Kayhan international

Archive:

Monday, December 19, 2011

$1 Billion Oil Deal With Russian Firm

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- Russia's Tatneft and Iran on Sunday signed a $1 billion preliminary deal to develop the Zagheh oil field, deepening Moscow's business links with Iran despite U.S. calls for further sanctions over Iran.
The Zagheh oil field, located outside the town of Deilam in south Iran on the shores of the Persian Gulf, contains an estimated 3 billion barrels of heavy crude oil.
Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi said that the field will produce 7,000 barrels per day of heavy crude in the first phase of its development within two years.
"The field has the capacity to increase its crude oil production to 55,000 barrels a day in the second phase within 54 months,'' Qasemi was quoted as saying.
A final contract will be signed within three months on a "buyback'' basis, meaning the Russians will build the facilities but will not own them, and will receive their costs plus a pre-agreed profit in return.
Russia has rejected U.S. demands for new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, arguing for diplomatic solutions to the standoff.
Iran is the second largest OPEC oil producer, with a production of about 4 million barrels of oil a day. The country's recoverable oil reserves are estimated at over 137 billion barrels, or 12% of the world's overall reserves.
The country relies on oil exports for about 80% of its public revenues. However, most of Iran's crude production is used domestically. Iran also has the world's second largest natural gas reserves, estimated at 28 trillion cubic meters.
Qasemi said Tatneft "is one of the world's reputable companies working in extraction of heavy oil which is why we wanted to use its experiences".
Naji Sadouni, the director of the state Petroleum Engineering and Development Co., signed the memorandum of understanding with his Russian counterpart, saying the value of the contract was around $1 billion.
"The oil field will start production within 24 months and its full production will be in 54 months," Mehr quoted Sadouni as saying.
The president of the southern Russian republic of Tartarstan, the home of Tatneft, in Tehran for the signing, also visited Iran's giant South Pars gas field and said he hoped for further economic cooperation with Iran.
"The diversity of projects in South Pars is unbelievable ... I hope that in future Tartarestan becomes a place for comprehensive Iran-Russia cooperation," Rustam Minnikhanov told the official IRNA news agency.
Deputy Economy Minister Behrouz Alishiri said Sunday that Iran needs an annual $300 billion in foreign direct investment to meet its objective of eight percent economic growth by 2015.
The country attracted about $15 billion in foreign investment last year, he said.
Economic growth was four percent in the last Iranian calendar year that ended March 20, Economy Minister Shamseddin Husseini said in October.
Iran has come under four rounds of UN sanctions initiated by the U.S. as well as unilateral embargo by the United States and its European allies.
A senior lawmaker said Sunday that if Iran's oil industry is targeted by international sanctions, the Islamic Republic will not let a single barrel of oil cross the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
“(The U.S.) should know that in line with international law, such as Paragraph 4, Article 14 of Geneva 1958 Convention, if oil sanctions are imposed on Iran, we will not allow even a single barrel of oil to be exported to countries hostile to us,” Issa Jafari noted.
He added that the Strait of Hormuz is the world's energy corridor through which a daily total of 35 million barrels of crude oil is exported.
The lawmaker further said that new sanctions were a plot by the US and its allies to divert global attention from the Occupy Wall Street movement and also to cover up the recent scandal with regards to the U.S. spy drone violating Iran's airspace.

Mubarak Remnants Unleash Reign of Terror

CAIRO (Dispatches) – Protesters and security forces fought in Cairo on Sunday, the third day of clashes that have killed 10 people and exposed rifts over the army's role as it manages Egypt's promised transition from military to civilian rule.
Soldiers and police manned barriers on some streets around Tahrir Square, the hub of the uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak and again convulsed by violence as protesters demand the generals who took charge in February quit power.
Police in riot gear made brief forays beyond their barriers and were met by a surge of protesters pelting them with rocks. Police appeared to have taken over the frontline from soldiers.
Troops in riot gear were filmed on Saturday beating protesters with long sticks even after they had fallen to the ground. A picture showed two soldiers dragging a woman lying on the ground by her shirt, exposing her underwear.
The violence has overshadowed a staggered parliamentary election, the first free vote most Egyptians can remember, that is set to give Islamists the biggest bloc.
Many Egyptians are enraged by the army's behavior. Others want to focus on voting, not street protests.
The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces will retain power even after the lower house vote is completed in January, but has pledged to hand over to an elected president by July.
"The army council must go," said a protester with a bandaged head, who gave his name as Mohamed, after another night of clashes between soldiers and activists who had stayed in Tahrir.
Nearby, dozens of youths hurled rocks at security forces behind a barrier of barbed wire and metal sheets. Riot police appeared to have moved to the frontline instead of soldiers.
An army source said 164 people had been detained.
Hundreds of protesters were in Tahrir on Sunday, although traffic was flowing through the square coming from streets not blocked and away from the violence. Most of the clashes have been in streets leading off the square.
One group of activists approached those hurling stones to urge them to stop, but they refused, citing the deaths of 10 people as a reason not to "negotiate".
A hardcore of activists have camped in Tahrir since a protest against army rule on Nov. 18 that was sparked by the army-backed cabinet's proposals to permanently shield the military from civilian oversight in the new constitution.
Bouts of violence since then, including a flare-up last month that killed 42, have deepened frustrations of many other Egyptians.
A building near Tahrir with historic archives was gutted on Saturday by a fire. Some people tried to gather up any remaining, partially charred documents to save them.
The Health Ministry said 10 people had been killed in the violence since Friday and 505 were wounded, of which 384 had been taken to hospital. Most of the deaths happened on Friday or early Saturday. No deaths were reported on Sunday.
The latest bloodshed began after the second round of voting last week for parliament's lower house. The staggered election began on Nov. 28 and will end with a run-off vote on Jan. 11.
The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties repressed in the 30-year Mubarak era have emerged as strong front-runners.
The clashes began early Friday when one of several hundred peaceful protesters staging a sit-in outside the Cabinet offices near parliament was detained and beaten by troops. The protesters began their sit-in three weeks ago to demand that the nation's ruling military immediately step down and hand over power to a civilian administration.
Activists have been trying to drum up public sympathy for their cause by flooding social network sites with photos and video from the troops' brutal
assaults he past two days.
"Liars,'' proclaimed a red headline on the front page of the independent Al-Tahrir newspaper, referring to repeated denials by the military council and military-appointed Prime Minister Kamal el-Ganzouri that no force or live ammunition were used against the protesters. With the headline, the paper ran a photo of the woman protester who was half-stripped by attacking soldiers.
Other widely circulating footage shows an army officer running toward protesters while firing a pistol at them, though it is not clear from the footage whether he was using live ammunition.

