Russian Atomic Submarine to Reach Indian coast in Mid March

New Delhi: India will become the world's sixth operator of a nuclear-powered submarine next month when Russia's K-152 Nerpa attack vessel reaches the country's shores ahead of its formal induction into the Indian Navy.

The submarine, christened INS Chakra, is expected to reach the Indian shores, with its home base as Visakhapatnam, anytime in March, according to navy officers here.

The other global naval powers operating nuclear-powered submarines are the US, Russia, Britain, France and China.

The attack submarine was handed over to the Indian Navy by Russia at a ceremony in the Far Eastern Primorye territory on Jan 23.

Codenamed Akula-II by NATO, the Project 971 Shchuka-B class vessel will be on a 10-year lease with the Indian Navy till 2022 under a contract worth over $900 million signed in mid-1990.

Under the deal, Russia trained Indian submariners on operating the Nerpa for over a month in the Pacific Ocean ahead of its handing over.

With a displacement of over 8,000 tonnes, the vessel can touch a maximum speed of 30 knots and can operate at a maximum depth of 600 meters.

The vessel can lurk in the deep sea without having to surface for 100 days waiting for its prey to appear and to strike hard at will.

Manned by a 73-member crew, the vessel is armed with four 533mm torpedo tubes and four 650mm torpedo tubes.

The Indian Navy operated a nuclear-powered submarine 1987-1991 when it had a Soviet-origin Charlie class vessel, also named INS Chakra, in its fleet. The submarine was returned to Russia after the three-year lease ended.

Nuclear-powered submarines, being silent killers, are considered key weapon platforms in view of the surprise element in case of an attack. They are an important part of India's nuclear doctrine, as these can help in completing the nuclear-weapon triad or the capability to fire nuclear arsenal from platforms over the land, air, and under the sea.

Though Nerpa was originally scheduled to join the Indian Navy in 2009, an unexpected on-board explosion in November 2008 when it was undergoing sea trials in the Western Pacific by the Russian Navy sailors resulted in the death of 20-odd personnel due to a toxic gas release.

India will add another nuclear-powered vessel to its submarine fleet in the next six to 10 months when the indigenously built INS Arihant that is undergoing trials joins the fleet.

Two more Arihant-class submarines, with miniaturised nuclear reactors designed and developed with Russian help, will join the naval fleet in the next four years.

India currently operates 14 conventional diesel-electric submarines. Of them, 10 are Russian-origin Kilo class vessels and four are German HDW vessels

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/russian-submarine-to-reach-indian-shores-mid-march-180705&cp

Iran Haults sale of Oil to French and British Companies

Iran has halted oil sales to British and French companies, the nation's oil ministry has said.

A spokesman was reported as saying on the ministry's website that Iran would "sell our oil to new customers".

European Union member states had earlier agreed to stop importing Iranian crude from 1 July.

The move is intended to pressure Tehran to stop enriching uranium, which can be used for civilian nuclear purposes but also to build warheads.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful, but the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency says it has information suggesting Iran has carried out tests "relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device".

Sunday's statement on the oil ministry website was attributed to spokesman Ali Reza Nikzad Rahbar.

BBC world affairs correspondent Peter Biles says it appears to be another act of retaliation in the showdown between Iran and the West.

The French news agency AFP says the decision is not expected to have a big impact. Last year France bought only 3% of its oil - 58,000 barrels per day (b/d) - from Iran and the UK imported even less Iranian oil. A UK government official told the BBC there would be "no impact on UK energy security".

Some Iranian media had announced on Wednesday that Iran had stopped oil exports to the Netherlands, Greece, France, Portugal, Spain and Italy in retaliation for the EU's oil embargo, but this was later denied by the oil ministry.

The EU oil embargo, agreed last month, was phased so member states that were relatively dependent on Iranian crude - notably Greece, Spain and Italy - had enough time to find alternative sources.

The bloc currently buys about 20% of Iran's oil exports, which account for a majority of government revenue.

However, Iran's Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi said that a cut in exports to Europe would not hurt Tehran.

Oil industry sources quoted by Reuters news agency say Iran's top oil buyers in Europe have already started reducing purchases of Iranian crude.

Last year Iran supplied more than 700,000 barrels per day (b/d) to the EU and Turkey, but by the start of this year that had dropped to about 650,000 b/d, Reuters reported on Thursday.

France's energy giant Total has stopped buying Iranian crude and Royal Dutch Shell, one of the biggest purchasers of Iranian oil, has cut back sharply, market sources told Reuters.

