version of a transparent, conductive material two years ago and published their findings, but this material still fell well short of matching ITO’s combination of high optical transparency and electrical conductivity. The new, more ordered material, she says, is more than 10 times better than the previous version.

The combined transparency and conductivity is measured in units of Siemens per centimeter. ITO ranges from 6,000 to 10,000, and though nobody expected a new material to match those numbers, the goal of the research was to find a material that could reach at least a value of 35. The earlier publication exceeded that by demonstrating a value of 50, and the new material has leapfrogged that result, now clocking in at 3,000; the team is still working on fine-tuning the process to raise that further.

The high-performing flexible material, an organic polymer known as PEDOT, is deposited in an ultrathin layer just a few nanometers thick, using a process called oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD). This process results in a layer where the structure of the tiny crystals that form the polymer are all perfectly aligned horizontally, giving the material its high conductivity. Additionally, the oCVD method can decrease the stacking distance between polymer chains within the crystallites, which also enhances electrical conductivity.

To demonstrate the material’s potential usefulness, the team incorporated a layer of the highly aligned PEDOT into a perovskite-based solar cell. Such cells are considered a very promising alternative to silicon because of their high efficiency and ease of manufacture, but their lack of durability has been a major drawback. With the new oCVD aligned PEDOT, the perovskite’s efficiency improved and its stability doubled.

(Source: Science Daily)

New metallic material for flexible soft robots

Ultrafast quantum simulations: A new twist to an old approach

‘Origami robots› are state-of-the-art soft and flexible robots that are being tested for use in various applications including drug delivery in human bodies, search and rescue missions in disaster environments and humanoid robotic arms.

Because these robots need to be flexible, they are often made from soft materials such as paper, plastic and rubber. To be functional, sensors and electrical components are often added on top, but these add bulk to the devices.

Now, a team of NUS researchers has developed a novel method of creating a new metal-based material for use in these soft robots.

Combining metals such as platinum with burnt paper (ash), the new material has enhanced capabilities while maintaining the foldability and lightweight features of traditional paper and plastic. In fact, the new material is half as light as paper, which also makes it more power efficient.

These characteristics make this material a strong candidate for making flexible and light prosthetic limbs which can be as much as 60 per cent lighter than their conventional counterparts. Such prosthetics can provide real-time strain sensing to give feedback on how much they are flexing, giving users finer control and immediate information -- all without the need for external sensors which would otherwise add unwanted weight to the prosthetic.

This light-weight metallic backbone is at least three times lighter than conventional materials used to fabricate origami robots. It is also more power-efficient, enabling origami robots to work faster using 30 per cent less energy. Furthermore, the novel material is fire-resistant, making it suitable for fabricating robots that work in harsh environments as it can withstand burning at about 800°C for up to 5 minutes.

As an added advantage, the novel conductive material has geothermal heating capabilities on-demand -- sending a voltage through the material causes it to heat up, which helps to prevent icing damage when a robot works in a cold environment. These properties can be used in the creation of light, flexible search-and-rescue robots that can enter hazardous areas while providing real-time feedback and communication.

The metal-based material is produced through a new process developed by the team called ‹graphene oxide-enabled templating synthesis›. Cellulose paper is first soaked into a graphene oxide solution, before dipping it into a solution made of

metallic ions such as platinum. The material is then burned in an inert gas, argon, at 800°C and then at 500°C in air.

The final product is a thin layer of metal — 90 micrometers , or 0.09mm — made up of 70 per cent platinum and 30 per cent amorphous carbon (ash) that is flexible enough to bend, fold, and stretch. This significant research breakthrough was published in the scientific journal Science Robotics on 28 August 2019. Other metals such as gold and silver can also be used.

Team leader Assistant Professor Chen Po-Yen used a cellulose template cut out in the shape of a phoenix for his research. “We are inspired by the mythical creature. Just like the phoenix, it can be burnt to ash and reborn to become more powerful than before,” said Asst Prof Chen, from NUS Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

The team›s material can function as mechanically stable, soft, and conductive backbones that equips robots with strain sensing and communication capabilities without the need for external electronics. Being conductive means the material acts as its own wireless antenna, allowing it to communicate with a remote operator or other robots without the need for external communication modules. This expands the scope of origami robots, such as working in high-risk environments (e.g. chemical spills and fire disaster) as remote-control untethered robots or functioning as artificial muscles or humanoid robotic arms.

“We experimented with different electrically conductive materials to finally derive a unique combination that achieves optimal strain sensing and wireless communication capabilities. Our invention therefore expands the library of unconventional materials for the fabrication of advanced robots,” said Mr. Yang Haitao, doctoral student at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the first author of the study.

In the next steps of their research, Asst Prof Chen and his team are looking at adding more functions to the metallic backbone. One promising direction is to incorporate electrochemically active materials to fabricate energy storage devices such that the material itself is its own battery, allowing for the creation of self-powered robots. The team is also experimenting with other metals such as copper, which will lower the cost of the material›s production.


Billions of tiny interactions occur between thousands of particles in every piece of matter in the blink of an eye. Simulating these interactions in their full dynamics was said to be elusive but has now been made possible by new work of researchers from Oxford and Warwick.

In doing so, they have paved the way for new insights into the complex mutual interactions between the particles in extreme environments such as at the heart of large planets or laser nuclear fusion.

Researchers at the University of Warwick and University of Oxford have developed a new way to simulate quantum systems of many particles, that allows for the investigation of the dynamic properties of quantum systems fully coupled to slowly moving ions.

Effectively, they have made the simulation of the quantum electrons so fast that it could run extremely long without restrictions and the effect of their motion on the movement of the slow ions would be visible.

Reported in the journal Science Advances, it is based on a long-known alternative formulation of quantum mechanics (Bohm dynamics) which the scientists have now empowered to allow to study the dynamics of large quantum systems.

Many quantum phenomena have been studied for single or just a few interacting particles as large complex quantum systems overpower scientists’ theoretical and computational capabilities to make predictions. This is complicated by the vast difference in timescale the different particle species act on: ions evolve thousands of times more slowly than electrons due to their larger mass. To overcome this problem, most methods involve decoupling electrons and ions and ignoring the dynamics of their interactions -- but this severely limits our knowledge on quantum dynamics.

To develop a method that allows scientists to account for the full electron-ion interactions, the researchers revived an old alternative formulation of quantum mechanics developed by David Bohm. In quantum mechanics, one needs to know the wave function of a particle. It turns out that describing it by the mean trajectory and a phase, as done by Bohm, is very advantageous. However, it took an additional suit of approximations and many tests to speed up the calculations as dramatic as required. Indeed, the new methods demonstrated an increase of speed by more than a factor of 10,000 (four orders

of magnitude) yet is still consistent with previous calculations for static properties of quantum systems.

The new approach was then applied to a simulation of warm dense matter, a state between solids and hot plasmas, that is known for its inherent coupling of all particle types and the need for a quantum description. In such systems, both the electrons and the ions can have excitations in the form of waves and both waves will influence each other. Here, the new approach can show its strength and determined the influence of the quantum electrons on the waves of the classical ions while the static properties were proven to agree with previous data.

Many-body quantum systems are the core of many scientific problem ranging from the complex biochemistry in our bodies to the behavior of matter inside of large planets or even technological challenges like high-temperature superconductivity or fusion energy which demonstrates the possible range of applications of the new approach.

Prof Gianluca Gregori (Oxford), who led the investigation, said: “Bohm quantum mechanics has often been treated with skepticism and controversy. In its original formulation, however, this is just a different reformulation of quantum mechanics. The advantage in employing this formalism is that different approximations become simpler to implement and this can increase the speed and accuracy of simulations involving many-body systems.”

Dr. Dirk Gericke from the University of Warwick, who assisted the design of the new computer code, said: “With this huge increase of numerical efficiency, it is now possible to follow the full dynamics of fully interacting electron-ion systems. This new approach thus opens new classes of problems for efficient solutions, in particular, where either the system is evolving or where the quantum dynamics of the electrons has a significant effect on the heavier ions or the entire system.

“This new numerical tool will be a great asset when designing and interpreting experiments on warm dense matter. From its results, and especially when combined with designated experiments, we can learn much about matter in large planets and for laser fusion research. However, I believe its true strength lies in its universality and possible applications in quantum chemistry or strongly driven solids.”


19 more galaxies mysteriously missing dark matter have been foundA smattering of small galaxies appear to be missing a whole lot of dark matter.

Most of a typical galaxy is invisible. This elusive mass, known as dark matter, seems to be an indispensable ingredient for creating a galaxy — it’s the scaffolding that attracts normal matter — yet reveals itself only as an extra gravitational tug on gas and stars.

But now, researchers have found 19 dwarf galaxies — all much smaller than the Milky Way — that defy this common wisdom. These newly identified outliers have much less dark

matter than expected. The finding, published November 25 in Nature Astronomy, more than quintuples the known population of dark-matter renegades, adding fuel to an already simmering mystery.

“We are not sure why and how these galaxies form,” says Qi Guo, an astrophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Typical dwarf galaxies concentrate dark matter far more than their larger cousins, she notes. Their smaller size leads to weaker gravity, which has trouble holding on to tenuous clouds of gas. That usually shifts the balance

of mass in dwarf galaxies away from normal matter and toward dark matter.

“This new class of galaxy is straining our ability to explain all galaxies in one cohesive framework,” says Kyle Oman, an astrophysicist at Durham University in England who was not involved in this research.

In 2016, Oman and his colleagues identified two galaxies that appeared to be missing dark matter. In short order, two more oddballs turned up.

(Source: sciencenews.org)


HERITAGE & TOURISM NOVEMBER 27, 2019

H E R I T A G Ed e s k

TEHRAN — Main dome of the Monastery of Saint

Thaddeus, a UNESCO-registered property in northwest Iran, has recently been restored successfully, IRNA reported on Tuesday.

The cone-shaped dome was brought back to its former glory as part of a project which started this summer in accordance with the UNESCO standards and under the supervision of cultural heritage experts.

“Prior to commencement of the restoration work an outline [proposal] for both the restoration and its masonry material were submitted to UNESCO experts for approval,” a provincial tourism official said.

“We take no action arbitrarily and without taking the advice of experts,” Sherli Avadian, the director of Iran’s Armenian monastic ensembles, said in September.

“The [replacement] stones that have been used are similar in quality and color to the original. Some 80 percent of the monastery’s stones are white,” Avadian explained.

In the [Iranian calendar] year 1395 (March 2016-17) and following some meetings with UNESCO representatives and their consecutive inspections, a comprehensive plan, consisting of five phases, was finally ratified for restoring the Monastery of Saint Thaddeus.

Also known as the Qareh Klise (“the Black Church”), the monastery is one of the oldest surviving Christian monuments

in the country. It is situated in West Azarbaijan province, some 20 kilometers form Maku, adjacent to the borders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

Together with St. Stepanos Monastery and the Chapel of Dzordzor, Qareh Klise was

placed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2008 under the name “Armenian Monastic Ensembles of Iran”.

All the three sites are located in West Azarbaijan and are of high significance from historical and cultural perspectives. They bear

credible testimony to interchanges with the ancient regional societies in particular the Byzantine, Orthodox and Persian. UNESCO says that they bear examples of outstanding universal value of the Armenian architectural and decorative traditions.



UNESCO-tagged monastery’s main dome restored

Handmade carpets, tableau rugs to go on show in Tehran

TEHRAN — Domestic producers and ex-hibitors of handwoven Persian carpets, rugs

and tableau rugs will showcase their works at an exhibit, which opens today at the Niavaran Cultural-Historical Com-plex in northern Tehran.

A total of 28 manufacturers and producers of Persian carpets, rugs and tableau rugs, who are from various provinces, cities and towns including Tabriz, Isfahan, Qom, Kashan, Ardakan, Sirjan, Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari, Golestan, and Naein, are scheduled to take part in the event that will be running through December 6, IRIB reported on Tuesday.

Persian carpets are sought after internationally for their delicate designs and good quality. A medallion pattern is arguably the most characteristic feature of all types of Persian rugs. However, there is tremendous variation in the shapes and sizes of the medallions as well as the way they are used in various rugs. It’s not wrong to say that no two rugs will have the same medallion layout.

Over 5,397,000 tons of Iranian carpets, worth $424.451 million, were exported to over 70 countries with the U.S. standing on top of the importers list, during the past fiscal year (ended March 20, 2019). Germany, the UK, Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Russia, Portugal, Denmark, Swe-den and Norway as well as Hungary, Romania, Poland and Ireland are major importers of Iranian carpet.

