Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has visited India as both powers seek to cope with the impact of sweeping US sanctions aimed at cutting Iranian oil exports to zero.

Zarif arrived in New Delhi on Tuesday to meet with his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj. “India is one of our most important partners, economic, political and regional,” the Iranian foreign minister said ahead of the talks.

The visit comes weeks after the US suspended temporary six-month waivers that had allowed several countries, including India, to continue buying Iranian oil without facing America’s penalties. Unsurprisingly, the issue of sanctions is expected to be top of the meeting’s agenda.

India was Iran’s second most important customer after China, but it put a halt to imports after the waivers expired in early May. New Delhi said at the time that it was prepared to deal with the damage inflicted by the US sanctions.

Should India decide to resume trade with Iran despite the US sanctions, it would be expected to switch from the dollar to the rupee for payments, according to Alexey Kupriyanov, a research fellow at Russia’s IMEMO institute.

The next step would be to start making payments through local commercial banks in India. “It’s a scheme that is already working, and is likely to develop further,” Kupriyanov said. However, the analyst believes India expects to be granted new waivers, obviating the need for such workarounds.

Ultimately, India’s actions will be decided after the current elections, which are set to conclude in May, Kupriyanov said. The outcome of the polls will decide whether New Delhi opts to antagonize Washington by taking measures to trade with Iran.

“If [current Prime Minister Narendra] Modi takes the lead, he is more inclined to take drastic steps… if he has to form a coalition government, or if the [opposition party] Indian National Congress does well in the polls, the Indian foreign policy will be much more cautious.”

Ties between Iran and India have been flourishing over the years. Back in 2016, Prime Minister Modi visited Tehran with a stated goal of establishing a strategic relationship with the Islamic Republic and expanding India’s reach into the region.

That aside, Zarif’s visit comes amidst spiraling tensions in the Gulf between Tehran and Washington. Fears of a US-Iran clash were fueled by the White House’s recent decision to deploy sizeable military assets to the region, including the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and other expeditionary ships, as well as a B-52 bomber squadron.

US saber-rattling in the Gulf may not be limited to sending warships and bombers. The Pentagon is considering deployment of 120,000 troops to the Middle East, which itself could reflect the influence of Iran hawk John Bolton, according to New York Times.

Meanwhile, Iranian military commanders said they don’t believe that an open confrontation with the US will break out as it lacks adequate forces in the region.

Think your friends would be interested?

Click Here:

Video footage captured by an RT Arabic correspondent details the damage done to a Norwegian tanker ship at a port in UAE waters. Saudi and Emirati officials allege three other ships nearby were targeted with ‘sabotage.’

The footage reveals a sizable hole in the stern of the Andrea Victory, a Norwegian tanker ship docked at the port of Fujairah in the UAE. The damage was inflicted on Sunday by an “unknown object,” Thome Ship Management, a Norwegian shipping company that manages the vessel, said in a statement to the media.

No crew members were harmed in the incident and that the Andrea Victory was not at risk of sinking, the company said.

Click Here:

Three other commercial vessels, including two Saudi oil tankers and an Emirati barge, were also damaged Sunday in what Saudi and UAE officials say were “sabotage attacks.” One of the Saudi ships was in the process of delivering Saudi crude oil to American customers, according to Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih.

Though the UAE maintained that the four ships were damaged by sabotage, local authorities at Fujairah denied media reports of explosions at the harbor.

The incident comes on the heels of a number of American military deployments to the region, meant to quell an unspecified threat from Iran, according to the White House. Perhaps anticipating that Iran would be blamed, the Iranian Foreign Ministry on Monday called for an investigation, requesting to know “the exact dimensions” of what happened.

When asked whether Iran was involved in the sabotage, US Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook declined to comment but said the US would assist the UAE in its investigation. The Saudis and Emiratis also refrained from explicitly blaming Iran.

US President Donald Trump did not speculate whether Tehran was behind the Fujairah incident but said the US would retaliate if Iran attacked any tankers in the Mediterranean.

“It’s going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens, I can tell you that,” the president told reporters Monday “They’re not going to be happy.”

Think your friends would be interested?

Ahead of his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that it is their collective duty to “find ways for further development.”

