$100 per barrel oil not a problem: Iran’s oil minister

Economic Times--Oil Minister Masoud Mirkazemi has said that USD 100 per barrel is a real price and not a matter of concern for producers.
The price of USD 100 for oil per barrel is real, he said yesterday, adding the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) does not need to hold an emergency meeting over the price issue.
None of the OPEC members finds USD 100 concerning or irrational. Some of the OPEC members see no need for an emergency meeting even with prices at USD 110 or USD 120," Mirkazemi told a press conference in Tehran.
 

Iran holds the rotating OPEC presidency. The next scheduled OPEC meeting is on June 2.
 

"None of the members have asked for an emergency meeting and I think for a long time there would be no such request," Mirkazemi said.
OPEC is a permanent intergovernmental organization of 12 oil-exporting developing nations that includes Algeria , Angola, Ecuador, Iraq , Iran, Kuwait , Libya, Nigeria , Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.
The organization supplies 25 per cent of global oil demand, coordinates and unifies the petroleum policies of its member countries.
 

At its last meeting at Quito, the 12-nation organization decided to leave production quotas unchanged, stressing the looming risks to the fragile global economic recovery. Continued…

Iran’s fuel blockade strains relations with Afghanistan, prompts protests

Washington Post- A protracted fuel blockade by Iran sparked protests in Afghanistan for the second day in a row Sunday as tensions rose between the Islamic neighbors, who share a long border and a complicated history.

Afghan demonstrators in the western border city of Herat threw eggs and stones at the Iranian consulate, protesting the six-week border blockade of fuel tankers passing through Iran that has caused prices of gasoline and winter heating fuel to rise between 35 and 60 percent across the country.

Afghanistan’s commerce minister, Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, said at a news conference in the capital Sunday that the government was "not happy" with Iran, marking the first public criticism of the actions by Afghan officials. He said the Afghan government had not received any plausible explanation for the blockade, which has left up to 2,000 fuel trucks stranded on the border. "Whatever reason they have given is not acceptable to us," Ahady said.

Iranian officials said they were stopping the fuel transports because the government suspects the product ends up with NATO - and perhaps U.S. - forces in Afghanistan. "We have news that fuel transited through Iran is handed over to NATO forces. We are extremely worried about this," Fada Hossein Maleki, Iran’s ambassador to Afghanistan, told the official Islamic Republic News Agency on Jan. 5. Continued…

Iran’s nuclear program and a new era of cyber war

La Times--Stuxnet, the game-changing computer worm that is believed to have significantly set back Tehran’s progress in nuclear enrichment, may herald a new era of shadowy digital combat.

The full extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear equipment wrought by Stuxnet is a matter of speculation. Other than limited international inspections, the outside world has almost no access to information about Iran’s nuclear program. Iran, which says its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes, has refused to comply with a U.N. Security Council order that it stop its uranium enrichment program.

Iranian officials acknowledge that the complex malware snaked its way into industrial software used to operate centrifuges in the Natanz nuclear facility and went undetected for a year. As of Sept. 29, after which Iran took action that made further assessment impossible, Stuxnet had infected 100,000 hosts worldwide, 60,000 of which were in Iran, according to a detailed report on the worm by Symantec, a computer security company.

According to the Institute for Science and International Security, 1,000 of about 8,000 centrifuges at Natanz had to be replaced in late 2009 and early 2010. In mid-November, Iran temporarily halted enrichment at Natanz because of technical problems with its centrifuges, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog.Continued…