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Prayer Time (Tehran)
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Dawn: 5:37
Sunrise: 7:07
Noon: 11:59
Evening: 17:12
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Weather Guide
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THU |
FRI |
Tehran: |
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High: |
14 oC |
12 oC |
Low: |
5 oC |
5 oC |
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Athens |
3 |
13 |
Ankara |
9 |
7 |
Paris |
8 |
10 |
New Delhi |
21 |
21 |
Rome |
11 |
12 |
Riyadh |
28 |
27 |
Frankfurt |
6 |
2 |
Cairo |
21 |
20 |
Kuwait City |
27 |
27 |
Karachi |
28 |
27 |
Copenhagen |
8 |
2 |
London |
12 |
11 |
Moscow |
-1 |
-3 |
Madrid |
10 |
10 |
Vienna |
4 |
4 |
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Identification
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Published by the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA)
Address:
Iran Cultural & Press Institute, #212 Khorramshahr Avenue Tehran/Iran
Managing Director: Mohammad T. Roghaniha
Executive Editor: Amin Sabooni
Editorial Dept. Tel: 8755761-2
Editorial Dept. Fax: 8761869
Advertising Dept. Tel: 8753119, 8757702, 8733764
Internet Address:
www.iran-daily.com
E-mail Address:
iran-daily@iran-daily.com
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Ahmadinejad Reviews End of War Games
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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (inset) attended the closing ceremony of war games in the Persian Gulf, Dec. 14. (IRNA Photo)
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TEHRAN, Dec. 14--President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad attended on Wednesday the closing ceremony of war games entitled “Admirers of Supreme Jurisprudent“.
According to ILNA, the closing ceremony was conducted on Kharg warship.
Warship destroyers, submarines, speed boats and aerial units as well as bomber planes participated.
Floater units operated by soldiers also participated, which displayed their high level of preparedness in defending the country. Soldiers from different tribes and religions took part and were commended by senior Army, Islamic Revolution’s Guards Corps and Police commanders.
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Nuke Powers Cannot Dictate Terms
ZAHEDAN,
Sistan-Baluchestan, Dec. 14--President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday reiterated that Iran will not succumb to pressures for giving up its right to nuclear technology.
Addressing a huge gathering in Zahedan during his first day of tour of Sistan-Baluchestan, Ahmadinejad said, “Those who have built and continue to build nuclear weapons do not have the right to block Iran’s access to nuclear technology.“
The president noted that those who possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and use them against people whenever they want, and those who equipped the enemy with weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq-imposed war (1980-88) today insist that Iran should not gain access to peaceful nuclear technology, IRNA reported.
“The Iranian nation is confident that these people are criminals and does not doubt that they have filled their warehouses with weapons of mass destruction for killing people,“ he said.
Ahmadinejad stressed that access to nuclear technology is the natural right of Iranians and said no country has the right to impose aerial sanctions on other countries.
“There should not be any excuse for not selling aircraft spare parts to other countries É When in the past a murderer regime ruled Iran, those who imposed sanctions against us today gave that regime everything. But, when the Islamic Revolution became triumphant and freedom and independence of the people were fulfilled, they imposed sanctions on the nation. Now what assurances exist that they will not do the same thing regarding nuclear fuel?“ he said.
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Thinkers Urged
To Prevent Abuse of Religion
TEHRAN, Dec. 14--An official said on Wednesday violence, murder, terrorism and violation of people’s rights do not comply with religious tenets, calling on American and Iranian thinkers to prevent the abuse of religion.
Mahmoud Mohammadi-Araqi, the head of Islamic Culture and Propagation Organization, also told a group of American religious activists that violence does not benefit anybody, IRNA reported.
“Violence perpetrated by political officials does not have religious roots and it is rather a political move.“
Mohammadi-Araqi also pointed to the services rendered by Iranians to the Western intellectual movement and the desire of Iranians to pursue cultural and intellectual debates.
Head of Mennonite Central Committee Ed Martin talked about their intellectual and academic interactions with other religions.
Martin, who has traveled to Iran for promoting exchange off professors and students, said, “Currently, many Muslim professors teach Islamic sciences at Christian universities in the US.“
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N. Europe Inhabitations 700,000 Years Old
PARIS, Dec. 14--Early Man inhabited northern Europe around 700,000 years ago, some 200,000 years sooner than previously thought, British archeologists believe.