“During my meetings in Russia, a number of important topics will be discussed. For some of them we can agree, for others we can disagree, but when it comes to national interests, our duty is to find ways for further development,” Pompeo wrote on Twitter.

He is due to meet with the Russian leaders in Sochi on Tuesday to discuss a wide range of issues. The US secretary of state canceled a planned meeting in Moscow to discuss escalating tensions between the US and Iran with European leaders in Brussels.

Think your friends would be interested?

Donald Trump has reportedly been presented with a plan to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East to counter the so-called Iranian threat, the New York Times reported.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan disclosed the updated military plan at a meeting of Trump’s top security aides on Thursday, the publication said, quoting anonymous sources inside the administration.

Click Here:

Several options to tackle Tehran in the region were outlined to the president during the briefing, while “the uppermost option called for deploying 120,000 troops, which would take weeks or months to complete,” the Times said.

While the revisions “ordered” by “hard-liners” do not promulgate a land invasion of Iran, “the development reflects the influence of Mr. Bolton, one of the administration’s most virulent Iran hawks,” The Times reported. Bolton has been a long-time advocate of using military force against Tehran, even penning an op-ed in 2015 titled “Top Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”

The proposal to send additional reinforcements comes amid accusations from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Tehran has been engaging in “an escalating series of threatening actions and statements in recent weeks.” To counter the unspecified threat, the Pentagon has already deployed the USS ‘Abraham Lincoln’ carrier strike group and bomber task force, including B-52s, to the region.

The deployment came exactly a year after Washington unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), and renewed sanctions against the Islamic Republic’s financial, oil and banking sectors. The US has also labeled Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps a “terrorist organization,” triggering a tit-for-tat response from Tehran.

Meanwhile, Iran said it will cancel part of its obligations under the nuclear agreement, and urged the European signatories to tackle Washington’s pressure.

The US sabre rattling is “attempting to magnify the shadow of war,” Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi explained on Sunday night, noting that American military buildup in the region is “theatrical and useless.”

Like this story?

Far from the cold dead rock imagined by modern science, Earth’s Moon is actually tectonically active, according to researchers who triangulated quake data with fault locations. Even stranger, it may still be shrinking.

By comparing lunar orbital imagery from NASA with seismic readings obtained nearly half a century ago from equipment left on the moon by the Apollo missions, researchers believe they’ve figured out what’s behind a pattern of mysterious moonquakes that have frustrated scientists for decades, seemingly originating from the upper few miles of the moon’s crust: our neighboring satellite, believed to be a cold lifeless rock, is actually geologically alive, just like Earth.

During the eight years the five Apollo seismometers functioned, they picked up 28 near-surface moonquakes measuring the Earth equivalent of between a 2 and 5 on the Moment Magnitude scale. By analyzing images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and using an earth-based algorithm to more accurately pinpoint the epicenters of those quakes, the researchers found eight of them happened within 19 miles of “fault scarps,” long clifflike formations crisscrossing the lunar terrain.

“It’s very likely that these eight quakes were produced by faults slipping as stress built up when the lunar crust was compressed by global contraction and tidal forces,” said Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institute, lead author of a paper on the findings published in Nature Geoscience on Monday. If so, “the Apollo seismometers recorded the shrinking moon and the moon is still tectonically active,” he said, calling the results “amazing.”

While other seismic disturbances measured by the Apollo-era seismometers could be attributed to Earth’s own gravity making itself felt through space – in the same way that the moon’s gravitational pull causes the oceans to rise and fall, so the Earth’s pull actually deforms the moon’s surface, stretching it into a slightly oblong shape before releasing it back into a sphere – asteroid impacts, or temperature shifts, these “shallow” moonquakes had previously frustrated all attempts to study them. They seemed to start in the upper few miles of the moon’s crust, yet accepted wisdom holds the moon is a big dead rock. Even Watters, who published a paper in 2010 analyzing the first NASA LRO images of the faults, believed the most recent scarps were “as young as a hundred million years.” 

While the theory remains just a theory until scientists are able to conduct more detailed study on the moon, the researchers made certain that the lineup of quakes and faults was not due to coincidence, running 10,000 seismic event simulations in an effort to reproduce the pattern and coming up with just a 1 percent chance the lineups had been random.