Experts Detail U.S. Drone 'Spoofing'

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- An Iranian engineer says a team of specialists hacked into a GPS navigator of the RQ-170 stealth drone and forced it to land inside the country.
The unnamed engineer has told The Christian Science Monitor that serious weaknesses in the drone's navigation systems allowed Iranians to spoof the GPS signals it received, fooling the drone into thinking it was landing at an American airfield in Afghanistan.
“The GPS navigation is the weakest point. The spoofing technique that the Iranians used - which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data - made the drone land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications from the U.S. control center,” he stated.
The Iranian engineer highlighted that Iran's takedown of the most advanced U.S. stealth drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, did not occur overnight.
Rather, Iranian experts have been studying drones since 2007, and especially since 2009, which is when the RQ-170 was first deployed in Afghanistan, he noted.
Iranians have in recent years managed to reverse engineer the systems of two unmanned aerial vehicles that they earlier downed in the country, and figured out their vulnerabilities.
On December 4, Iran downed with minimum damage the U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which was flying over the eastern city of Kashmar, some 225km (140 miles) from the Afghan border.
The capture of the RQ-170 stealth drone by Iranian Army's electronic warfare unit occurred as the advanced U.S.-built reconnaissance was on its very first mission over Iran. Its seizure at the moment means that Iranians were alerted in advance about the precise moment of its secret arrival.
Iran has announced that it would carry out reverse engineering on the captured RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft, which is also known as the Beast of Kandahar, and is similar in design to a U.S. Air Force B-2 stealth bomber.
A report published in a website linked to the war establishment of the occupying regime of Israel said Iran not only cracked communications system of the RQ-170 stealth drone and forced it to land inside the country, but also broke into CIA's secret drone command center.
According to an article published by DEBKAfile military intelligence website, Iranians not only unlocked the Sentinel's secret software but also penetrated the command and control center running the drones from CIA headquarters at Langley in McClean, Virginia. They then delved into the satellite connection between Langley and the drone.
The article pointed out that Iranian electronic experts subsequently reprogrammed the directives guiding the satellite and the RQ-170 stealth drone by falsifying the images appearing on the screens at Langley.
The drone misrepresented as complying with its original programming although it had been commandeered by Iran and was obeying its new masters.
The CIA handlers of the RQ-170 Sentinel drone did not activate the aircraft's self-destruct mechanism because they were not aware it was out of their control.
By the time it was discovered, it was too late; since the mechanism along with the rest of the drone's systems had been disconnected and passed to Iranian controllers.
A member of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee said Sunday the downing attests to the country's intelligence prowess.
“The arrest of this American spy further proves the extent of meddling in the country's current affairs by Americans and their inability to defeat Iran,” MP Hassan Kamran said.
The lawmaker noted that arresting a U.S. spy of Iranian descent was in continuation of the United States' soft war against Iran.
“The enemy, with all its equipment and plotting never imagined that its spy would be arrested by the intelligence forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said.
Kamran also urged Iran's judicial officials to deal with the U.S. spy in accordance with the Iranian law.

Police on Motorcycles Attack Protesters:
U.S. Resorts to New Crackdown Tactics

NEW YORK (Dispatches) -- More than 50 anti-Wall Street protesters have been arrested after they tried to climb over a chain-link fence around a church parking lot in a bid to establish a new encampment.
The demonstrators had used a wooden ladder to scale a chain-link fence into the lot owned by Trinity Church, an Occupy Wall Street spokesman said.
Police had no immediate figure on how many people were taken into custody, but Gideon Oliver, president of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, put the number at about 55, including between five and 10 members of the clergy.
The remaining demonstrators marched through Manhattan's streets toward the house of the Trinity Church rector, but were turned away by police.
Later, as they started to move toward Midtown, some of the demonstrators were hemmed in by lines of police, and police on motorcycles tried to disperse protesters who were in the middle of streets.
"We are unstoppable. Another world is possible," and "Whose street? Our street," were among the chants from the protesters, who blocked some streets as they marched.
The remainder of the group, several dozen protesters, held signs in Times Square into the evening.
"We're just trying to say that this country has gone in the wrong direction, and we need spaces that we can control and we can decide our future in, and that's what this is about,'' said David Suker, who was among those who scaled the fence.
The Occupy movement began with protesters taking over a park in New York in September to draw attention to economic inequality and a financial system they say is unfairly skewed toward the wealthy.
In ensuing months the protests and encampments spread to cities throughout the United States as well as to some in other countries.
But Occupy camps in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and a number of other major cities were shut down in recent weeks in operations that resulted in hundreds of arrests and have raised questions about the movement's future.
Authorities have justified their moves against the camps on a variety of grounds, including that the camps were causing sanitation problems and were dangerous to public safety.