The finding will rewrite the odyssey of Homo erectus, the ancestor of modern man, who ventured out of Africa and spread northwards into Eurasia, AFP reported.
The established timeline has these humans residing in the southern Caucasus about 1.8 million years ago, then venturing westwards along the Mediterranean, reaching Spain and Italy around 800,000 years ago.
But, until now, it was thought that bitter cold from a lingering Ice Age thwarted these Stone Age pioneers from moving northwards for hundreds of thousands of years.
The earliest evidence of human settlement north of the Alps and the Pyrenees dates from about half a million years ago, thanks to findings at Mauer in Germany and Boxgrove in southern England.
That assumption has now been overturned by remarkable finds excavated from eroding coastal cliffs in Suffolk, a county in eastern England.
Around 700,000 years ago, Britain was connected to continental Europe by a “land bridge“ that extended the length of the English Channel today.
Suffolk and the neighboring county of Norfolk were low-lying areas through which sluggish rivers meandered, depositing a thick layer of mud and sand.
The North Sea basin eventually subsided and the shallow coast of East Anglia emerged, exposing this sedimentary layer, called the Cromer Forest-Bed Formation.
Nearly a century and a half later, a team led by Anthony Stuart and Simon Parfitt of University College took these discoveries a giant step further.
In a paper published on Thursday in the British science journal Nature, they report the find of 32 flint artifacts, retrieved from a layer at Pakefield, Suffolk.
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Four Killed in Gaza Air Strike
GAZA CITY, Occupied Palestine, Dec. 14--At least four people were killed and three others wounded Wednesday in an Israeli air strike on their vehicle in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian witnesses and medical sources said.
The explosion happened as the car was driving through an eastern suburb of Gaza City with Israel claiming it was en route to carrying out an attack, AFP reported.
Witnesses said that an unmanned drone had fired two missiles at the vehicle, which was carrying members of the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella militant organization.
The force of the explosion scattered body parts and completely destroyed the car which was being driven close to the security fence between Gaza and Israel.
The Israeli Army, which has carried out a number of targeted killing operations in recent days, confirmed that it had carried out a raid, saying the vehicle was “on the way to carrying out an attack against an Israeli target“, without giving further details.
A military spokeswoman said that the size of the explosion “shows that explosives were being transported in the vehicle“.
Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz gave the greenlight to the resumption of targeted killing operations in the aftermath of a suicide bomb attack in the coastal city of Netanya on December 5.
A member of the Popular Resistance Committees who was said to have collaborated with Jihad in anti-Israeli attacks was killed in an air strike in the southern Gaza Strip on December 7.
A member of another armed faction, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was killed in an air raid on a house in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya on the following day.
The latest deaths raised to 4,911 the overall toll since the Palestinian Intifada or uprising began in September 2000. More than three-quarters of the victims have been Palestinian.
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Decisive Vote Approaches
Iraq Denies Ballots Seized From Iran
BAGHDAD, Iraq,
Dec. 14--Campaigning halted Wednesday across Iraq to give its 15 million voters an opportunity to reflect before deciding who will govern the country for the next four years.
Streets in Baghdad were eerily quiet on the eve of Thursday’s parliamentary election, with police strictly enforcing a traffic ban, AP reported.
In scattered violence, gunmen shot up four polling stations near Fallujah, but no one was hurt, police said.
Two police officers were killed and four others were wounded by a roadside bomb that exploded next to an Interior Ministry patrol in northern Mosul, according to officials at Jumhouri hospital.
President Jalal Talabani described the elections as “a national celebration, a day of the national unity and of victory over the terrorists and those who oppose our march toward democracy“.
He said a good turnout would give the new government the legitimacy it needs to deflate the insurgency and allow it to build up Iraq’s armed forces to the point where foreign troops could begin withdrawing.
Iraq’s election commission said it had registered 7,655 candidates on 231 lists and had certified 307 political groups--either in the form of single candidates or parties--and 19 coalitions.
Iraq’s electoral commission on Wednesday denied that hundreds of thousands of blank ballots similar to those set to be used in Thursday’s election were found on a tanker truck from Iran.