“For me, these findings emphasize that we need to go back to the moon,” said researcher Nicholas Schmerr of the University of Maryland. “We learned a lot from the Apollo missions, but they really only scratched the surface. With a larger network of modern seismometers, we could make huge strides in our understanding of the moon’s geology.”

Like this story?

Click Here:

Facebook-owned WhatsApp messenger has been weaponized to bug the phones of human rights campaigners, lawyers, and other dissidents with an Israeli spyware, sparking a backlash against the program’s manufacturer.

“NSO Group sells its products to governments who are known for outrageous human rights abuses, giving them the tools to track activists and critics. The attack on Amnesty International was the final straw,” Danna Ingelton, deputy director of Amnesty Tech, said in a statement on Monday. “It’s time to stop the use of NSO Group’s tools to infiltrate, intimidate and silence civil society.” 

Amnesty, which was targeted along with several human rights lawyers by the WhatsApp exploit, is working with a group of Israeli citizens and a civil rights group on a legal action to force the Israeli Ministry of Defense to revoke NSO Group’s export license, claiming the company’s flagship product, called Pegasus, is dangerous and prone to abuse – and that NSO deliberately sells it to repressive governments.

After discovering the vulnerability last week, WhatsApp claims it worked “around the clock” to develop a patch to protect users from the exploit, finally releasing the fix on Monday. WhatsApp has also reported the issue to the US Department of Justice, which declined to comment to the Financial Times. The company is not yet aware of how many of its 1.5 billion users were affected by the exploit.

Attackers installed Pegasus on target users’ phones through WhatsApp’s call function, according to the company; users did not even have to answer the call to become infected. Pegasus can turn on a target’s microphone and camera at will, peruse emails and texts, and track location – all without the target’s knowledge.

While NSO claims Pegasus is intended for government usage – its website insists its mission is “developing technology to prevent and investigate terror and crime,” and the company claims it carefully vets customers – a number of activists and human rights campaigners in the Middle East have found themselves on the wrong end of Pegasus attacks. Amnesty International claims “at least 24 human rights defenders, journalists and parliamentarians in Mexico,” an employee, several Saudi activists, an Emirati human rights campaigner, and even (allegedly) Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, whose killers reportedly used the software to track him, have been targeted using Pegasus.

“Under no circumstances would NSO be involved in the operating or identifying of targets of its technology, which is solely operated by intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” NSO said, adding that it would not have the ability to target an individual or organization.

Amnesty International is not the only organization pursuing legal action against NSO. Alaa Mahajne, a lawyer based in Jerusalem, is suing on behalf of Mexican and Saudi citizens targeted with the software. “It’s upsetting but not surprising that my team has been targeted with the very technology that we are raising concerns about in our lawsuits,” she said.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not coming to Moscow on Monday as previously planned, according to a report citing a State Department official. He will still meet the Russian president and foreign minister on Tuesday.

Instead of heading straight for the Russian capital, on Monday Pompeo will hold talks with European officials about “Iran and other issues,” an anonymous State Department official told Reuters.

The cancellation of the Moscow leg of Pompeo’s visit will reportedly not affect his planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which is scheduled to take place in Sochi on Tuesday. Pompeo is expected to talk to them about what Washington calls Russia’s “aggressive and destabilizing actions.” The US has repeatedly accused Russia of meddling all around the world, including most recently in Venezuela, where, according to Pompeo, only the US is allowed to meddle.

Pompeo has spent the past week escalating pressure on Iran, threatening it with “swift and decisive” US action in response to nebulously defined “attack on American interests or citizens” by “[Iran] or their proxies.” On Tuesday, he canceled a visit to Germany and instead went to Iraq, where he hinted that Baghdad should stay away from doing business with Tehran – for the sake of its own independence.

On Friday, the Pentagon said it was sending additional Patriot anti-air missiles to the Middle East in addition to the carrier strike group and bombers it had dispatched to near the Iranian coast as a “warning” a week earlier. Pompeo, meanwhile, has been insisting the US does not want war with Iran.