‘Historic’ storm to disrupt holiday travel as 20 million people face brutal weather

Millions of Thanksgiving travelers in the U.S. will get walloped this week by several storms, including a dangerous system threat-ening parts of the West Coast.

From California to Michigan, more than 20 million people are under winter weather advisories, watches or warnings, CNN meteorologist Dave Hennen said. And we’re still 26 days from the official start of winter.

A “historic” storm is heading towards southwest Oregon and northwest California Tuesday and Wednesday, the National Weather Service said.

The storm is currently forecast to rival the strength of a Category 1 hurricane and pack wind gusts up to 74 mph -- stronger than hurricane force, CNN Meterologist Judson Jones said.

The pressure could drop to a record low for November and all-time for the region, the NWS said.

(Source: CNN)


Gunung Mulu National Park

Gunung Mulu National Park, situated in the Malaysian State of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, is outstanding both for its high biodiversity and for its karst features.

The park is dominated by Gunung Mulu, a 2,376 m-high sandstone pinnacle and the property is the most studied tropical karst area in the world.

The geological Melinau Formation contains a remark-able concentration of caves, revealing a geological history of over more than 1.5 million years.

High in endemism, Gunung Mulu National Park provides significant natural habitat for a wide range of plant and animal species, both above and below ground.

The 52,865 ha park contains seventeen vegetation zones, exhibiting some 3,500 species of vascular plants. Its palm species are exceptionally rich, with 109 species in twenty genera recorded, making it one of the world’s richest sites for palm species.

Providing protection for a substantial area of Borneo’s pri-mary tropical forest and a home for a high diversity of species, including many endemics and threatened species, the large cave passages and chambers provide a major wildlife spectacle in terms of millions of cave swiftlets and bats.

The property is home to one of the world’s finest exam-ples of the collapse process in karstic terrain and provides outstanding scientific opportunities to study theories on the origins of cave faunas. The deeply-incised canyons, wild rivers, rainforest-covered mountains, spectacular limestone pinnacles, cave passages and decorations found within the property produce dramatic landscapes and breathtaking scenery that is without rival.

(Source: UNESCO)

ROUND THE GLOBE

A view of the Monastery of Saint Thaddeus, which is under restoration in November 2019.

Egypt hails rare find of mummified lion cubs, cats and crocodiles

Egypt has unveiled an unprecedented discovery of dozens of mummified sacred animals, including cats, crocodiles and two lion cubs, found during the excavation of a tomb of a royal priest.

Khaled El-Enany, Egypt’s minister of antiquities, said Saturday the find dated back to the seventh century BC and could fill “a museum by itself.”

The discovery included 25 wooden boxes decorated with hi-eroglyphics filled with mummified cats and 75 boxes of wooden and bronze cat statues.

Mostafa Waziri, secretary gen-eral of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that the most distinguished finds were five mum-mified big cats. A CT-scan carried out on two of these mummies revealed they were lion cubs, according to a Facebook post from the Ministry of Antiquities. He said further study would be carried out for more details.

While mummified cats, which were kept as pets as well as re-

vered in ancient Egypt, are not uncommon, lion mummies are much more unusual.

French Egyptologist Alain Zivie had previously uncovered mummified male lion near the same site, El-Enany said, revealing their sacred status in ancient Egypt.

Other highlights included a large scarab beetle made of stone hidden inside a wooden box, two small size scarabs made of wood and sand-stone; three statues of crocodiles with the remains of small mum-mified crocodiles inside.

Dozens of statues of ancient Egyp-tian deities were also unearthed, in-cluding 73 bronze statuettes depicting god Osiris. The ministry said archeolo-gists found “meticulously mummified” scarab beetles along with mummies of cobras and crocodiles.

The animal mummies and other finds were unearthed at the Saqqara necropolis near the Giza pyramids, south of Cairo.

(Source: CNN)

TEHRAN — A life-size replica of the skull of an elephant, which is estimated

to have lived some two million years ago, was unveiled at Zanjan University on Sunday.

The replica was constructed by Iranian experts and university students from original fossilized fragments and remains that were earlier unearthed in northwestern Ardebil province, Fars reported.

Director of Zanjan University’s information center, Ali

Sepehri, said that the constructed fossil was unveiled to mark national day of fossils on October 25, the report added.

The original fragments were found in September, Sepehri said, adding, they will be put on show at a museum in Ardebil in the near future.

Based on an opinion of Professor Majid Mirzaei Ata-Abadi from Zanjan University, the skull fossil is of Mastodon family which had been three meters in height and ten tons in weight.

TEHRAN — Italian, Japanese and Ira-nian engineering firms are set to join

hands in a project for reinforcing and strengthening the “Ancient Iran” section of the National Museum of Iran, director of the museum said on Sunday, Fars reported.

Jebrael Nokandeh added that cultural heritage officials from Italy and Japan will also take part in a construction project to retrofit the museum, the report said.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Nokandeh pointed that coop-eration between Iran and Italy in the fields of archaeology and cultural heritage dates back to 60 years.

The National Museum of Iran is somewhat chock-full of

priceless relics that represent various eras of the country’s rich history. Its structure was completed in 1928 based on the design by French architect André Godard who was also an archaeologist and historian of French and Middle Eastern Art.

The façade interweaves some Sassanian-era principles of Iranian architecture notably the grand iwan-style entrance embellished with a lavish brickwork.

Massive and tiny statutes, ceramics, pottery, stone figures and carvings as well as metal objects, textile remains, and some rare books and coins are amongst objects that build up the innumerable collections inside.

Iranian experts build replica of two-million-year-old elephant skull

Italian, Japanese expertise to help reinforce Tehran museum

An exterior view of the National Museum of Iran

Statues of cats are displayed after the announcement of a new discovery carried out by an Egyptian archaeological team in Giza’s Saqqara necropolis, south of the capital Cairo, on November 23, 2019. (Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images)




Drilling Company




Second Announcement

Subject of Tender: Tender No. Description

FP/20-98/031 P/ F: KOOMEY AIR ELECTRIC ACCUMULATOR FP/020-98/047 P/F: “RENHE”WELL LOGGING UNIT FP/020-98/101 P/F:CAMERON GATE VALVE FP/020-98/102 P/F:LANZHOU DRAWWOKS FP/020-98/103 P/F:JEREHTWIN FP/020-98/105 P/F:HOTWELL LOGGING FP/020-98/142 P/F:NATIONAL DRAWWORKS FP/020-98/143 P/F:S.C.R BRAKE CONTOR FP/020-98/144 P/F:DRECO ROTARY TABLE

Tender descriptions:

Estimated value (Rial/Euro)



4,221,040,000 (Rial) Tender No. :FP/20-98/031 Indent No.:08-22-9745037 3,220,187

National Iranian Drilling Company 10,572,500,000 (Rial) Tender No.: FP/20-98/047

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We are referring to the Russophobic neocon Deep Staters who have trooped before Adam’s Schiff Show to pillory POTUS for daring to look into the Ukrainian stench that engulfs the Imperial City – a rank odor that is owing to their own ar-rogant meddling in the the internal affairs of that woebegone country.

This time it was Dr. Fiona Hill who sanctimo-niously advised the House committee that there is nothing to see on the Ukraine front that involved any legitimate matter of state; it was just the Donald and his tinfoil hat chums jeopardizing the serious business of protecting the national security by in-jecting electioneering into relations with Ukraine.

She warned Republicans that legitimizing an unsubstantiated theory that Kyiv undertook a con-certed campaign to interfere in the election – a claim the president pushed repeatedly for Ukraine to investigate – played into Russia’s hands.

“In the course of this investigation,” Dr. Hill testified before the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, “I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

Folks, we are getting just plain sick and tired of this drumbeat of lies, misdirection and smug condescension by Washington payrollers like Fiona Hill. No Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election?Exactly what hay wagon does she think we fell off from?

Or better still, ask Paul Manafort who will spend his golden years in the Big House owing to an August 2016 leak to the New York Times about an alleged “black book” which recorded payments he had received from his work as an advisor to the Ukrainian political party of former president Yanakovych. As we have seen, the latter had been removed from office by a Washington instigated coup in February 2014.

By its own admission, this story came from the Ukrainian government and the purpose was clear as a bell: Namely, to undermine the Trump presidential campaign and force Manafort out of his months-old role as campaign chairman – a role that had finally brought some professional management to the Donald’s helter-skelter cam-paign for the nation’s highest office.

In the event, this well-timed bombshell worked, and in short order Manafort resigned, leaving the disheveled Trump campaign in the lurch:

government investigators examining secret records have found Manafort’s name, as well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of Mr. Manafort’s main client, former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.

In addition, criminal prosecutors are inves-tigating a group of offshore shell companies….. Among the hundreds of murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partner-ship put together by Mr. Manafort and a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Manafort’s involvement with moneyed inter-ests in Russia and Ukraine had previously come to light. But as American relationships there become a rising issue in the presidential campaign – from Mr. Trump’s favorable statements about Mr. Putin and his annexation of Crimea to the suspected Russian hacking of Democrats’ emails – an examination of Mr. Manafort’s activities offers new details of how he mixed politics and business out of public view and benefited from powerful interests now under scrutiny by the new government in Kiev.

The bolded lines in the NYT story above tell you exactly where this was coming from. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau had been set up by an outfit called “AntAC”, which was jointly funded by George Soros and the Obama State Department. And there can be little doubt that the Donald’s accurate view at the time – that Crimea’s reunification with Mother Russia after a 60 year hiatus which had been ordered by the former Soviet Union’s Pre-sidium – was unwelcome in Kiev and among the Washington puppeteers who had put it in power.

For want of doubt that the Poroshenko gov-ernment was in the tank for Hillary Clinton, the liberal rag called Politico spilled the beans a few months later. In a January 11, 2017 story it revealed

that the Ukrainian government had pulled out all the stops attempting to help Clinton, whose protégés at the State Department had been the masterminds of the coup which put them in office. Thus, Politico concluded,Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also dissem-inated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

President Petro Poroshenko’s admin-istration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race…..

But Politico’s investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections.

While it’s not uncommon for outside operatives to serve as intermediaries between governments and reporters, one of the more damaging Russia-related stories for the Trump campaign – and certainly for Manafort – can be traced more directly to the Ukrainian government.Documents released by an independent Ukrainian government agency – and publicized by a parliamentarian – appeared to show $12.7 million in cash payments that were earmarked for Manafort by the Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president, Yanukovych.

The New York Times, in the August story re-vealing the ledgers’ existence, reported that the payments earmarked for Manafort were “a focus” of an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption officials, while CNN reported days later that the FBI was pursuing an overlapping inquiry.

Yet Fiona Hill sat before a House committee and under oath insisted that all of the above was a Trumpian conspiracy theory, thereby reminding us that the neocon Russophobes are so unhinged that they are prepared to lie at the drop of a hat to keep their false narrative about the Russian Threat and Putin’s “invasion” of Ukraine alive.

Needless to say, Fiona Hill is among the worst of the neocon warmongers, and has made a specialty of demonizing Russia and propagating over and over flat out lies about what happened in Kiev during 2014 and after. Thus, in one recent attack she claimed,Russia today poses a greater foreign policy and security challenge to the United States and its Western allies than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Its annexation of Crimea, war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, and military inter-vention in Syria have upended Western calculations from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. Russia’s intervention in Syria, in particular, is a stark re-minder that Russia is a multi-regional power…..

There is not a single true assertion in that quo-

tation, of course, but we cite it for a very particular reason. Shifty Schiff & his impeachment tribunal have brought in Hill – and Lt. Colonel Vindman, Ambassador Taylor, George Kent and Tim Morrison previously – in order to created an echo chamber.

That’s right. The Dems are parroting the neocon lies – whether they believe them or not – in order to propagate the impression that the Donald is undermining national security in his effort to take a different posture on Russia and Ukraine, and is actually bordering on treason.

Thus, Adam Schiff repeated the false neocon narrative virtually word for word at the opening of the public hearings:

“In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation’s embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s desire to re-build a Russian empire.”

That’s pure rubbish. It’s based on the Big Lie that the overwhelming vote of the Russian population of Crimea in March 2014 was done at the gun point of the Russian Army. And that event, in turn, is the lynch-pin of the hoary canard that Putin is seeking to rebuild the Soviet Empire.So it is necessary to review the truth once again about how Russian Crimea had been temporarily appended to the Ukrainian SSR during Soviet times.