“This information is not correct at all,“ electoral official Hussein Al-Hindawi told a news conference.
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World Against New Nuclear Plants
VIENNA, Austria, Dec. 14--A majority of those surveyed in 18 countries around the world said they were opposed to the building of new nuclear plants, according to a poll published Wednesday by the UN nuclear watchdog.
“Six in ten citizens (62 percent) overall believe that existing nuclear reactors should continue to be used, yet six in ten (59 percent) do not favor new nuclear plants being built,“ the survey of about 18,000 people showed, AFP reported.
These findings come “at a time when the nuclear power option is being vigorously pursued in the fast developing countries of Asia and being reconsidered in some European nations and the USA,“ said the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Only in South Korea do a majority of people support the building of new nuclear plants, said the report from the Vienna-based organization. Moreover, only 29 percent of those surveyed found the IAEA inspections to be ’effective’, against 46 percent who said they were not. A majority of people (54 percent) also thought the risk of nuclear terrorism was ’high’, compared to 28 percent who said it was ’low’.
The IAEA is currently carrying out inspections in Iran to determine whether the country’s nuclear program is strictly peaceful or whether it has military purposes, as the United States and the European Union fear.
The poll was carried out from May to August by the American institute Globescan Inc., in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Cameroon, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and the United States.
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Watershed Or Waterloo?
By M.P. Zamani
For the third time this year, Iraqis are participating in the political process towards self-governance.
Today (December 15) will be the final test of new Iraq’s fledgling experience in the democratic process that began in January this year and should conclude with the setting up of the constitutional assembly and government by the year-end. A great deal of hope has been placed on Thursday’s decisive vote, and the composition of the future Iraqi National Assembly, with the expectation that it will be truly representative. Lawmakers elected for a four-year term will choose the future government.
This time Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the parliamentary elections in January, are expected to have a strong showing, indicating that they have come to terms with the political realities in the country after the ouster of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003.
They are also likely to prove a challenge to the United Iraqi Alliance, an umbrella group of various Shiite parties. The latter no doubt will be victorious at the polls given their popular standing, but Sunni Arabs are likely to make gains in the elections. Interestingly, as unlike in the two previous ballots they have shown quite a bit of political fervor and the election could turn out to be a keen contest.
Therefore, the first constitutional assembly and government will be crucial for Iraq, and the country’s future course of direction will to a large extent hinge on the unity and strength of the three main sectarian groups in IraqÑthe majority Shiites, who constitute 60 percent of the population, the Arab Sunnis, comprising 20-25 percent and the Kurds, 15-20 percent.
Iraq unfortunately still represents division and disunity, fragmented and fractured with the insurgency taking deadly swipes atÊpeace, security and stability in the country. While the earlier political processes were conducted rather peacefully, the problem of combating the militants, who are bent on marring the establishment of a people’s government and democratic institutions sanctioned by popular vote, is the biggest challenge yet facing Iraq.
The present Iraqi government has taken all precautions for the parliamentary exercise by closing national borders, extending curfew hours, issuing a travel ban and closing the country to civilian traffic, as part of stringent security measures to protect voters. With all the security in place and given the people’s enthusiasm, voting should go without a hitch.
However, the greatest concern now is not so much the parliamentary vote, but the question of how future security issues will be addressed. How will the problem of insurgency be contained, if not eliminated?
The emphasis should be on Iraq’s political and sectarian unity, otherwise the constitutional process that has been carefully nurtured over the months despite all odds, will begin to flounder and foreign elements will continue to disrupt the process of nation-building. The occupying US force will also have a pretext to prolong their stay in Iraq.
Meanwhile, reports of persecution and torture of Iraqi detainees are slowly emerging. The government, while denying responsibility, has ordered a probe into the charges. Revenge attacks and killings will further widen the gap between the different ethnic and sectarian groups in Iraq and create more bitterness among the population.
Whether the process of establishing a constitutional government will be Iraq’s watershed or waterloo will depend on the emergence of strong leadership at the helm of the state that can forge unity among the various disgruntled elements of the Iraqi polity and successfully bring them into the mainstream.
The time has come for Iraqis to take control of their destiny. How they will steer it remains to be seen.
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