Shaheen Fatemi's article titled "Don't Nuke Iran, Knock the mullahs" will appear here tomorrow. ... more

(New York, March 13, 2002) The Iranian authorities have begun closed and unannounced proceedings against a seventy-three-year-old Iranian journalist who is being denied his basic right to a fair trial, Human Rights Watch said today. "The judicial authorities are making a mockery of rule of law in Iran. The Iranian authorities have given no reason to hold Mr. Pourzand, and by law they should release him immediately." ... more

TEHRAN: An Iranian journalist on trial for acting against state security has admitted collaborating with "counter-revolutionaries and monarchists" living abroad, the government daily Iran reported on Tuesday. ... more

TEHRAN-KABOL 12 Mar. (IPS) "No Iranian national is among those arrested in Afghanistan", the official spokesman of the Iranian Government, Mr. Abdollah Ramezanzadeh stressed Monday, rejecting allegations by some Afghan personalities claiming that Iranian military men had been detained in Afghanistan. ... more

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan –– After days of official silence, the U.S. military confirmed Tuesday it is holding 12 people seized recently in western Afghanistan – a group an Afghan politician says is largely Iranian. ... more

A dispute between Iran's reform-majority parliament and a conservative watchdog body over draft legislation on foreign investments in Iran is to go to arbitration. The conservative Guardian Council, which rules whether parliamentary bills are constitutional and in conformity with Islamic principles (Shari'a), has refused again to approve certain articles of the proposed investment law. ... more

ATHENS (AP)--Greece and Iran will sign a natural gas deal during a visit by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, the Greek government said Tuesday. The government didn't provide details of the deal to be signed by Greece's Natural Gas Co., but Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh said during a January visit that the two countries would seek to extend a pipeline that currently ends near Ankara. ... more

Concern greets new US nuclear doctrine: Allies are already nervous about the widening war on terrorism. For most of the cold war, the US and the Soviet Union largely accepted the doctrine that nuclear weapons were so massively destructive they were good for only one thing: dissuading other countries from using them. ... more

TEHRAN, Iran - An Iranian dissident has been freed on bail after more than a year in prison, his son said Wednesday. Hoda Saber, 41, a pro-democracy journalist who was the editor of the now-banned Iran-e-Farda magazine, was released late Tuesday on bail of 1.3 billion rials (dlrs 162,500) his son, Hanif Saber, told The Associated Press. ... more

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the 1980s it was the biggest scandal of the Reagan administration, a covert arms-for-hostages overture to Iran -- more popularly known as ``Iran-Contra.'' Today, a half-dozen alumni of that episode have found prominent jobs in the Bush administration. The most recent is former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, 65. The retired admiral took over a new Pentagon counterterrorism office last month. ... more

The giant offshore South Pars gas field, the largest project in Iran involving international oil and gas companies, has begun production, French oil giant TotalFinaElf said yesterday. Signed in 1997, TotalFinaElf's South Pars deal was the first to challenge Washington's Iran Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) which threatens sanctions against any firm investing over $20 million in the oil and gas sectors of Iran and Libya. TotalFinaElf, the only company spared from ILSA by an official waiver from Washington, has a 40 per cent stake and operates the $2 billion project. Malaysia's Petronas and Russia's Gazprom have a 30 per cent stake each. ... more

Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, meets President Mohammad Khatami of Iran today in a move which highlights divergences with the US over George Bush's "axis of evil" policy. Mr Solana said he hoped dialogue would encourage reformers in Tehran. "We want to get constructively engaged with Iran," he said in Vienna. ... more

Tehran, March 13, IRNA -- `Kayhan International' on Wednesday praised President Mohammad Khatami's just concluded trip to Austria, calling it a "timely step" to correct "unpleasant opinions about Iran" engineered by the White House. ... more

Curators of Islamic art collections around the country are reporting an increase in attendance in their galleries, a growth they can only attribute to the current political situation. ... more

TEHRAN (Reuters) - An earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale jolted southern Iran, but no casualties were reported, the official IRNA news agency said on Tuesday. The epicentre of the quake, which struck late on Monday, was in Gulf waters off the Iranian coast near the southern port city of Bandar-e Lengeh, the agency said. ... more

KISH ISLAND, Iran, March 12 — Iranian women ride bikes, roar atop the waves on jet skis or just soak in the warm rays of the beach without the requisite head covering. There is even a roped-off stretch of sand where male and female foreigners can mingle. WHAT'S FROWNED upon on the Iranian mainland is tolerated on Kish, a sun-splashed island in the Persian Gulf that has become an experiment into how far the country's Islamic rulers are willing to go to attract foreign investment. ... more

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has tried to reach out to the country's Kurdish population amid speculation that their areas could be used by the United States as it contemplates extending its war on terror against Iraq. In a speech on the 32nd anniversary of an historic agreement setting out the rights of the Iraqi Kurds, he said Kurds should not be deceived by "the foreigner", and should postpone their aspiration in the face of threats facing Baghdad. ... more

THE growing likelihood of American military action against Iraq threatens to pit London against Paris and tear apart the European Union's fledgling foreign and defence policy, unless handled with great care. The Europeans have backed the Afghan war, dispatching German special forces and French bombers to help annihilate al-Qa'eda, but the addition of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to the list of targets in President Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech has changed the mood dramatically. ... more

Cabinet minister Ephraim Sneh said Wednesday that at this stage, Israel had no plans to take action against Hezbollah, even if it were proven that the militant Lebanese organization had links to the Tuesday shooting attack in which gunmen killed six Israelis near the northern border. Meeting Wednesday on the eve of the expected arrival of U.S. special Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's security cabinet is to discuss IDF operations in the territories ... ... more

Gunmen disguised as soldiers fired at Jewish settlers just south of the Lebanese border on Tuesday, killing six in an ambush which Israel initially blamed on infiltrators from Lebanon, a charge that kindled fears of a new conflagration in the South on the eve of the Arab summit. But the apparent attempt to mobilize public opinion against Lebanon was short-lived, when UNIFIL peacekeepers and the Lebanese Army Command ascertained that there had been no breach of the border. Two assailants and six Israelis were killed in the attack. Six other Israelis were wounded and a third attacker was reportedly arrested later in the day. But the identities of the assailants remained under wraps. ... more

If another country were planning to develop a new nuclear weapon and contemplating preemptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers, Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue state. Yet such is the course recommended to President George W. Bush by a new Pentagon planning paper that became public last weekend. Bush needs to send that document back to its authors and ask for a new version less menacing to the security of future American generations. ... more

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Seventeen years ago, an Afghan girl orphaned and living in a refugee camp appeared on the cover of National Geographic, her eyes big and green, a red scarf draped loosely over her hair. Now, the magazine says it has tracked down the subject of that famous photo, a wife and mother living in a remote part of Afghanistan, and will once again feature her in its April issue focusing on the plight of refugees. The girl, whose parents had been killed by bombing during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, was photographed in 1984 at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan by Steve McCurry. The photo was first published on the cover of the June 1985 issues of National Geographic. ... more

TEHRAN, March 12 (AFP) - Reformist deputy Shahrbanoo Amani was sentenced to four months in jail for "insulting" a conservative parliamentarian, IRNA quoted her colleague Ahmad Bourghani as saying Tuesday. "The court has sentenced Amani, deputy from northwestern city of Urumieh, to four months in jail for insulting conservative deputy Mohammad Abbaspour in an interview with a local publication", Bourghani told IRNA. The court ruled that her jail term be suspended for four years due to her "social status", Bourghani added. ... more