The allegedly “occupied” territory of Crimea, in fact, was actually purchased from the Ottomans by Catherine the Great in 1783, thereby satisfying the longstanding quest of the Russian Czars for a warm-water port. Over the ages Sevastopol then emerged as a great naval base at the strategic tip of the Crimean peninsula, where it became home to the mighty Black Sea Fleet of the Czars and then the Soviet Union, too.

For the next 171 years Crimea was an integral part of Russia (until 1954). That span exceeds the 170 years that have elapsed since California was annexed by a similar thrust of “Manifest Destiny” on this continent, thereby providing, incidentally, the United States Navy with its own warm-water port in San Diego.

While no foreign forces subsequently invaded the California coasts, it was most definitely not Ukrainian and Polish rifles, artillery and blood which famously annihilated The Charge Of The Light Brigade at the Crimean city of Balaclava in 1854; they were Russians defending the homeland from Turks, French and Brits.And the portrait of the Russian “hero” hanging in Putin’s office is that of Czar Nicholas I – whose brutal 30-year reign brought the Russian Empire to its historical zenith. Yet despite his cruelty, Nicholas I is revered in Russian hagiography as the defender of Crimea, even as he lost the 1850s war to the Ottomans and Europeans.

At the end of the day, security of its historic port in Crimea is Russia’s Red Line, not Washington’s. Unlike today’s feather-headed Washington pols, even the enfeebled Franklin Roosevelt at least knew that he was in Soviet Russia when he made port in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945.

Maneuvering to cement his control of the Kremlin

in the intrigue-ridden struggle for succession after Stalin’s death a few years later, Nikita Khrushchev allegedly spent 15 minutes reviewing his “gift” of Crimea to his subalterns in Kiev.As it happened, therefore, Crimea became part of the Ukraine only by writ of one of the most vicious and reprehensible states in human history – the former Soviet Union:

On April 26, 1954. The decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet transferring the Crimea Oblast from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR…..Taking into account the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimea Province and the Ukrainian SSR….

That’s right. Washington’s hypocritical and ten-dentious accusations against Russia’s re-absorption of Crimea imply that the dead-hand of the Soviet presidium must be defended at all costs – as if the security of North Dakota depended upon it!In fact, the brouhaha about “returning” Crimea is a naked case of the hegemonic arrogance that has overtaken Imperial Washington since the 1991 Soviet demise.

After all, during the long decades of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the “captive nation” of Ukraine – with or without the Crimean appendage bestowed upon it in 1954. Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990’s when a financially desperate Ukraine rented back Sevastopol and the strategic redoubts of the Crimea to an equally pauperized Russia.

In short, in the era before we got our Pacific port in 1848, and even during the 170-year interval since then, America’s national security has depended not one whit on the status of Russian-speaking Crimea. That the local population has now cho-sen fealty to the Grand Thief in Moscow over the ruffians and rabble who have seized Kiev amounts to a giant: So what!

The truth is, when it comes to Ukraine there really isn’t that much there, there. Its bounda-ries have been morphing for centuries among the quarreling tribes, peoples, potentates, Patriarchs and pretenders of a small region that is none of Washington’s damn business..

Still, it was this final aggressive drive of Wash-ington and NATO into the internal affairs of Russia’s historic neighbor and vassal, Ukraine, that largely accounts for the demonization of Putin. Likewise, it is virtually the entire source of the false claim that Russia has aggressive, expansionist designs on the former Warsaw Pact states in the Baltics, Poland and beyond.

The latter is a nonsensical fabrication. In fact, it was the neocon meddlers from Washington who crushed Ukraine’s last semblance of civil governance when they enabled ultra-nationalists and cryp-to-Nazis to gain government positions after the February 2014 putsch.

As we indicated above, in one fell swoop that inexcusable stupidity reopened Ukraine’s blood-soaked modern history. The latter incepted with Stalin’s re-population of the eastern Donbas region with “reliable” Russian workers after his genocidal liquidation of the kulaks in the early 1930s.It was subsequently exacerbated by the large-scale col-laboration by Ukrainian nationalists in the west with the Nazi Wehrmacht as it laid waste to Poles, Jews, gypsies and other “undesirables” on its way to Stalingrad in 1942-43. Thereafter followed an equal and opposite spree of barbaric revenge as the victorious Red Army marched back through Ukraine on its way to Berlin.

So it may be fairly asked. What beltway lame brains did not chance to understand that Washing-ton’s triggering of “regime change” in Kiev would reopen this entire bloody history of sectarian and political strife?

Moreover, once they had opened Pandora’s box, why was it so hard to see that an outright partition of Ukraine with autonomy for the Donbas and Crimea, or even accession to the Russian state from which these communities had originated, would have been a perfectly reasonable resolution?

Certainly that would have been far preferable to dragging all of Europe into the lunacy of the current anti-Putin sanctions and embroiling the Ukrainian factions in a suicidal civil war. The alleged Russian threat to Europe, therefore, was manufactured in Imperial Washington, not the Kremlin.

In fact, in 1989 and 1990, the George H. W.

Bush administration assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that if he accepted German unification, the West would not seek to exploit the situation through any eastward expansion – not even by “one inch,” as then-secretary of state James Baker assured Gorbachev. But Bill Clinton reneged on that commitment, moving to expand NATO on an eastward path that eventually led right up to the Russian border.

So Robert Merry said it well in his excellent piece on the entire neocon Ukraine Scam that is being paraded before the Schiff Show.

That is, what is being desperately defended on Capitol Hill is not the rule of law, national security or fidelity to the Constitution of the United States., but a giant Neocon Lie that is needed to keep the Empire in business, and the world moving ever closer to an utterly unnecessary Cold War 2.0 between nation’s each pointing enough nuclear warheads at the other to destroy the planet.

NATO, with just 16 members in 1990, now includes 29 European states, with all of the ex-pansion countries lying east of Germany. As this was unfolding, Russian leaders issued stern warn-ings about the consequences if America and the West sought to include in NATO either Ukraine or Georgia. Both are considered as fundamental to Russian security.

True, many in western Ukraine have pushed for greater ties to the West and wanted their elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to respond favorably to Western financial blandishments. But Yanu-kovych, tilting toward Russia, eschewed NATO membership for Ukraine, renewed a long-term lease for the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, and gave official status to the Russian language. These actions eased tensions between Ukraine and Russia, but they inflamed Ukraine’s internal politics. And when Yanukovych abandoned negotiations aimed at an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union in favor of greater economic ties to Russia, pro-Western Ukrainians, including far-right provocateurs, staged street protests that ultimately brought down Yanukovych’s government. Victoria Nuland gleefully egged on the protesters. The deposed president fled to Russia.

Nuland then set about determining who would be Ukraine’s next prime minister, namely Arseniy Yatsenyuk. “Yats is our guy,” she declared to U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. When Pyatt warned that many EU countries were uncomfort-able with a Ukrainian coup, she shot back, “Fuck the EU.” She then got her man Yats into the prime minister position, demonstrating the influence that enables US meddling in foreign countries.

That’s when Putin rushed back to Moscow from the Winter Olympic Games at Sochi to protect the more Russian-oriented areas of Ukraine (the so-called Donbass in the country’s east and Crimea in the south) from being swallowed up in this new drama. He orchestrated a plebiscite in Crimea, which revealed strong sentiment for reunifica-tion with Russia (hardly the “sham referendum” described by Taylor) and sent significant military support to Donbass Ukrainians who didn’t want to be pulled westward.

The West and America have always been, and must remain, wary of Russia. Its position in the center of Eurasia – the global “heartland,” in the view of the famous British geographic scholar Halford Mackinder – renders it always a potential threat. Its vulnerability to invasion stirs in Rus-sian leaders an inevitable hunger for protective lands. Its national temperament seems to include a natural tendency towards authoritarianism. Any sound American foreign policy must keep these things in mind.

But in the increasingly tense relationship between the Atlantic Alliance and Russia, the Alliance has been the more aggressive player – aggressive when it pushed for NATO’s eastward expansion despite promises to the contrary from the highest levels of the US government; aggressive when it turned that policy into an even more provocative plan for the encirclement of Russia; aggressive when it dangled the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia; aggressive when it sought to lure Ukraine out of the Russian orbit with economic incentives; aggressive when it helped foster the street coup against a duly elected Ukrainian government; and aggressive in its continued refusal to appreciate or acknowledge Russia’s legitimate geopolitical interests in its own neighborhood.

George Kent and William B. Taylor Jr., in their testimony last week, personified this aggressive outlook, designed to squeeze Russia into a ge-opolitical corner and trample upon its regional interests in the name of Western universalism. If that outlook continues and leads to ever greater tensions with Russia, it can’t end well.

TEHRAN (FNA) — Ammar Waqqaf, Syrian political analyst, says Washington’s move to send more troops to Syria to alleg-edly protect oil fields is meant to kill the chances of the local Arabs in Northeastern Syria joining forces with the central government in Damascus.

In an exclusive interview with FNA, Waqqaf added the US is now pushing for the talks between Kurdish militia and Da-mascus, before the central government is recovered politically and militarily, while it seeks hard to keep the local Arab pop-ulation living in Eastern Euphrates away from the Damascus government.

“Daesh has always been more of a pretext to cover for the main reasons of intervention… [the United States] used Daesh to undermine the Syrian state,” the Syrian analyst added.Ammar Waqqaf is a Syrian and the founder and director of GNOSOS, an organization that focuses on stakeholder opinion in Syria and Middle East.Below is the full text of the interview:

How you do find the US plan to allegedly protect Syrian oil fields?

A: The alleged American withdrawal from Syria in parallel to the Turkish backed invasion turned out to be only a troop redeployment. The United States simply decided to reduce its scattered presence in Northeastern Syria and focus on the core

business of depriving the Syrian state from its own oil resources. This is part of the pressure that Washington has maintained over Damascus for some time now, which includes, amongst other measures, preventing oil shipments from reaching Syria. In other words, only a slight tactical change has taken place, not a strategic one. The reasons for such a change could include partially accommodating Turkish ambitions, in order to stop Ankara from shifting more towards Moscow. They could also include encouraging a start of talks between Kurdish militia and the Syrian state now, before Damascus makes even more political, military and economic recovery.

The Pentagon has said the US reinforces its position in Northeast Syria to prevent the oil fields from falling back into the hands of Daesh; but, Daesh hardly exists. How do you view the Pentagon’s claim?

A: Daesh has always been more of a pretext to cover for the main reasons of intervention. The threat of a terrorist attack is much easier to promote amongst the American electorate than, say for example, regime change. In fact, one could easily argue that the United States passively, and sometimes actively, used Daesh to undermine the Syrian state. Moreover, voices in Washington did clearly come out and say that the objective of the current American mechanized reinforcements is to prevent

the oil fields from falling back into the hands of the Syrian state. Nonetheless, even that objective may not be the real reason behind the recent deployments, as the US made a tacit warning to Damascus against taking its withdrawal for granted and attempt at regaining these fields, by insisting that the US military “maintains aerial supremacy in Northeastern Syria.” What could well be the main reason for the current American reinforcements in the oil fields area in Northeastern Syria is preventing local Arabs from ditching the Kurdish dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and joining forces with the central government in Damascus.

President Trump has identified Syria’s oil as a US national security priority, saying “[oil] can help us, because we should be able to take some also.” What legal right in international law may the US have to plunder Syrian oil?

A: It is unlikely that the relatively small quantities of oil in Northeastern Syria would water mouths in Washington. Moreover, the unsustainability of US deployment in that area and the uncertainty of the security situation means that the risk of investing in the rehabilitation of oil facilities far out-weighs the benefits. Therefore, one could assume that such a narrative is mainly targeted at an American electorate who could be swayed by the idea that, since there is an economic

stake, troop deployment and loss could be tolerated. In fact, the American electorate do not seem to hold administrations to account for whatever illegal interventions they make, and no matter what carnage or suffering that come as a result. A fresh example would be the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where the United States had no right whatsoever, according to interna-tional law, to invade Iraq and force a regime change. Despite this, the American administration was voted into office for a second term, despite people demonstrating in the streets prior to the war, and making their objections heard clearly.


NOVEMBER 27, 2019

Neocon uses impeachment to Push russophobic agenda

By David Stockman

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

Ammar Waqqaf: U.S. redeploys troops to prevent SDF joining Syrian army


S O C I E T Y NOVEMBER 27, 2019

After generations of storing their food in handmade cellars dug deep into the permafrost, growing numbers in Alaska’s far-north now find their cellars filling up with water and blood.