According to Reuters estimates, Tupras of Turkey was the biggest European customer for Iranian oil in 2011, taking about 200,000 b/d, followed by Total (100,000 b/d), Shell (100,000 b/d), Hellenic of Greece (80,000 b/d) and Cepsa of Spain (70,000 b/d).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17089953

Iran Leader Warns of War with U.S

(CNN) -- The supreme leader of Iran issued a blunt warning Friday that a war would be detrimental to the United States.
"You see every now and then in this way they say that all options are on the table. That means even the option of war," Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said during Friday prayers in Tehran. "This is how they make these threats against us.
"Well, these kinds of threats are detrimental to the U.S.," he said. "The war itself will be 10 times as detrimental to the U.S."
His comments came after stern comments Friday from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
"Today, unlike in the past, there is a broad global understanding that it is crucial to stop Iran becoming nuclearized and that no options should be taken off the table," he said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has come to the conclusion there is a growing likelihood Israel could attack Iran sometime this spring in an effort to destroy its suspected nuclear weapons program, according to a senior administration official.
The official declined to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the information.
The United States and its allies have warned that Iran is trying to make a nuclear weapon. Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian purposes

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/03/world/meast/iran-warning/

5.5 Earthquake in Iran

TEHRAN, Iran – An earthquake of moderate strength caused damage and injured 100 people in the city of Neyshabour in the northeast part of Iran Thursday afternoon, Iran's state TV reported.

The TV report said 17 of the injured were hospitalized and the others were treated for minor injuries and released.

As the quake rumbled through the area, many residents of the city fled their homes into the streets. Rescue teams were still at work in the area late Thursday.

The magnitude 5.5 quake shattered windows and affected communications for a short time.
It also destroyed walls of homes in some rural areas, the report said.

Residents of several cities and towns 60 miles from the epicenter reported feeling the quake.

The quake jolted the city of 220,000 in about 550 miles northeast of the capital Tehran at 16:05 local time.

Iran is located on seismic fault lines and is prone to earthquakes, experiencing at least one slight quake a day on average.

In 2003, some 26,000 people were killed by a magnitude 6.6 quake that flattened the historic southeastern city of Bam.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/01/19/magnitude-56-earthquake-strikes-northeastern-iran/#ixzz1jadBvp1x

Iranian nuclear scientist killed

On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He wasn't armed, or anywhere near a battlefield.

Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee.

"On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear programme in Iran turn up dead," bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum in October. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly." On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced on Facebook: "I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear" – a sentiment echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the Daily Telegraph: "I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes."

These "men on motorbikes" have been described as "assassins". But assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: not just assassinations but terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes.

Their purpose is to inure us to such state-sponsored violence against foreigners. In his acclaimed book On Killing, the retired US army officer Dave Grossman examines mechanisms that enable us not just to ignore but even cheer such killings: cultural distance ("such as racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to dehumanise the victim"); moral distance ("the kind of intense belief in moral superiority"); and mechanical distance ("the sterile, Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim").

Thus western liberals who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers – who have, incidentally, had the benefit of lawyers, trials and appeals – as state-sponsored murder fall quiet as their states kill, with impunity, nuclear scientists, terror suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands. Yet a "targeted killing", human-rights lawyer and anti-drone activist Clive Stafford Smith tells me, "is just the death penalty without due process".

Cognitive dissonance abounds. To torture a terror suspect, for example, is always morally wrong; to kill him, video game style, with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone, is morally justified. Crippled by fear and insecurity, we have sleepwalked into a situation where governments have arrogated to themselves the right to murder their enemies abroad.

Nor are we only talking about foreigners here. Take Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist preacher, al-Qaida supporter – and US citizen. On 30 September 2011, a CIA drone killed Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another CIA-led drone attack killed Awlaki's 21-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman. Neither father nor son were ever indicted, let alone tried or convicted, for committing a crime. Both US citizens were assassinated by the US government in violation of the Fifth Amendment ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law").

An investigation by Reuters last October noted how, under the Obama administration, US citizens accused of involvement in terrorism can now be "placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions … There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate."

Should "secret panels" and "kill lists" be tolerated in a liberal democracy, governed by the rule of law? Did the founders of the United States intend for its president to be judge, jury and executioner? Whatever happened to checks and balances? Or due process?

Imagine the response of our politicians and pundits to a campaign of assassinations against western scientists conducted by, say, Iran or North Korea. When it comes to state-sponsored killings, the double standard is brazen. "Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them," George Orwell observed, "and there is almost no kind of outrage … which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side".

But how many more of our values will we shred in the name of security? Once we have allowed our governments to order the killing of fellow citizens, fellow human beings, in secret, without oversight or accountability, what other powers will we dare deny them?

This isn't complicated; there are no shades of grey here. Do we disapprove of car bombings and drive-by shootings, or not? Do we consistently condemn state-sponsored, extrajudicial killings as acts of pure terror, no matter where in the world, or on whose orders, they occur? Or do we shrug our shoulders, turn a blind eye and continue our descent into lawless barbarism?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/16/iran-scientists-state-sponsored-murder?newsfeed=true