US Gasoline Still Making it to Iran
April 13th, 2010 | No Comments | Source: Washington PostCongress is pressuring private companies to cease doing business with Iran, but the effort has encountered the same problems US sanctions have ran into for 30 years — reluctance in the European Union to play ball and a bevy of shady, Middle Eastern front companies that can maneuver around any prohibitions.
Both chambers of Congress have passed bills that would sanction companies supplying gasoline to Iran, as well as the insurance and shipping companies that support such trade, in an effort to deter the Islamic republic from developing the bomb.
The US would like to stop sending Iran 130,000 barrels a day of gasoline that the oil-rich nation imports because it can’t refine the stuff.
Several companies including Caterpillar, Huntsman and Siemens have announced they will stop doing business with Iran.
But Catherine Margaret Ashton, the EU’s representative for foreign affairs and security policy, has written to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton opposing the congressional sanctions.
Those bills “envisage the extraterritorial application of US legislation and would be contrary to the EU-US understanding of 1998, under which it was agreed that such sanctions would not be applied to the EU in the light of the EU’s commitment to work with the US to counter the threat that Iran poses to international security,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, oil industry sources told the Washington Post that that Iranian front companies are securing gasoline from the United Arab Emirates, and that companies based in Iraq were doing the same thing.
In Iran, gasoline is heavily subsidized, costing drivers just 38 cents per gallon, although the government has cut quotas recently, and seems to be stockpiling gasoline. Best guesses put the nation’s gasoline supply on hand at about 1 month’s worth.




The trend is most pronounced among women in their 20s. In the 80s, there were twice as many thin Japanese women in this age range as there were overweight women. Now, Japanese women are 4 times more likely to be thin. In this age group, average daily calorie consumption was found in recent government studies to be just two-thirds of recommended levels.
MaCafee monitors Internet-based threats targeting computers in 120 countries. It found that in the fourth quarter of last year, about 1,095,000 computers in China and 1,057,000 in the US had been infected.
The report was authored by Dominique McMahon and colleagues at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health.
The dead operatives had been begun a campaign against a radical nut job known as Sirajuddin Haqqani and his woefully enslaved followers. This crew has claimed responsibility for killing dozens of US soldiers.
It looks as though the attack was part of a large corporate and political phishing ploy that leveraged security flaws in e-mail attachments to break into the networks of at least 34 companies including Yahoo, Symantec, Rackspace, Adobe and Northrop Grumman.
Such behavior would exceed the protective role assigned to Blackwater in a contract with the CIA, the sources said.
Both attacks almost certainly originated in China.
China’s remarkable economic growth is driving the decision, according to Chief Executive Daniel Vasella.
“When I came to, I could hear the doctors talking,” she told the
OK fine, but a few Internet savants
Now, as China rushes to invest nearly $600 billion of stimulus money and shake off a rare economic slowdown caused by the Great Economic Crisis, its
This angered provincial officials, state-owned companies and his current boss who eventually sidelined him, shook down his top aides and harassed his wife, according to people who confided in secrecy with the Times.
Yessiree concluded the specialists, but
Yet the researchers cautioned against concluding China’s government was directly responsible for the shenanigans.
Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hasn’t been quite so cocky lately.
But Khatami couldn’t reign in the fractious reformists that swept into power with him, the movement was eaten alive by an entrenched conservative bloc, and next thing you know, Ahmadinejad –exasperatingly flaky, populist rants and all—was the new game in town.
He’d been living that way since 2004 after confessing to being top dog in the world’s largest nuclear black market.
“The key question,” a Bush administration official said last year, “is whether he gave (those) designs to the Iranians.”