Dozens of the naturally refrigerated food shelters exist underneath the region’s mainly Inupiat whaling villages – where many rely on hunting and fishing to eat.

But now climate change and other modern factors are forcing changes to an ancient way of life, rendering tradi-tional storage methods dangerously unreliable.

Ranging from small arctic root cellars to spacious, wood-lined underground chambers, ice cellars are typically stocked with vast amounts of whale, walrus, seal and caribou.

These chambers, usually built 10 to 12 feet below the surface, have long been used to age subsistence food to perfection and ensure a steady supply during the sparser months, which is critical for survival.

But increasingly, these cellars are beginning to collect mould and water, in some cases becoming completely submerged. Others collapse completely.

In Alaska’s northernmost community, Utqiagvik – which saw its warmest summer on record this year – about 60 per cent of the 1,500 households rely on subsistence foods for at least half of their diet, National Geographic wrote in 2015.

“I’m worried,” said Gordon Brower, a Utqiagvik whaling captain whose family owns two ice cellars.

One is more than a century old and used to store at least two tonnes whale meat set aside for community feasts. The other, built in 1955, is used to feed Mr Brower and his family.

He recently asked his son to retrieve some whale meat from the one of the cellars, and discovered both were in a bad state.

“He came back and said: ‘Dad, there’s a pool of blood and water at the bottom,’” said Mr Brower, who is now housing the community’s meat under a tarpaulin sheet above ground.

“It seems like slight temporary variations in the per-mafrost – that active layer – is affecting the temperature of our cellar,” Mr Brower said.

There were once at least 50 ice cellars in Point Hope, a native village built precariously on a thin spit of land caught between the Chukchi and Arctic oceans.

Now, there are less than 20 cellars in the village

of 750 people.Many in the community have little money and cannot

afford to replace traditional methods with modern freezers.To compensate, Point Hope whaling captains have

use of three walk-in freezers that were donated for use by the whaling community.

But the much colder freezers do not impart the taste of aged whale meat so favoured throughout the region.

“It’s definitely a challenge at this time to be able to feed our people that acquired taste,” said 52-year-old whaling captain Russell Lane, who has spent his whole life in Point Hope.

The problem has been building for decades as a warm-ing climate impacts multiple facets of life in the far-north – thawing permafrost, disruptions in hunting patterns and shorter periods of coastal ice that had long protected coastal communities from powerful storms. Other factors include development and soil conditions.

The changes have increased vulnerability to foodborne illnesses and raised concerns about food security, according to studies by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.

State health officials said so far they have not heard of anyone becoming ill.

Despite the unprecedented rate of modern climate change, ice cellars have failed as far back as the early 1900s, according to a 2017 study in Utqiagvik in response to reports of flooded and collapsed cellars.

Researchers mapped 71 ice cellar locations around town and monitored five functioning cellars from 2005 to 2015, finding little thermal change over that relatively short timeframe. One of those cellars has since failed,

however, and another is starting to collapse.The study concluded that while a changing climate

has great potential to affect ice cellars, there are other factors, including soil conditions and urban development.

“Climate change, air temperatures, all these physical changes are affecting them,” said Kelsey Nyland from George Washington University, one of the study’s authors.

“But also, a lot of it has to do with development and modern life in an arctic setting.”

Scientists had previously agreed that an underground tunnel, known as the utilidor, built in Utqiagvik in 1984 to provide water, electricity, and other utilities had been responsible for the failure of some cellars, National Ge-ographic reported in 2015.

To adapt to the new environment, the village of Kakto-vik, on the Beaufort Sea coast, took ambitious steps after it lost all but one family’s cellar to flooding.

In 2013, the village launched a project to build a com-munity ice cellar incorporating traditional designs with contemporary technology used in Alaska’s North Slope oil fields – thermosyphons, off-grid tubelike refrigeration devices that cool the ground by transferring heat outside.

The hand-excavated cellar was ready for use in 2017, but it has yet to be filled. Whaling captains want to expand it first, according to whaling captain George Kaleak Sr, who represents Kaktovik on the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission.

Temperature sensors inside the cellar show it’s working as intended, Kaleak said. He expects the expansion to begin as early as next spring.

But experts warn melting ice cellars are a problem for hunters across the Arctic.

While some communities are able to avert crisis using modern technology, in Siberia the disappearance of mil-lennia-old permafrost is now creating climate refugees.

With researchers continually revising their predic-tions for how quickly permafrost could melt, and how this could contribute to the warming of the planet, it seems increasingly likely those forced to leave their homes will not be the last.

“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” Anna Liljedahl, associate professor at the University of Alaska told The Washington Post in October “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”

(Source: The Independent)

Alaska’s ice cellars melting due to climate change

S O C I E T Yd e s k

1 There has been cooperation between the two countries for nearly five years in the field of medicine and medical equipment, he said, adding, Russia has a huge $20 bil-lion drug market and Iran plans to expand cooperation with the neighboring country.

If companies reach an agreement on tech-nology transfer, the production line could also be moved to the target country, for exam-ple, an Iranian pharmaceutical raw material production line started in Saint Petersburg three years ago, he highlighted.

He went on to say that entering the Eur-asian health market can come beneficial for the country as Iran’s quality of medicine and medical equipment will prove high-quality in the region, adding, the country’s needs for pharmaceutical raw materials can also be met by attending these markets.

For the time being, Iran cooperates with Iraq, Lebanon and Tunisia in the health sec-tor, he concluded.

Three years ago, Iran and Russia signed 15 documents, protocols and memorandums of understanding, focusing on the pharma-ceutical and medical equipment sector.

Also, Iran has launched a production line for manufacturing multiple sclerosis drug in St. Petersburg.

Deputy health minister Reza Malekzadeh said in July that 73 types of medicine produced by Iranian knowledge-based companies are being exported to other countries.

In late May, Hossein Vatanpur, an offi-cial with the Ministry of Health, announced that 52 Iranian knowledge-based companies export their products with value more than 70 million dollars.

12Iran to export 17 domestically-made

medicines to RussiaClimate-heating greenhouse gases hit new high, UN reportsThe concentration of climate-heating greenhouse gases has hit a record high, according to a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

The jumps in the key gases measured in 2018 were all above the average for the last decade, showing action on the climate emergency to date is having no effect in the atmos-phere. The WMO said the gap between targets and reality were both “glaring and growing”.

The rise in concentration of greenhouses gases follows inevitably from the continued surge in global emissions, which was described as “brutal news” for 2018. The world’s scientists calculate that emissions must fall by half by 2030 to give a good chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C, beyond which hundreds of millions of people will suffer more heatwaves, droughts, floods and poverty.

But Petteri Taalas, the WMO secretary-general, said: “There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, despite all the com-mitments under the Paris agreement on climate change. We need to increase the level of ambition for the sake of the future welfare of mankind.

“It is worth recalling that the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of carbon dioxide was 3-5m years ago. Back then, the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now.”

Three-quarters of the emissions cuts pledged by countries under the Paris agreement of 2015 are “totally inadequate”, ac-cording to a comprehensive expert analysis published earlier in November, putting the world on a path to climate disaster. An-other report has found that nations are on track to produce more than double the fossil fuels in 2030 than could be burned while keeping heating under 1.5C.

“The [CO2 concentration] number is the closest thing to a real-world Doomsday Clock, and it’s pushing us ever closer to midnight,” said John Sauven, head of Greenpeace UK. “Our ability to preserve civilisation as we know it, avert the mass extinction of species, and leave a healthy planet to our children depend on us urgently stopping the clock.”

The WMO report, published on Monday, found the global average concentration of CO2 reached 407.8 parts per million in 2018, up from 405.5ppm in 2017. It is now 50% higher than in 1750, before the industrial revolution sparked the widespread burning of coal, oil and gas.

Since 1990, the increase in greenhouse gas levels has made the heating effect of the atmosphere 43% stronger. Most of that – four-fifths – is caused by CO2. But the concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide, the two other key greenhouse gases, also surged in 2018 by a higher amount than the annual average over the past decade.

Methane, which is produced by cattle, rice paddies and fossil fuel exploitation, is responsible for 17% of the heating effect. Its concentration is now more than double pre-industrial levels.

Nitrous oxide, which comes from heavy fertiliser use and forest burning, is now 23% higher than in 1750. The observations are made by the Global Atmosphere Watch network, which includes stations in the Arctic, high mountains and tropical islands.

(Source: The Guardian)




Drilling Company




Second Announcement

Subject of Tender: P/F:ELMAGO CURRENT BRAKE AND HENGDU HONGTIAN DRILLER CONTROL CABIN Tender descriptions:



Registration No. through national electronic tendering

system The Tender holder

38,600,727,298 Tender No.:FP/20-98/118 Indent No.: 08-22-9845052 3/215/189 National Iranian Drilling

Company Qualitative evaluation of tenderers

Based on minimum scoring (50) made in award criterion reflected in the tenderers pre-qualification forms.

Method

Purchasing & Submitting

The distribution of the documents will be started one day after the publishing of second advertisement and ended on the following tenth day thereof.

Tender Document

Distribution by Company

Hall No.:113, 1st floor, Foreign Procurement Dept., National Iranian Drilling Company, Airport square, Ahwaz, IRAN 061-34148707 Room No. 431, 4th floor ,Oil central building No.8,Yaghma alley, Jomhori Islami st., Tehran – Iran

Distribution Place



Submitting Method

14 Days after the last time of Purchasing. Closing date Documents Receiving Method

Hall No. 107, 1st floor, Tender Committee, Operation building, National Iranian Drilling Company, Airport square, Ahwaz, IRAN. Tel: +98-61-34148580 +98-61-34148569

Address

Tender Guarantee

1,931,000,000 Rial / 15,790 Euro Value of guarantee



Type of guarantee


Duration of credit &

quotation

(Foreign Procurement Dept.)

www.nidc.ir http://sapp.ir/nidc_pr


TEHRAN TIMES


Advertising Dept

021 -430 51 450Tel:

N.I.S.O.C

1398.5143


First Announcement





Vendors who intend to participate in aforesaid tenders are requested to send their “ Intention to participate” letter via Fax to the following number along with their resume according to Qualitative Assessment Form no. 2, available at: WWW.nisoc.ir , not later than 14 days after the second announcement, otherwise, their requests for participation in the.tender will be disregarded The applicants should have relevant background in supplying the required goods and capability to provide and submit.a bid bond of 27,102 EURO or 3,473 ,760,000 RIAL, in favor of NISOC Tender documents including the materials thorough technical specifications and Qualitative Assessment Forms can be accessed via: WWW.nisoc.ir-material procurement management tabONLY ACCEPTABLE DELIVERY TERM IS D.D.P. NISOC’S WAREHOUSE, AGHAJARI.IRAN PAYMENT TERM IS C.O.D. SUBSE-QUENT TO NISOC’ S MATERIAL APPROVAL NO ADVANCE PAYMENT WILL BE PAID

N.I.S.O.C

نوبت اول

Items Material Description Quantity

04

PARTS FOR “COOPER-BESSEMER” GAS TURBINE TYPE COBERRA-182 SERIAL NOS. SN-401.2.3.4.5 AND 6 RT RP FITTED TO COMPRESSOR TYPE RB7-6B.SERIAL NOS 1045-48-51-53 RC REFCOOPER-BESSEMER S.A

17 NOS

01 PARTS FOR “COOPER ROLLS” POWER GAS TURBINE. TURBINE TYPE RT 48. SERIAL NOS.884 RT 885 RT AND 886 RTF COOPER ROLLS LTD

12 NOS






TEHRAN — Pasteur Insti-tute of Iran (IPI) has joined

Asia-Pacific regional network, Alireza Biglari, head of the IPI said on Tuesday.

Located in 25 countries on five continents, the Institut Pasteur International Network includes 32 institutions, which are united by shared values and missions for the benefit of populations focus-ing on scientific research, public health services, education alliances, innovation and technology transfer, according to its website.

The Institut Pasteur International Network

was categorized in five regions of Africa-Indi-an Ocean, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North Africa-Iran.

After following up on the issue over the past year, at a meeting of the Pasteur Institute’s inter-national network of presidents held in Yaounde, Cameroon, in late November, the network’s general assembly voted for Iran to be excluded from the North Africa-Iran regional network and join the Asia-Pacific regional network, Biglari explained.