On Wednesday, Iran announced that it would stop disposing of excess heavy water and uranium, which was one of the key terms of the landmark 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement it had struck with the US, the EU, Russia and China. Tehran accused the EU of caving in to American pressure and failing to stick to its end of the deal. European diplomats shot back by saying the EU “rejects any ultimatums,” but also urged “countries not party to the JCPOA” – which includes the US after its unilateral withdrawal in 2018 – to “refrain from taking any actions that impede the remaining parties’ ability to fully perform their commitments.”

The United Arab Emirates has said that four commercial ships were hit by “sabotage” in its waters, hours after denying reports of explosions at an oil tanker terminal. The incident comes as US/Iran tension ratchets up.

The four vessels were targeted by “sabotage operations” in waters near the emirate of Fujairah, the country’s foreign ministry said on Sunday. The exact nature of the sabotage was not revealed, nor were the nationalities of the ships. There were no reported casualties.

“Subjecting commercial vessels to sabotage operations and threatening the lives of their crew is considered a dangerous development,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that it is investigating the alleged incident.

The statement came hours after Fujairah’s government denied reports that an explosion had rocked an oil terminal at the emirate’s port. Lebanese broadcaster Mayadeen first reported the explosion, before the story was picked up by Iran’s Press TV. Officials in Fujairah called on the media to “investigate accurately and rely on official sources.”

Although the exact events are unknown, Iranian lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh tweeted that “the explosions of Fujairah showed that the security of the south of the Persian Gulf is like glass.”

Should the security situation in the region deteriorate, much is at stake. Fujairah backs on to the Gulf of Oman on the south side of the Strait of Hormuz. With the UAE and Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran on the other, one-third of the world’s oil at sea transits the strait, which is only 39 kilometers wide.

The UAE did not directly blame Iran for the alleged sabotage, but its claim comes just days after the United States Maritime Administration warned that “Iran and/or its regional proxies could take action against US and partner interests, including oil production infrastructure” in the region. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are steadfast American allies.

Egypt, another American ally in the Middle East, sided with the UAE’s take on events, condemning the alleged act of sabotage later on Sunday night.

Iran has insisted that it has no interest in escalating tensions in the region, yet the US has pressed ahead with the deployment of a carrier strike group and an Air Force bomber group to the region, to protect US interests from the unspecified threat. The USS Abraham Lincoln passed through Egypt’s Suez Canal on Thursday, in what National Security Advisor John Bolton called a “clear and unmistakable message” to Tehran.

The carrier will be joined by a battery of Patriot missiles and a transport ship – the USS Arlington – the Pentagon announced on Friday. Still, State Secretary Mike Pompeo assured the world that “our aim is not war, our aim is a change in the behavior of the Iranian leadership.”

Details about the “intelligence” used to justify the buildup are thin on the ground. A CNN report on Friday warned that Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps may be planning on launching missiles from small civilian boats, citing an anonymous “defense official.” The network’s report has not yet been substantiated. Multiple sources within the US government have said that Bolton and Pompeo are “overreacting” to the threat posed by Iran, and “mischaracterizing” intelligence reports.

Iran has matched the US in the rhetoric game, with IRGC aerospace head Amirali Hajiadeh telling the Iranian Students’ News Agency that an aircraft carrier parked in the Gulf provides “opportunities” for Iran to test its missile capabilities. Ayatollah Yousef Tabatabai-Nejad also warned Washington that a single missile from Iran could easily sink its “billion-dollar fleet.”

Think your friends would be interested?

Saudi Arabia says two of its oil tankers were among the ships the United Arab Emirates earlier said were targeted in “sabotage operations” off its coast. The alleged attack damaged the ships, but caused no casualties or oil spill.

One of the two vessels was on its way to pick up crude for delivery to the US when it was hit, according to a statement by Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih, carried by state broadcaster SPA. Earlier, the UAE said that commercial vessels were hit in “sabotage operations” near its waters, apparently referring to the same incident. Neither elaborated on the nature of the alleged sabotage.

According to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the “sabotage” took place in waters near the emirate of Fujairah, in the Gulf of Oman just outside the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for about a third of the world’s oil tanker traffic, with Iran on one side and Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the other.

