The Washington Post reported that Iran set off a diplomatic row with Germany on Tuesday by closing its airspace to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s plane as it flew to India, thereby delaying her arrival there on an official visit. Germany summoned the Iranian ambassador in Berlin to protest “the breach of international protocol,” Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said. Iran did not say why the permission was revoked, and a second plane carrying several of Merkel’s ministers had no trouble transiting Iranian airspace on the way to the government consultations in India.
The Los Angeles Times published an article headlined "Iran's supreme leader backs Ahmadinejad." It says that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a public endorsement of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday as he looked to resolve a months-long rift among the country's conservative power elites.The pronouncement by Khamenei, the country's most powerful figure, has followed a period of turbulence between him and Ahmedinejad, his onetime political favorite.
The New York Times reported that the IAEA presented a report to its board that laid out new information on what it calls “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program, clarifying the central issue in the long clash between Tehran and the West over nuclear technology. The nine-page report raised questions about whether Iran has sought to investigate seven different kinds of technology, ranging from atomic triggers and detonators to uranium fuel. Iran has dismissed charges that it is pursuing such technologies as lies based on fabricated documents, or real ones taken out of context. It insists
that its atomic program is meant exclusively for such peaceful objectives as producing medical isotopes and electric power. The
result has been a tense standoff.
The Turkish information agency Hurriyet continued the discussion of the incident with Merkel's plane in Iran. It reports that Merkel, speaking at a news conference with Prime Minister Singh, declined to go into detail about the inconvenience, which saw her plane circle for two hours over Turkey before receiving permission to enter Iranian airspace. The German leader pressed the case for the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet, made jointly by a European consortium including Germany, which is competing for a $12 billion deal up for grabs in India.
'Iran, India to end oil payment deadlock' is an article published by the Iranian information agency Press TV. It says that the Iranian ambassador to New Delhi, Seyyed MahdiNabizadeh, claims Iran and India are soon likely to resolve the deadlock over India's payments for crude oil imports from the Islamic Republic. India has been looking for an alternative payment mechanism for crude from Iran after the Reserve Bank of India announced in December 2010 that payments for Iranian crude oil imports would have to be settled outside the existing Asian Clearing Union (ACU) mechanism. Iran insisted that it would not trade outside the ACU mechanism.