The North Africa-Iran regional network included Iran, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia,

and the Asia-Pacific network consists of China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Caledonia and Laos, he said.

He went on to highlight that from now on, the Pasteur Institute of Iran will have the opportunity to conduct joint researches and educational activ-ities with a stronger and more coherent network.

The two priorities of the Asia-Pacific regional network adopted at the meeting include microbial resistance, computational medicine and bioin-formatics, and the IPI will pursue joint programs in these two areas, he concluded.

Pasteur Institute of Iran joins Asia-Pacific regional network

Thirteen French troops killed in Mali operation against militants

13 dead, hundreds hurt as powerful earthquake jolts Albania

Thirteen French soldiers were killed in Mali when their helicopters collided at low altitude as they swooped in to sup-port ground forces engaged in combat with militants, the French army said Tuesday.

It was the biggest loss of French troops in a single day since an attack in Beirut 36 years ago when 58 soldiers died.

The ground commandos had been track-ing for several days a band of militants moving on pick-up trucks and motor-bikes. After identifying the group Monday, the Tiger and Cougar helicopters were sent to reinforce, along with a combat jet.

“In all likelihood, it was a collision be-tween these two helicopters at low altitude that caused the accident,” the armed forc-es ministry said. “They were supporting commandos from the Barkhane force who were engaged with armed terrorists,” the ministry said in a statement.

France, the former colonial power in the region, first intervened in Mali in 2013 to drive out militants who had occupied the north. It still has a 4,500-strong Barkhane force countering insurgencies in the wider region.

Rather than stabilizing, security has progressively worsened.

militants with links to al Qaeda and ISIL have strengthened their foothold across the arid region, making large swathes of territory ungovernable and stoking ethnic violence, especially in Mali and Burkina Faso.

The deaths were announced by the office of French President Emmanuel Macron who expressed his “deep sadness” at the loss.

“The President of the Republic salutes with the greatest respect the memory of these soldiers,” the Elysee Palace statement said. “He bows to the grief of their families and their loved ones.”

Monday’s deaths bring the total number of French soldiers killed in the Sahel region since 2013 to 38, according to officials in the defense and foreign ministries.

More than 200 soldiers from regional nations and international peacekeepers have been killed since September in Mali alone, with dozens more killed in Burkina Faso.

(Source: Reuters)

Albanian rescuers were digging through rubble as desperate survivors trapped in toppled buildings cried out for help Tuesday after the strongest earthquake in decades claimed at least 13 lives.

The 6.4 magnitude quake struck at 3:54 am local time (0254 GMT), with an epicenter 34 kilometres (about 20 miles) northwest of the capital Tirana in the Adriatic Sea, according to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre.

A total of 13 people have now been found dead, according to the defense ministry, while around 38 people have been res-cued alive.

The worst damage was in and around the coastal city of Durres, a tourism destination on the Adriatic, where sol-diers, police and civilian forces were working to reach those believed to be trapped inside buildings that were re-duced to dust.

Many of the dead were pulled from the ruins in Durres and the nearby town of Thumane.

Families looked on in horror as emer-

gency workers sifted through the rubble of a collapsed five-storyy building in Thumane, as those trapped cried out to be rescued.

Relatives shouted the names of their loved ones still inside: “Mira!”, “Ariela!”, “Selvije!”.

A survivor, a thin man covered in grey dust, was seen carried out on a stretcher.

Dulejman Kolaveri, a man in his 50s in Thumane, told AFP he feared his 70-year-old mother and six-year-old niece were trapped, because they lived on the fifth floor of the building.

“I don’t know if they are dead or alive. I’m afraid of their fate... only God knows,” he said with trembling hands.

Arben Allushi, another Thumane lo-cal, told AFP with tears in his eyes that his wife and niece were in the building when it fell.

Not far away in Kurbin, a man is his fifties died after jumping from his building in panic, the ministry said. Another perished in a car accident after the earthquake tore open parts of the road, it added.

(Source: AFP)

WORLD IN FOCUS 13I N T E R N A T I O N A L D A I L Y

Hezbollah rejects U.S. position on Lebanese government formation

The Lebanese Hezbollah resistance move-ment has dismissed the condition promoted by the United States as a prerequisite for the formation of a new administration in Lebanon, amid nationwide anti-government demonstrations that have led to the resig-nation of prime minister Saad al-Hariri.

Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem dismissed the U.S. stance in a meeting with a delegation from the Lebanese Islamic Unionist Party, led by Omar Ghandour on Monday.

Qassem underlined the need for the establishment of a government of “salva-tion,” which he said would stop Lebanon’s financial and economic deterioration, initiate reforms, confront corruption, and prevent the foreign political exploitation of the woes in the Arab country.

“The formation of the government is the common denominator” of all groups and people in Lebanon and it “cannot be subjected to US conditions, and cannot be used as leverage for political options,” the Hezbollah official said.

Protests erupted in Lebanon on October 17, when the government proposed taxed on

Whatsapp calls, along with other austerity measures.

The ongoing demonstrations have com-pounded Lebanon’s economic woes.

Hariri stepped down on October 29, surrendering to one of the demands of the

protesters, who accuse the ruling political elite of pushing Lebanon toward economic collapse. Hariri said at the time that he had reached a “dead end” in trying to resolve the crisis that had paralyzed the country for two weeks, namely the protests.

Later, a senior official familiar with Hari-ri’s thinking told Reuters that the former prime minister was ready to retake his job at the head of a new government on the condition that it includes “technocrats” and can quickly implement reforms to stave off economic collapse.

Later, testifying before the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Middle East, for-mer U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman suggested that Washington had to back Hariri and endorse his condition, attributing that requirement to the people of Lebanon.

“With the demonstrators calling for a technocratic rather than political govern-ment, our public messaging can emphasize our expectation that a new Lebanese gov-ernment, if it seeks international support, should effectively and immediately address the reform aspirations of the Lebanese peo-ple,” Feltman said.

He said “the demonstrations [in Leba-non] and the reactions to them by Lebanese leaders and institutions fortunately coincide with US interests.”

(Source: Press TV)

China’s Foreign Ministry has summoned United States Ambassador to Beijing Terry Branstad to protest the passing in the US Congress of a bill related to Hong Kong and to demand an end to American meddling in the country’s internal affairs.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Rep-resentatives voted 417 to 1 to approve the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which had been unanimously passed by the Senate the day before. Presi-

dent Donald Trump is now expected to sign that bill and another one related to Hong Kong into law.

If signed into law, the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act would require the U.S. government to impose sanctions against Chinese and Hong Kong officials allegedly responsible for human rights abuses in Hong Kong. It would also require an annual review to certify Hong Kong’s autonomy to continue enjoying special trade privileges by the U.S.

In a notice posted on its website on Mon-day, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang had told Ambassador Branstad that Washington had “to correct its errors and stop meddling in Hong Kong affairs and interfering in China’s internal matters.”

Hong Kong has been engulfed by mass protests since June. The public display of anger initially came in opposition to a controversial extradition bill. The pro-

posal was shelved, but the protests have continued and taken on an increasingly violent form, with masked individuals vandalizing public and private property and attacking security forces and gov-ernment buildings.

The anti-government demonstrators now want complete separation from mainland China. The U.S. has been consistently back-ing them.

(Source: agencies)

A Palestinian prisoner battling cancer died in Israeli cus-tody, officials said on Tuesday, sparking accusations of medical neglect.

The announcement of Sami Abu Diak’s death came amid heightened tension in the occupied West Bank, where pro-tests were already planned for the later in the day.

Dubbed a “day of rage” by organisers, the demonstrations were called to denounce a recent decision by the United States to no longer consider illegal Israeli settlements to be a violation of international law.

The demonstrators were also expected to call for Abu Diak’s release, who had been imprisoned for 17 years after being arrested during the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising.

Official Palestinian news agency Wafa said the 36-year-old suffered from terminal cancer and had been refused compassionate leave to be with his family. It carried what it said was the last message from Abu Diak, whose health reportedly deteriorated two weeks ago, saying he had wanted to spend his last days with his mother.

The Palestinian presidency held Israel responsible for his death, alleging he was “subjected to the deliberate medical negligence practiced by (Israeli) occupation authorities towards all prisoners”.

In a statement, Israel’s prison authority said a seriously ill unnamed “security prisoner” died after being transferred to an Israeli hospital. It said he had been convicted for killing three people.

According to Addameer, a Palestinian prisoners’ rights group, Abu Diak had first complained of abdominal pain in 2015, which was treated with painkillers. Two weeks later, he lost consciousness and was transferred to the Israeli Soroka hospital.

He then underwent surgery to remove parts of his intes-tines, and was diagnosed with cancer. After that, Abu Diak underwent other surgical procedures that reportedly left him unconscious while on anesthetics for more than a month.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) and Abu Diak’s family had asked for his release to allow him to die at his family’s

side, but Israeli officials denied the request. The Palestinians also reached out to European countries and the Red Cross to apply pressure on Israel to release him.

(Source: al Jazeera)

The world will miss its chance to avert climate disaster without an immediate and all-but-impossible fall in fossil fuel emissions, the UN said Tuesday in its annual assessment on greenhouse gases.

The United Nations Environment Programme said that global emissions need to fall by 7.6 percent each year until 2030 to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.

The harsh reality is that emissions have risen on average 1.5 percent annually over the last decade, hitting a record 55.3 billion tonnes of CO2 or equivalent greenhouse gases in 2018 –three years after 195 countries signed the Paris treaty on climate change.

The World Meterological Organization said Monday that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations hit an all-time record in 2018.

The Paris deal committed nations to limit temperature rises above pre-industrial levels to “well below” 2C, and to a safer 1.5-C if at all possible.

To do so they agreed on the need to reduce emissions and work towards a low-carbon world within decades.

Yet the UN found that even taking into account current

Paris pledges, the world is on track for a 3.2C temperature rise, something scientists fear could tear at the fabric of society.

Even if every country made good on its promises, Earth’s “carbon budget” for a 1.5-C rise -- the amount we can emit to stay below a certain temperature threshold -- would be exhausted within a decade.

In its own words, the UN assessment is “bleak”.While it insisted the 1.5C goal is still attainable, it ac-

knowledged that this would require an unprecedented, coordinated upheaval of a global economy that is still fueled overwhelmingly by oil- and gas-fueled growth.

“We are failing to curb greenhouse gas emissions,” UN-EP’s executive director, Inger Andersen, told AFP.

“Unless we take urgent action now and make very sig-nificant cuts to global emissions we’re going to miss the target of 1.5C.”

(Source: AFP)

China summons U.S. envoy over Hong Kong bill

Palestinian prisoner battling cancer dies in Israeli custody

Slash emissions now or face climate disaster, UN warns

China supports reasonable reform of UN Security Council

1 However, till now, 63 countries have never made their way to the Security Council. Some of the small and medium-sized countries get a seat at the Council every 40 to 50 years. This is regrettable and unfair,” said the ambassador.

“Reform must increase the opportunities for the small and medium-sized countries to sit in the Council and participate in their decision-making processes. This is the only way to make the Council more democratic, transparent and efficient,” he said.

Noting that multilateralism is under attack and the most needed for the UN is unity and cooperation, Zhang said, “Security Council reform concerns the vital interests of all UN members and the future of the UN and will lead to major adjustment of the global governance system and international order.”

“In-depth communication and democratic consultation is needed to find a package solution that accommodates interests and concerns of all parties, enjoys the widest possible political consensus and receives the support of all member states,” said the envoy.

“The Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) is the only legit-imate platform for discussion among member states on Security Council reform. We hope that IGN of the current General Assembly session will keep to the right track of being membership driven and carry out in-depth discussion under five clusters of issues through informal plenary sessions,” he said.

Stressing that the parties currently have serious disagree-ments on the general direction and approach of reform, he said that “rushing into a text-based negotiation, setting artificial time lines, or even trying to force through any premature reform pro-posal would do no good to the sound development of the reform process. That would only aggravate division and cause conflict or even confrontation,” he said.

Talking about the reform process, the ambassador said that if not handled properly, the process “will not make any progress.”

“Instead, it could jeopardize the consensus already reached and undermine the interest of all member states, and would still less address the under-representation of developing countries in the Security Council,” he said.

Zhang expressed the hope that the president of the General Assembly would “appoint experienced candidates with just and objective perspectives to serve as co-chairs of the IGN and China will support the co-chairs in doing their work.”