While much of what could happen outside Fujairah Port remains unknown, the timing for the alleged “sabotage attack” is particularly notable. Just recently, the Pentagon dispatched a carrier strike group and a bomber force, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vaguely citing some “escalatory actions” by Iran as a pretext for the deployment.

Iran’s top military commanders, among them the head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Gen Hossein Salami, said the deployments were part of a US plan to intimidate Iran. The IRGC commander said it was unlikely that the US wants a war against Iran as Washington lacked adequate military resources to do so.

Those dastardly Russian hackers are alive and well and meddling in the upcoming European Parliament elections, warned the New York Times. Just don’t expect to see any proof, because the paper offers none.

Fresh from interfering in seemingly everything wrong in America, unidentified Russian hackers have shifted their attention to Europe, deploying information warfare tactics to give a boost to populist and right-wing parties ahead of next month’s European Parliament elections. At least according to a New York Times article, given the front-page treatment on Sunday.

The story is heavy with accusation. The Russians, it states, are busy “spreading disinformation, encouraging discord and amplifying distrust in the centrist parties that have governed for decades.” Among their tools are news websites that “bear the same electronic signatures as pro-Kremlin websites,” Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles, and WhatsApp groups.

Although the Times article claimed that “intelligence officials,” and “security experts” back up its theories, it quotes only one: Former FBI analyst Daniel Jones, who now runs a nonprofit entitled Advance Democracy.

“They’re working to destroy everything that was built post-World War II,” Jones said, an explanation rivaling George W. Bush’s “they hate our freedom” for its nonsensical reductionism.

Is it possible that Jones might have an agenda? Most definitely. The former intelligence analyst runs a second nonprofit, The Democracy Integrity Project, from his home in Virginia. TDIP spent much of the last two years emailing a daily “collusion”newsletter to journalists, including those at the New York Times.

Jones’ ties to the Democratic party machine are also extensive. A former staffer for California Senator Dianne Feinstein (D), Jones reportedly worked with opposition research firm Fusion GPS to continue to search for evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia even after Trump’s election. The uncorroborated claims made in the so-called ‘Steele Dossier’ often featured prominently in TDIP’s daily memos to reporters, and leaked text messages to Democrat Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Warner revealed Jones to be an associate of Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier.

With the Steele Dossier deemed unfit to print by every single mainstream media outlet (except, of course, Buzzfeed), and with the “collusion” narrative completely dismantled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, who else can the New York Times bring in to back up their Russian meddling expose?

Enter Ben Nimmo, who claims at the end of the article that Europe is a “test bed” for Russian interference efforts. Again, Nimmo offers no proof, but a glimpse at his resume gives an idea of what his motivations might be. A senior fellow at NATO-sponsored think tank the Atlantic Council, Nimmo has emerged in recent years as a reliable Russia-basher, always ready to give a juicy soundbite to the media. He’s also identified thousands of ‘Russian-linked’ Twitter accounts, based on some thoroughly dodgy methodology.

With two ‘experts’ down, what has the Times got left? Not much. The article notes that “a definitive attribution would require the kind of tools that the American government used to reveal the 2016 interference.” Of course, none is provided.

Click Here:

Even if the Russians aren’t involved, the article claims that populist and right-wing groups in Europe are “adopting many of the Kremlin’s tactics.” In practice, this means that the nasties on the right side of the political spectrum make funny memes and videos to support their candidates of choice.

Running through the article is a palpable fear that the centrism that has dominated European politics for more than half a century is now under threat. “False and divisive stories about the European Union, NATO, immigrants and more,” amplify the threat, driving voters into the embrace of populist parties, “many of them sympathetic to Russia.”

However, never once does it occur to the authors that perhaps Europeans are simply tiring of the consensus. Perhaps they disagree with mass immigration, especially at a time of slow economic recovery from the Great Recession. Perhaps they disagree with the often unaccountable bureaucracy of Brussels, and their membership in a military alliance that they have personally never felt a connection with. After all, populism is called populism because its positions are popular ones.

But nope, it’s all a sinister Russian plot to undermine democracy. Let’s go with that one.

Graham Dockery, RT

Subscribe to RT newsletter to get stories the mainstream media won’t tell you.