Iran Halts sales of Oil to France and Britain

19 February 2012
Last updated at 12:54











Iran 'halts oil sales to France and Britain'













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.




Why just Britain and France......what about the rest of Europe who voted for the embargo?????

COULD ALWAYS IMPORT MORE ARAB OIL

Badboy wrote:COULD ALWAYS IMPORT MORE ARAB OIL

I just wondered why Britain and France were singled out and not the rest of Eeurope. It was a bit stupid to say the embargo would start in July, the
Summer months when not so mucg oil was needed. This is why Iran has made the embargo immediate, but unfair not to include the rest of Europe.

An investment analyst has just answered my question.

He said Britain and France account for only about 1% of sales of Iranian Oil, so it is a bit of sabre rattling by Iran. Italy and Spain would have been much
more affected.

Iran thwarted investigation into nuclear program, UN watchdog says


By msnbc.com news servicesThe
Iranian government has blocked attempts to investigate its
alleged atomic weapons work, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency
said Wednesday.
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, or
IAEA, expressed disappointment over a lack of progress during two days
of talks in Tehran over Iran's disputed nuclear program and said its
request to visit a military site had not been granted.
In the
second such visit in less than a month, a senior team from the IAEA had
traveled to Tehran to press Iranian officials to start addressing
mounting concerns that the country may be seeking to develop atomic
arms.

"During both the first and second round of discussions, the agency
team requested access to the military site at Parchin. Iran did not
grant permission for this visit to take place," the Vienna-based IAEA
said in a statement after the talks Monday and Tuesday talks in the
Iranian capital.






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The statement was released early Wednesday, after the IAEA team left
on a return flight to Vienna. The unusual timing — shortly after
midnight in Europe — reflected the urgency the IAEA attached to the
communique.

Iran
says it would take pre-emptive action against its enemies if it felt
its national interests were threatened. NBC's Ali Arouzi reports
NYT: Mother visits American sentenced to death in Iran
Iran denies any interest in possessing nuclear weapons and says its atomic program is for peaceful purposes.
In
the latest in a war of words between the West and Iran, an Iranian
general warned Tuesday that the nation will pre-emptively strike anyone
who threatens it.
The statement by Gen. Mohammed Hejazi continues
the defiant tone Tehran has taken in its confrontation with Western
countries that claim it is developing nuclear weapons.
"We do not
wait for enemies to take action against us," said Hejazi, according to
the semiofficial Fars news agency. "We will use all our means to protect
our national interests."
Hejazi heads the military's logistical wing.
The U.S. and Israel have not ruled out strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iran
also said Tuesday that a visiting U.N. team did not plan to inspect the
country's nuclear facilities and would only hold talks with officials
in Tehran.
The statement cast doubt on how well U.N. inspectors
can gauge whether Iran is moving ahead with its suspected pursuit of
nuclear weapons.
Iran threatens pre-emptive action amid nuclear tensions
The visit by the International Atomic Energy Agency team, which started Monday, is the second in less than a month.
Foreign
Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said the visiting IAEA team was
made up of experts, not inspectors. He told reporters that the IAEA team
was holding discussions Tuesday in Tehran to prepare for future
cooperation between Iran and the U.N. watchdog. He said this cooperation
is at its "best" level.
"The (title) of the members of the
visiting delegation is not 'inspectors.' This is an expert delegation.
The purpose of visit is not inspection," said Mehmanparast. "The aim is
to negotiate about cooperation between Iran and the agency and to set a
framework for a continuation of the talks."
Visits to Iranian nuclear sites were not part of the IAEA visit three weeks ago.
The latest IAEA trip came as Iran carried out air defense war games to practice protecting nuclear and other sensitive sites.
The
official news agency IRNA said Monday that the four-day air defense war
games — dubbed "Sarallah," or "God's Revenge" — were taking place in
the south of the country and involved anti-aircraft batteries, radar and
warplanes. The drill was to be held over 73,000 square miles near the
port of Bushehr, the site of Iran's lone nuclear power plant.
Iran has held multiple air, land and sea maneuvers in recent months as the tensions increased.
The
military maneuvers are viewed as a message to the West that Iran is
prepared to defend itself against hostile measures and to retaliate —
including warnings that it could cut the strategic Strait of Hormuz
waterway off its southern coast with its naval forces.
Tehran is
also under heavy economic pressure. Last month, the European Union
imposed sanctions on Iran's fuel exports and froze its central bank
assets. An oil embargo is set to begin in July.
Iranian officials
said the country should respond by cutting off EU states early, before
they can line up alternative buyers. Over the weekend, Tehran announced
that it was pre-emptively cutting off exports to France and Britain.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Iran blocking 30 million from email, Web ahead of election





By Alex Johnson, msnbc.comWith
parliamentary elections scheduled for next week, Iran has begun
blocking Internet services, Web security experts say, adding to concerns
that government leaders hope to shut off Iranians from the rest of the
online world.

Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

The Tor Network,
which provides free software for anonymous use of the Internet,
reported that on Feb. 9, Tehran began filtering keywords and throttling
or shutting down access to sites that use a form of security called
Secure Socket Layers, or SSL. The protocol, which encrypts data being
sent back and forth between servers and users, is used by such popular
sites as Gmail and Facebook. Web addresses protected by SSL begin
"https," instead of "http."






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Activists in repressive countries often use Tor services to get
around such restrictions, and before Feb. 9, Iranians were the
second-largest users of Tor. But because Iran targeted the core SSL
protocol, "Tor stopped working too," the organization said.

The action is blocking email and some Web access for as many as 30 million Iranians who use SSL-protected sites, reported CBR Systems & Network Security, a European technology organization.
Iran,
which will hold parliamentary elections on March 2, has referred to
Google and other search engines as "spying tools," and it has throttled
access to foreign web servers previously at politically sensitive times.
The free-expression activist group Reporters Without Borders has
branded Iran as an "enemy of the Internet." (.pdf)
Online journalists censored, attacked: report
Iran's
Communications and Technology Minister Reza Taghipour said Monday that a
firewalled "national Internet," which Tehran has been promising since
as early as 2006, would be launched in the spring. Internet security
analysts and open-Internet activists say the "national Internet" would
act as a closed intranet sealing Iranians off from large chunks of the
web. Similar systems are known to be in use in China and North Korea.
The
Iranian news agency Mehr quoted Taghipour as saying at a cyberdefense
forum in Tehran that "the first phase of this network will become
operational in the month of Khordad," which straddles May and June.
The
Tor network said it was continuing "to research and investigate
solutions with the assumption that SSL will eventually be blocked
nationwide inside Iran."