“China calls upon all member states to demonstrate political will, engage in IGN during this General Assembly session ac-tively and constructively, and work towards the widest possible consensus,” said the envoy.

“China is ready to work with all parties to take the reform in the direction that serves the fundamental interests of all member states and the long-term interests of the UN,” he added. Speaking of the UN’s history, the ambassador said that the UN, the most important outcome of World War II, came after the fight against fascism, in which so many people made the ultimate sacrifice.

“As the core of international collective security mechanism, the Security Council has played and has been playing an irre-placeable role in maintaining international peace and security and in preventing another world war,” he said.

“Looking ahead, we must learn from history and war, and reflect on the causes of war, support the status and role of the UN and uphold the core values of the UN Charter, to shape a better future free from the scourge of war for generations to come,” said the envoy.

(Source: Xinhua)

Hariri withdraws candidacy for prime ministerOutgoing Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri says he is with-drawing his candidacy for the premiership.

The announcement comes nearly a month after he resigned amid ongoing protests as well as a severe economic and financial crisis.

In a statement issued Tuseday, he called on President Michel Aoun to quickly hold consultations with heads of parliamentary blocks to name a new prime minister.

Hariri submitted his government’s resignation on Oct. 29 in response to nationwide anti-government demonstrations that erupted two weeks earlier.

They’ve since targeted corruption and mismanagement by the country’s ruling elite.

Hariri says he hopes withdrawing his candidacy will open the way for a solution to the political deadlock.

He insists that a new government made up of experts is needed to get Lebanon out of its crisis.

(Source: Daily Star)

White House must cooperate with impeachment inquiry: JudgeA federal court has ruled that White House aides can be required to testify before Congress as the impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Donald Trump reaches its final stages.

The Trump administration had previously claimed that Trump’s top aides have absolute immunity against any court.

U.S. appeals court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson rejected the Trump administration’s claims of immunity against the law, insisting on Monday that “no one is above the law”.

“No one, not even the head of the Executive branch, is above the law,” Judge Jackson said, adding that “presidents are not kings”.

In her court order, Judge Jackson ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn, who defied a Congress subpoena, to appear in court to testify.

“Executive branch officials are not absolutely immune from compulsory congressional process - no matter how many times the executive branch has asserted as much over the years - even if the president expressly directs such officials’ noncompliance,” she noted.

The judge added that her order had broad application to cur-rent and former White House officials, as well.

(Source: AFP)

Will Iran face new crises? 1 The crisis can reemerge because its conditions still exist

and such vulnerabilities will tempt the foe to take advantage of them. The recent crisis must have made all state bodies and au-

thorities aware that one cannot expect that the security bodies always pay for the costs and at the same an immediate measure is not taken to activate the national economy with a real focus on domestic production.

NOVEMBER 27, 2019


W O R L D S P O R T S NOVEMBER 27, 201914Russia’s sports officials cry foul as WADA eyes four-year Olympic ban

Ex-Liverpool star Alonso acquitted of tax fraudFormer Liverpool midfielder Xabi Alonso has been acquitted of tax fraud, a Madrid court announced on Tuesday.

The prosecutors had initially demanded for him to face five years in jail before halving their request.

Alonso, a World Cup winner with Spain in 2010, was accused of using a company based on the Portuguese island of Madeira to avoid paying 2 million euros ($2.2 million) in taxes on his image rights to the Spanish authorities.

Prosecutors said the fraud took place between 2010 and 2012 when he was playing for Real Madrid.

The court added it was impossible to discuss a cover-up as the transfer of the rights had been ‘formalized in the contract’ signed in 2009 between Alonso and the Portuguese firm.

Alonso, who retired from playing in 2017 after a stint at Bayern Munich, is one of a string of high-profile footballers to face scrutiny by the Spanish tax authorities over the declaration of income from image rights.

Some have admitted fraud as part of a deal to avoid jail time, including Atletico Madrid striker Diego Costa and Barcelona’s Gerard Pique, both of whom paid out after being convicted over the summer.

And earlier this year, the tax authorities caught up with Juventus attacker Cristiano Ronaldo and Tottenham coach Jose Mourinho, both over the management and declaration of image rights.

(Source: Mirror)

Klopp relaxed over Salah fitness ahead of Napoli Champions League clashLiverpool manager Jurgen Klopp says he has no concerns about Mohamed Salah’s fitness ahead of their Champions League clash with Napoli.

Salah was an unused substitute in the 2-1 win at Crystal Palace on Saturday after missing training with an ankle problem.

“Mo Salah looks really good,” Klopp said. “I’m not worried about it.”

Klopp also provided an update on the fitness of defender Joel Matip, who has been sidelined with a knee injury.

“Joel is improving but is some time away. There will be a scan this week and then we will see how it is.”

Victory over Carlo Ancelotti’s side on Wednesday will ensure defending champions Liverpool finish top of Group E with a game to spare but Klopp said his team could not afford to look past this match.

“The biggest mistake we could make is that we have won it already and what would happen if we win it,” Klopp added.

“These things are not in our mind. Of course we try to win the game, it would be massive for us after the start we had. Napoli are a dangerous opponent.

“There are two weeks between tomorrow night and the Salzburg game (final match of the group) and we have three games in between. Why should I think about the Salzburg game now?”

(Source: AFP)

Fox Sports suspend Van Basten for on-air Nazi remarkFormer Netherlands forward Marco van Basten has been suspended from his role as a television analyst for one week after using a term associated with Nazi rallies.

The 55-year-old said “Sieg Heil”, which in German means “hail victory”, on the Dutch edition of Fox Sports after a German coach was interviewed by one of the channel’s reporters for the De Eretribune show on Sunday.

Van Basten apologised later in the programme while Fox said in a statement on Monday that the comment was “stupid and inappropriate” and that it had suspended the three-times Ballon d’Or winner until Dec. 7.

The channel added that Van Basten’s wages for the week would be donated to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.

Van Basten’s comment came on the same weekend players across the top two leagues of Dutch football stood still for the first minute of games to protest against racism.

The country’s Eredivisie and second-tier First Division also displayed the message “Racism? Then we won’t play” on all screens and boards in stadiums after Excelsior forward Ahmad Mendes Moreira was abused by fans on Nov. 17.

(Source: (Reuters)

Balotelli racial remark by president Cellino a ‘joke’ - BresciaBrescia president Massimo Cellino’s suggestion that Mario Balotelli’s recent issue at the club was because the player is black was “a joke,” the club have said.

Balotelli was dropped from the matchday squad for the trip to Roma this weekend due to an apparent lack of enthusiasm, Brescia manager Fabio Grosso said on Sunday.

And, when asked what was wrong with Balotelli, Cellino on Monday replied: “He is black. He is trying to clear himself.”

However, soon after, Brescia released a statement which read: “Following the comments from president Massimo Cellino, in regards to our player Mario Balotelli, Brescia clarify it is quite clearly a joke, patently misunderstood, made in an attempt to de-dramatise an excessive media episode with the intention of protecting the player.”

Reached by ESPN FC for comment, anti-discrimination organisation the Fare Network condemned Cellini’s comments, saying in a statement: “Cellini should look at himself and examine his attitude towards Balotelli and people of African heritage, the denials can’t hide the truth.

(Source: ESPN)

Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo and Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James delivered exceptional scoring efforts as their conference-leading clubs stretched NBA win streaks to eight games on Monday.

Greek playmaker Antetokounmpo scored 50 points, grabbed 14 rebounds and added six assists to rally the Bucks over the visiting Utah Jazz 122-118.

The reigning NBA Most Valuable Player’s run of 17 double-doubles to start a season is the NBA’s longest since 1976.

“I’m just trying to get better,” said Antetok-ounmpo. “Take it day by day, game by game and just get myself ready in games that matter the most.

“We want to be the last team playing at the end of the season.”

Four-time NBA MVP James scored 33 points and passed off 14 assists while Anthony Davis contributed 19 points and 12 rebounds to spark the NBA-leading Lakers in a 114-104 victory at San Antonio.

“He was unbelievable,” Lakers coach Frank Vogel said of James. “He just dominated the action, made everything offensively.”

The Lakers improved to an NBA-best 15-2 to pace the Western Conference with Milwaukee atop the Eastern Conference at 14-3, the league’s

second-best record.“It’s good to be in the position we’re in,”

James said.James made 13-of-24 shots from the floor,

including 4-of-7 from 3-point range, and his 12 in the fourth quarter helped the Lakers improve to 7-1 on the road.

“I just want to be able to not have any weak-nesses and allow a defense to dictate what I do,” James said. “Just trying to be the most complete basketball player I can be.”

The Bucks are on their longest win streak since the 2001-02 season.

“We’re just playing together and having fun,” Antetokounmpo said. “Our defense has been really good lately.”

Antetokounmpo scored 32 points in the sec-ond half to spark a comeback for the Bucks and chants of “M-V-P” from Bucks fans.

Utah led 57-48 at half-time but surrendered 42 points to Milwaukee in the third quarter and made only 26.

Utah’s Donovan Mitchell was driving for a tying layup in the dying seconds but Brook Lopez blocked the shot to preserve Milwaukee’s victory.

“It was a big-time block,” Antetokounmpo said.

Embiid held scoreless Toronto’s Pascal Siakam had 25 points

and seven rebounds and Fred VanVleet added 24 points and eight assists in the Raptors’ 101-96 home victory over Philadelphia.

Sixers big man Joel Embiid was held scoreless for the first time in his career, the Cameroonian star missing all 11 of his shots from the floor, four from 3-point range, and three free throws.

“I can’t have that type of production,” Embiid said. “I never thought I would be talking about zero points in an NBA game but it is what it is.”

Cameroon forward Siakam and VanVleet each scored five points in a game-ending 10-0 run for Toronto.

Jaylen Brown scored 24 points and Jayson Tatum added 20 as the Boston Celtics edged

visiting Sacramento 103-102.Bogdan Bogdanovic’s 3-pointer gave the

Kings a 102-101 edge but Boston’s Marcus Smart answered with a layup to create the final margin.

Carmelo tops Blazer win Carmelo Anthony scored 25 points to lead

the Portland Trail Blazers over host Chicago 117-94. The 35-year-old forward hit 10-of-20 from the floor, 4-of-7 from 3-point range.

Spencer Dinwiddie’s jumper with 1.8 seconds remaining gave the Brooklyn Nets a 108-106 victory at Cleveland.

The Cavaliers had scored nine points in a row to equalize before Dinwiddie hit the last of his 23 points.

T.J. Warren scored 26 points to lead six double-figure scorers for host Indiana in a 126-114 win over Memphis.

Luke Kennard had game highs of 20 points and seven assists as Detroit defeated visiting Orlando 103-88.

Karl-Anthony Towns had 28 points, 13 rebounds and eight assists to spark Min-nesota over host Atlanta 125-113.

Chris Paul hit the go-ahead jumper with 36 seconds remaining in a 13-0 closing run for Oklahoma City in a 100-97 win at Golden State.

(Source: Eurosport)

Giannis hits 50 to lead Bucks win, LeBron sparks Lakers

Messi has ‘won the Ballon d’Or’ 2019 ahead of Ronaldo and van Dijk

Tennis star Murray reveals emotional impact of Dunblane Massacre

Lionel Messi is set to win a record sixth Ballon d’Or award and the Barcelona su-perstar has already been informed of his achievement, according to reports in Spain.

Mundo Deportivo claims that the Argen-tine has already been told of his win, even though the awards ceremony is on Monday, December 2, and that a team from France Football magazine travelled to Barcelona to tell the 32-year-old.

Messi is on a three-man shortlist for this year’s gong alongside his perennial rival Cristiano Ronaldo and Liverpool defender Virgil van Dijk.

Messi won the 10th La Liga title of his career last term, scoring 36 goals and pro-viding 13 assists in 36 top-flight outings for Ernesto Valverde’s side.

But Van Dijk, the UEFA men’s player of the year, has a strong case for pipping Messi to the gong, having helped turn Liverpool into the continent’s outstanding team and winning the Champions League.

Ronaldo’s goalscoring heroics have con-tinued since his move to Juventus, with whom he won Serie A last season. He also won the Nations League with Portugal.

Paris Saint-Germain forward Kylian

Mbappe believes Messi deserves the award.‘Messi. In individual terms, he was the

best this year.’ said Mbappe when recently asked by German publication Der Spiegel who he thought would win the award.

Messi to part ways with Barcelona?Lionel Messi did his absolute best to

convince Neymar to return to Barcelona last summer.

The Argentinian told his former team-mate that he could come back to the Camp Nou, where he’d be set to have the baton handed over to him with Messi ready to leave.

“We can only win the Champions League together,” France Football report Messi of having said.

“In two years I’ll leave and you’ll take my place.”

Messi was desperate for Neymar to make his way back to Barcelona, explaining that he, the Brazilian and Luis Suarez could again form a fearsome frontline.

In their last spell together, the MSN strikeforce fired the Catalans to a Cham-pions League title, beating Juventus 3-1 in Berlin in 2015.

(Source: Staff & Agencies)

Former world tennis number one Andy Murray reveals for the first time in a new documentary that he suffered from breath-ing problems and anxiety following the Dunblane School massacre.

The 32-year-old and his older brother Jamie were pupils at the school in Scotland where on March 13, 1996, Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 children, aged five and six, and a teacher in the gymnasium.

Andy Murray, then eight years old, had been on his way with his classmates to the gym when Hamilton -- armed with four handguns and 700 rounds of ammunition -- opened fire.

He was ushered away and told to hide under the windows of the headmaster’s office whilst Jamie, who is 15 months older, was in another classroom.

Murray has rarely spoken about the massacre and did not want to be filmed talking about it.

But the documentary ‘Andy Murray: Resurfacing’ includes a voice-note that the three-time Grand Slam champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist sent to filmmaker Olivia Cappuccini.

“You asked me a while ago why ten-

nis was important to me,” says Murray in the documentary due to be released on Amazon on Friday.

Divorce Murray, who bursts into tears halfway

through the voice-note, says the massacre precipitated a further traumatic sequence of events in the family.

“Within 12 months of that happening, our parents got divorced,” he said.

“It was a difficult time that, for kids, to see that and not quite understand what is going on.

“And then six to 12 months after that, my brother (Jamie) moved away from home.

“He went away to train, to play ten-nis. We obviously used to do everything together. When he moved away that was also quite hard for me.”

Murray admits that is when he suffered from anxiety but tennis has provided an escape for him.

“Around that time and after that, for a year or so, I had lots of anxiety but that came out when I was playing tennis,” said Murray. When I was competing I would get really bad breathing problems.”

(Source: AFP)

Russian sports officials on Tuesday spoke out against a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) committee’s recommendations that the country be banned from the Olympics for four years, saying this was overly harsh and would hurt sport there.

The recommendations, published on Mon-day, mean Russia could miss out on the next two Olympic Games and world championships in a wide range of sports.

WADA’s independent Compliance Review Committee recommended the ban after Mos-cow provided WADA with laboratory data that was found to have been doctored.

“It’s sad. I can only call these recommenda-tions unfair,” Umar Kremlev, head of Russia’s boxing federation, said in a statement.

“Russia plays an important role in the development of global sport. How can such a country be banned?”

The committee’s recommendations will be put to the agency’s executive committee in Paris on Dec. 9.

For Dmitry Svishchev, president of Russia’s curling federation, the country has already suf-ficiently been punished for its doping scandals.

“These recommendations are harsh, base-less punishment for old problems for which Russia has already been punished,” he told Reuters.

“Russia has made great progress in fight-ing doping. To punish the next generation in such a harsh manner is too much.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov linked the recommendations to what he called broader attempts by Western countries to reprimand Russia.

“The more these types of decisions are made, the better it is... for their anti-Russian argument,” Lavrov said.

Hosting eventsRussia was banned by the International

Olympic Committee (IOC) from last year’s

Pyeongchang Winter Games as punishment for alleged state-sponsored doping at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

But some Russian athletes with no history of doping were cleared to compete as neutrals.

Under the latest recommendations, some Russians without a history of doping could be cleared to compete in major international events as neutrals, as was the case in Pyeo-ngchang.

The IOC said in a statement it welcomed the opportunity for clean Russian athletes to compete, saying WADA did not indicate “any wrongdoing by the sports movement in this regard, in particular the Russian Olympic Committee or its members.”

The committee also recommended barring Russia from hosting major sporting events for four years, and moving major events for which Russia has already won hosting rights elsewhere “unless it is legally or practically impossible to do so.”

Russia is currently set to host the 2023 men’s world ice hockey championships.

St. Petersburg is due to host four matches in the 2020 European championships and was selected to host the Champions League final in 2021. These fixtures may not be affected by a new WADA ban as European football’s organizing body UEFA is not on its list of signatories.

“Given that UEFA is not a WADA signa-tory and Russian soccer players have not been caught doping, I am 99.9% certain that nothing will happen with the Euro next year,” parliamentarian Igor Lebedev, a for-mer member of the Russian Football Union’s executive committee, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to meet UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin in St. Petersburg on Wednesday.

(Source: Reuters)

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TEHRAN — Persepolis football team booked a

place in Iran’s Hazfi Cup quarterfinals after beating Sanat Naft 1-0 here on Tuesday.

Mehdi Torabi scored the only goal of the match in the 54th minute.

In Isfahan, Sepahan defeated Paykan 2-1 thanks to first half goals from Mohammad Mohebbi and Sajjad Shahbazzadeh.

Shahryar Moghanloo pulled a goal back in the second half.

In Urmia, Tractor defeated Navad Urmia 7-6 on penalties following a 1-1 draw at the end of ninety minutes.

Esteghlal have already qualified for the quarters.

Esteghlal are the most decorated foot-ball team in Hazfi Cup, winning the title seven times.

Hazfi Cup is the Iranian football knock-out cup competition, run by the Iranian Football Federation.

Persepolis into Iran’s Hazfi Cup quarters

TEHRAN — Uzbeki-stan defeated Iran 3-0

at the CAFA U23 Women’s Championship on Tuesday.

Iran will meet Afghanistan in their first match on Thursday.

Iran started the campaign with a 4-0 win over Tajikistan and then beat Turk-menistan 5-0.

Maryam Azmoun’s team also beat Kyrgyz Republic 6-0.

“I am satisfied with the way we played against Uzbekistan. “The competition helps the Central Asian teams to strengthen their ability for more international events,” Az-moun said.

All six Central Asian Football Association members Tajikistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Kyr-gyz Republic and Afghanistan compete on a round-robin basis in Dushanbe and Hisor.

The winners will be determined following the final day of competition on Thursday.

Uzbekistan beat Iran at CAFA U23 Women’s Championship

NOVEMBER 27, 2019

Iran’s men’s team are a team on the rise following their highest ever placed finish of fourth in the 2018 World Championships in Hamburg, and later that year winning gold at the Asia Para Games.

Under new leadership, Maziyar Mirazimi has stepped up from Assistant Coach to Head Coach and has made five changes from the 2018 team for the upcoming 2019 Asia Oceania Championships.

“We will participate with our full team in this competi-tion. Having participated in several wheelchair basketball tournaments in Turkey and Japan followed by several train-ing camps, we hope to take part in the 2019 Asia Oceania Championships fully prepared,” Mirazimi said.

“Our only challenge is that some of our players who are currently playing in foreign wheelchair basketball leagues have not been able to attend our preparation camps.”

One of Iran’s players playing abroad is their captain, Morteza Abedi, who is currently playing for 1907 Fenerbahçe in Turkey’s Super League.

“I am really proud of playing for one the top wheelchair basketball teams in the world, although I did not have enough opportunities to prepare for the tournament other than

participating in my league matches and other tournaments. Moreover, due to the scheduled time of 2019 Asia Oceania Championships, I have not been able to attend the pre-camps of our national team,” Abedi said.

Despite not having the optimal preparation conditions, Abedi still has very high expectations.

“Nothing but winning the championships can make me

feel content.”On their last three appearances at the Asia Oceania

Championships, the top spot has always eluded them, with two silver medals and a bronze, something they are looking to rectify.

“Our main objective is to win the championship. Additionally, our other aspiration is to build a team worthy of standing in one of the top ranks at Tokyo 2020. Hopefully triumph in this upcoming championship will help us to show a strong performance for the Paralympic Games,” Mirazimi said.

Eyeing up the opposition for the Tokyo 2020 qualifica-tion spots, he continued: “From my point of view, besides the host country (of the Tokyo Paralympic Games), Iran and Australia have the better chance of qualifying for the Paralympic Games. And other teams like Thailand and South Korea will probably fight for the third qualifying slot.”

Iran will play in Division One of the men’s competition against Australia, Japan, Thailand, China and Korea, their opening game will be against China on Saturday 30th November.

(Source: iwbf.org)

The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) on Tuesday celebrated the achievements of its leading match officials at the start of the big-gest-ever AFC Refereeing Conference which was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The opening ceremony honored eight refer-ees and assistant referees who were presented the AFC Referees Memento Award. The officials were recognized for their outstanding service in raising the refereeing standards in Asia.

Three-time FIFA World Cup referee, Ravshan Irmatov from Uzbekistan was joined by Australia’s Peter Daniel Green and Nagor Amir bin Noor Mohamed from Malaysia in receiving the award in the Referees category.

Among the assistant referees who received the recognition were Kochkarov Bakhadyr of Kyrgyz Republic, China PR’s Cui Yongmei and Huo Weiming, Islamic Republic of Iran’s Sokhandan Reza and Singapore’s Lee Tzu Liang, all of whom have graced some of the biggest stages in world football.

AFC General Secretary, Dato’ Windsor John,

who opened the ceremony, said: “I’m proud to say that our Asian referees are among the best in the world.

“For the first time ever, we bring together elite referees – both men and women – and assistant referees as well as referee assessors in one room. “The AFC is committed to providing you with the necessary tools and information to enhance your knowledge.

“As the sport grows, so does the demands and expectations on our referees,” said Dato’ Windsor.Irmatov, who is widely regarded as one of the best match officials in the world of refereeing, said: “It was a real honour to serve AFC for 17 seasons, I have very fond memories, after five AFC Champions League finals, four AFC Asian Cups two finals including three FIFA World Cups.

“This award is the achievement of the people who have taught me throughout my career. Without their effort and that of the AFC, it would be impossible to reach where I have.

“I would also like to thank my family mem-bers, assistants, friends and fans from Asia and

Uzbekistan. I’ve always felt their warm support. “I’m proud to be part of Asian football fam-

ily. Now it’s time to pass the mantle over to my younger colleagues. I’m sure they will put highest goal and work hard to achieve it.” added the five-time AFC Referee of the Year award recipient.

China PR’s Cui Yongmei, who joined the AFC assistant referees panel in 2008, said: “I’m so grateful and appreciative to the AFC. It’s a beautiful memento to summarise the 12 years I’ve spent as a referee.

“I want to thank AFC for the huge sup-port in providing us with a good learning environment, I’m so lucky to be part of some of the important women’s tournaments. It’s a memorable experience.”

Reza Sokhandan of Islamic Republic of Iran, who has been a FIFA assistant refer-ee for 17 years, said: “Thanks to the AFC for this award, this really means a lot to me. I’ve learned so much during my career and this year, Asian referees have performed well in AFC and FIFA tournaments.

“Being a top official is not easy. A referee must work hard and think professionally to stay competitive.”

Korea Republic referee Kim Dong-jin, DPR Korea referee Ri Hyang-ok and assistant referee Hong Kum-nyo, and referee assessor Enayat Masoud of Islamic Republic of Iran, who were unable to attend the ceremony, completed the list of 2020 awardees.

There were a total of 369 participants – consisting 65 referee assessors and 304 refer-ees and assistant referees during the two day conference which gathered men and women elite referees and assistant referees, and referee assessors for the first time.

The first day of the landmark course also saw participants glean insights from FIFA Head of Refereeing Department Massimo Busacca, who shared the latest amendments to the laws of the game.

IFAB Technical Director David Elleray also provided an overview on the protocols of the Video Assistant Referees system.

Iran men eye Gold at 2019 Asia Oceania Championships

AFC match officials honored at biggest-ever Refereeing Conference

A self-made crisis in Iranian football1 Lack of a certain strategy by the football federation and

its inability to provide funds for timely and regular payment of current expenses of national team have caused an unsightly situation for Team Melli.

Iranian Football Federation spokesman Amir Mehdi Alavi revealed in a TV interview that Wilmots had requested termination of his contract even before the match against Iraq.

The important question is how a manager with such an atti-tude is able to lead Team Melli to success? It should have been the news of victories with Wilmots for Team Melli but it seems that there is no end in sight to the turmoil at the Iran football national team.

Iran among top five countries in contest of air-rifle shooting

IRNA — Islamic Republic of Iran Shooting Sports Federation (ISSF) said that Iran is one of the five most powerful teams in the air-rifle shooting competitions.

Ali Dadgar said on Tuesday that Iranian Federation has ob-tained six quota for the ranking of the Olympics for the first time and it is one of the brightest achievements of the Federation this year, adding that National Federation of the Shooting Contests aims to get four quota for the ranking of the global rankings.

He emphasized that the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the five countries that have won all their Olympic quota in the first stage.

Iran compound team win bronze at Asian Archery Championships

TASNIM — Iran’s men’s compound team claimed a bronze medal at the Bangkok 2019 Asian Archery Championships.

The Iranian team consists of Mohammad Palizban, Nima Mahboobi and Danial Heydarzadeh.

Iran defeated Malaysia 231-228 in the bronze-medal match.Also, Iran’s women’s compound team finished in fourth place

after losing to Kazakhstan 231-227 in the third-place match.The 21st edition of Asian Archery Championships are being

held in Bangkok from November 21-29.

Persepolis to hold winter camp in Doha

Persian Football – Iran’s Persepolis football team are set to hold winter preparing camp in Doha, Qatar.

The Reds will hold the camp in January at the Aspire Zone Foundation (AZF).

AZF gears up to host comprehensive football training camps for a number of world-class teams during the northern hemi-sphere’s winter.

Persepolis held their pre-season camp in Turkey. Gabriel Calderon’s team is under pressure after suffering four

defeats in 11 matches in Iran Professional League.

We requested AFC to help Iran’s women’s football: Shadi Mahini

IRNA —U-15 girls football team coach Shadi Mahini says that they have requested the Asian Football Confederation to send an experienced instructor to Iran.

The 2nd AFC Women’s Football Conference 2019 was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last week and Iranian coaches Mahini and Maryam Jahan Nejati (Shahrdari Sirjan coach) attended the conference.

The three-day conference, with more than 70 participants from the AFC Member Associations, covered various important topics including key case studies from expert speakers from FIFA and UEFA who shared insights, ideas and future plans for the sport.

The 2nd AFC Women’s Football Conference started on a lively note with the keynote session themed ‘Dare to Dream’ setting the tone before FIFA shared its blueprint on women’s football development in Asia.

“The recent FIFA Women’s World Cup in France was analyzed at the conference. Wage gap between male and female footballers was among the topics discussed at the conference. The women footballers are forced to retire from football after the marriage and some of the married players cannot play abroad,” Mahini said.

“The five Asian countries took part in the 2019 World Cup but none of them qualified for the next stages. It was a worrying issue for the confederation,” she added.

“Iran’s women football has not a long history in the world and we should not compare it with Japan for example. Asian powerhouse football teams like Japan, China, South Korea and Vietnam are playing in Asia for many years. Their players start to play football since they are eight or 10. Our girls should start the football from that age which is considered golden age,” Mahini concluded.

TEHRAN — Iran na-tional football team head

coach Marc Wilmots says that he is facing an intolerable situation in Team Melli.

Iranian federation and the Belgian coach have reportedly reached a deadlock after Team Melli’s poor results in the 2022 World Cup qualification.

Local media reported that the federation is going to terminate Wilmots’s contract by mutual consent.

Now, Wilmots has reacted to the rumors on his Twitter account, posting a message about his future in the Asian team.

“I have taken note of the rumors published in the Iranian press, which are incorrect. The truth is that Iran football federation has created serious contractual violations for me and my staff. We face an intolerable situation,” Wilomots wrote.

“My lawyers work on the case and I don›t want to comment more on the issue,” the Belgian coach added.

Under guidance of Wilmots, Iran have suffered back-to-back defeats against Bahrain and Iraq in the 2022 World Cup qualification.

Team Melli sit in third place in Group C with six points, five points adrift of leaders Iraq.

The Iranian media reports suggest that former Persepolis coach Branko Ivankovic is a possible candidate to succeed Wilmots.

The Federation’s spokesman Amir mehdi Alavi said that negotiations are underway between the federation and Wilmots.

According to the contract, Wilmots must reside in Iran until next year’s May and as

his salary problem has been settled, there is no excuse for his absence, he said.

Marc Wilmots breaks silence on Iran’s future

No. 18, Bimeh Alley, Nejatollahi St., Tehran, IranP.o. Box: 14155-4843

Zip Code: 1599814713

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GUIDE TO SPIRITUAL AWAKENING

A thought is a clear mirror. A counsel is a warning. Learning civility is enough to disapprove for others what you disapprove for yourself.

Imam Ali (AS)

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Farhad Aslani joins “Salman Farsi” project

Poland Film Week to open in Tehran next week

TEHRAN — Movies from Polish

filmmakers will be reviewed during a weeklong festival, which will open at the Iranian Artists Forum in Tehran on Sunday, the organizers announced on Tuesday.

A lineup of seven feature films, including “Gods” by Lukasz Palkowski, “80 Million” by Waldemar Krzystek and “Katyn” by Andrzej Wajda, will be screened during the program.

The lineup also includes “Big Animal” by Jerzy Stuhr, “Spoor” by Agnieszka Holland, and “Papusza” and “Birds Are Singing in Kigali”, both co-directed by Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze.

Organized by Iran’s Art and Experience Cinema in collaboration with the Embassy of Poland, the Poland Film Week will be held at the City Center Cineplex in Isfahan and Golestan Cineplex in Shiraz simultaneously until December 7.

Polish filmmaker Joanna Kos-Krauze is scheduled to hold workshops on joint film productions in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz during the film week.

The film week was scheduled to be held during January in Tehran, but it was postponed by the Cinema Organization of Iran (COI) in response to Poland’s decision to host a U.S.-led anti-Iran summit during February.

TEHRAN — Actor Farhad Aslani has

joined “Salman Farsi”, a TV series by director Davud Mirbaqeri about the life story of the Iranian companion of the Prophet of Islam Muhammad (S).

Aslani has previously collaborated with Mirbaqeri in several series, including “Mokhtarnameh” and “Imam Ali (AS)”, the public relations team of the series announced in a press release on Tuesday.

Alireza Shojanuri will portray Salman’s middle-age and old-age.

Mirbaqeri has earlier said that he would begin filming “Salman Farsi” on location on Qesham Island in southern

Iran in late autumn.Salman Farsi was one of several

individuals of Persian origin residing in Arabia, probably as a consequence of Sassanid involvement in Yemen. He was among the freedmen (mawali) of the Prophet Muhammad (S) and became the model of Persian converts and the symbol of the role that Persia and Persians would play in the future of Islam.

According to certain traditional narrations, Salman Farsi was the first who translated parts of the Holy Quran into Persian during the 7th century.

Mirbaqeri has estimated that the series would take about five years to complete.

A scene from “Katyn” by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda.Farhad Aslani in an undated photo.

TEHRAN — Iranian director Sonia Haddad’s film “Exam” has received the

Grand Jury Award - Live-Action Short at the American Film Institute - AFI FEST, the organizers announced on Friday.

The award was presented to the film for “its bold directorial style, anchored by a stunning lead performance,” the jury said in their statement.

“‘Exam’ stood out from the other films for its bold directorial style, anchored by a stunning lead performance,” the jury said in its statement published by the Organizers.

“The result is a tense portrait that reaches past its specificity into the universal,” the statement added.

“Exam” is about a teenage girl who agrees to deliver a pack of cocaine on the day of an important exam at school.

The grand jury award winners in the live-action and animated short categories will be eligible for the 2020 Best Live Action Short and Best Animated Short Academy Awards.

The Grand Jury Prize of the festival in the animation section went to “Something to Remember” by Niki Lindroth von Bahr.

The film is about the challenges of the lives of some animals who sound and feel all too human.

The AFI FEST was held in Los Angeles, California from November 14 to 21.

TEHRAN — Some Iranian and German artists will display their artworks in a joint

exhibit named “Artolog” (Art+Dialogue), which will open at Motorkhooneh Gallery in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz on December 4.

A selection of paintings, photos and sculptures with the central theme of light, art and technology will be on view at the exhibition, the organizers have announced.

The Iranian artists are Nader Fatemi, Shahriar Asadi, Mojgan Tavakkolinia, Majid Aslami, Afshin Ariafar, Leila

Shekari and Leila Aghdam. Volker Tenner, Helga Berg and the artist couple Ingrid

and Knut Reinhardt are the German artists participating in the exhibition, which will be running until December 8.

The artists have been invited to the exhibit by the German couple to experience a new atmosphere for dialogue and exchange views.

The couple displayed a selection of their robart, a new art form that connects science with art, at the Art Center in Tehran in February.

“Exam” wins grand jury award at AFI FEST

Iranian, German artists team up for exhibit “Artolog”

1 Nicaraguan Ambassador Mario Antonio Barquero Baltadano, also attending the ceremony, said that Iran aims to negotiate about peace with the world through the sculpture symposium and would surely be successful.

He added that the participation of foreign sculptors indicates that Iran is taking a step toward this peaceful negotiation.

Laura Marcos from Argentina, Olga Nechay from Belarus, Arijel Strukelj from Slovenia, Georgi Minchev from Bulgaria, Jiang Chu from China and Sangam Vankhade from India were among the participating sculptors at the symposium.

Ulises Jiménez Obregon from Costa Rica, Victor Arturo Guadalupe Tineo from Peru, Yeh Chuan Hsien from Taiwan and Alex Labejof from France also took part in the event.

The Iranian sculptors were Hedayat Sahrai, Hossein Molai Fumani, Mohammad-Mehdi Ashuri, Reza Qarebaghi and Mehdi Seifi.

A number of student sculptors were also honored. They included Nafiseh Behruz, Safura Dadkhah, Mojtaba Dahesh, Samaneh Masih, Ehsan Garmsiri and Hamid Mohammad-Hossein.

The Beautification Organization organized the symposium every year to help beautify the urban environment of the city and familiarize the citizens with the process of making new designs.

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“Funfair” crowned best short at Foyle Film Festival

TEHRAN — Iranian director Kaveh Mazaheri’s award-winning film “Funfair” was named best

international short at the 32nd Foyle Film Festival in Northern Ireland, the organizers announced on Sunday.

The film will also qualify for further consideration at the 2019 Academy Awards following its win at the closing ceremony of the event held at the Brunswick Moviebowl in Derry-Londonderry.

Actor and producer Sorush Saeidi attended the ceremony to collect the award.

“Funfair” tells the story of Majid, a young financially struggling man who comes up with a ploy in order to better the life of his wife, Sarah.

Mazaheri’s previous film “Retouch” won awards at the festivals in Tribeca, Krakow and Palm Springs.

Shaun O’Connor’s “A White Horse” won the award for best Irish short, and Hungarian director Géza M. Toth’s “Matches” was picked as best animated short at the Foyle Film Festival.

“We are delighted to present these three deserving films with our prestigious Light in Motion award,” festival director Bernadette McLaughlin said that the closing ceremony.

Over 120 short films from some 23 countries around the world were screened during the festival.

Film Museum of Iran to screen restored version of 1934 movie “Firdausi”

TEHRAN — A restored version of “Firdausi”, Iranian filmmaker Abdolhossein Sepanta’s 1934

biopic about the Persian poet Ferdowsi, will be screened at the Film Museum of Iran in Tehran on December 4.

About 20 minutes of the 90-minute movie, which has been restored by the National Film Archive of Iran, will be screened at the museum.

Starring Nosratollah Mohtasham, Sohrab Puri and Sepanta, the film was produced by the Imperial Film Company in Bombay, India.

Sepanta (1907-1969) was the director of some of the earliest sound films in Persian, including “Shirin and Farhad”, “Black Eyes” and “Leila and Majnun”. He was also the writer and actor of the first Iranian sound film, “The Lor Girl” by Ardeshir Irani.

Sorush Saeidi (R), actor and producer of the Iranian film “Funfair”, and other winners celebrate after receiving awards during the 32nd Foyle Film Festival at the Brunswick Movie-bowl in Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland on November 24, 2019. (FFF)

A poster for “Firdausi”, Iranian filmmaker Abdolhossein Sepanta’s 1934 biopic about the Persian poet Ferdowsi.

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Sculptors create works during the 9th Tehran International Sculpture Symposium in the Abbasabad district on November 10, 2019.

Tehran Intl. Sculpture Symposium wraps up

A scene from “Exam” by Iranian director Sonia Haddad.

A poster for the exhibit “Artolog” in Shiraz.

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