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BUCHAREST, May 27 (Reuters) -Iranian collectors are queuing to bid on anIranian-built luxury car given to the late communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1974 by the Shah ofIranto mark his election as president of the now-defunct Socialist Republic of Romania.

The Paykan Hillman Hunter, built from 1967 onwards, was the first car built by theIranian National Company, and became not only a landmark ofIranian industry but also a national icon.

"Interest is huge. We've received more than 100 offers," said Alina Panico, of the Artmark auction house in Bucharest.

"Romanian collectors of four-wheeled gems are present, but most of the bids come fromIranians who want to bring a national symbol from the 1970s back home."

The limousine version being auctioned on Thursday after 1530 GMT is completely roadworthy, with a top speed of 145 km/h (91 mph) and a 1.5 litre, four-cylinder in-line engine delivering 54 horsepower. The starting price is 4,000 euros ($4,900), but Panico said it was likely to fetch at least 10,000 euros ($12,200).

Hillman, originally based near the English Midlands city of Coventry, was one of the oldest and most prolific British car brands, and the marque continued to be used until 1976 by its then-owner, Chrysler.

After failed attempts to build Fiat models, theIranian National Company produced its first Paykan under licence from Hillman in 1967.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had visited Romania in 1966, beginning an era of commercial and diplomatic ties, and a friendship with Ceausescu.

The Romanian leader had come to power the previous year, and set about creating one of the most repressive regimes in Cold War-era Eastern Europe.

In 1989, as communism crumbled, he and his wife Elena fled mass protests in the capital but were quickly captured and shot by a hastily assembled firing squad.

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Police Investigate Videos Where Chinese Man Boasts Of Sex With Iranian Woman - Iran International

BUCHAREST, May 27 (Reuters) -Iranian collectors are queuing to bid on anIranian-built luxury car given to the late communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1974 by the Shah ofIranto mark his election as president of the now-defunct Socialist Republic of Romania.

The Paykan Hillman Hunter, built from 1967 onwards, was the first car built by theIranian National Company, and became not only a landmark ofIranian industry but also a national icon.

"Interest is huge. We've received more than 100 offers," said Alina Panico, of the Artmark auction house in Bucharest.

"Romanian collectors of four-wheeled gems are present, but most of the bids come fromIranians who want to bring a national symbol from the 1970s back home."

The limousine version being auctioned on Thursday after 1530 GMT is completely roadworthy, with a top speed of 145 km/h (91 mph) and a 1.5 litre, four-cylinder in-line engine delivering 54 horsepower. The starting price is 4,000 euros ($4,900), but Panico said it was likely to fetch at least 10,000 euros ($12,200).

Hillman, originally based near the English Midlands city of Coventry, was one of the oldest and most prolific British car brands, and the marque continued to be used until 1976 by its then-owner, Chrysler.

After failed attempts to build Fiat models, theIranian National Company produced its first Paykan under licence from Hillman in 1967.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had visited Romania in 1966, beginning an era of commercial and diplomatic ties, and a friendship with Ceausescu.

The Romanian leader had come to power the previous year, and set about creating one of the most repressive regimes in Cold War-era Eastern Europe.

In 1989, as communism crumbled, he and his wife Elena fled mass protests in the capital but were quickly captured and shot by a hastily assembled firing squad.

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Former Iran Intel Minister Says His Outfit Was At The Disposal Of Soleimani - Iran International

Highlights

23-country oil producer bloc set to meet online June 1

OPEC+ delegates say the plan remains to ease quotas

Iran sanctions deal, Asia coronavirus hotspots bear watching

Oil prices are nearing $70/b again, western economies are humming from robust COVID-19 vaccine campaigns and the summer driving season is about to kick off prime conditions for OPEC and its allies to be sending more crude into the market.

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But coronavirus crises in Asia and the potentially imminent prospect of sanctions relief for Iran are sure to remain top of mind for the OPEC+ coalition, as it prepares to convene online June 1 to discuss production policy.

For now, delegates told S&P Global Platts that the 23-country alliance will press on with plans to relax output quotas over the next two months, until more clarity emerges over the fate of the Iran nuclear deal and the impact of coronavirus containment measures in India, Japan, Taiwan, and other hotspots.

OPEC+ countries, which held almost 7 million b/d of production offline in April, are in the process of boosting output by some 2.1 million b/d from May-July roughly 2% of pre-pandemic demand of which 1.4 million b/d will come from Saudi Arabia.

"It is premature to decide to delay any further easing of the production cuts while no agreement has yet been signed on the lifting of Iranian sanctions," one delegate said on condition of anonymity. "Compared to the previous month, the outlook for the short term is brighter, although uncertainties continue to weigh on oil demand."

Beyond July, however, production levels are yet to be determined. The supply accord between OPEC and its allies calls for quotas to be held steady from July to April 2022, although rapidly changing market conditions as the global economy continues to emerge from the pandemic make it likely to be adjusted, with OPEC and its allies now meeting almost every month.

Ministers will actually be convening twice in June a second meeting for OPEC members only is scheduled for June 24.

"The good part of the monthly OPEC+ meeting is giving opportunities to monitor the market closely," another delegate said. "The market is good but still can become fragile at any time."

The OPEC+ talks will be happening at the same time as US, Iranian, and European diplomats converge for another round of nuclear deal talks in Vienna.

Platts Analytics estimates that if a framework agreement can be reached in the coming weeks, before Iran's June 18 presidential election, sanctions relief for Iran could bring about 1.05 million b/d of Iranian crude supply into the market between May and December, potentially complicating OPEC+ efforts to prevent oil prices from backsliding.

Dated Brent, which Platts assessed at $65.68/b on the day of the last OPEC+ meeting April 27, has mostly wobbled in the upper $60s/b since hitting a two-year high of $70.30/b May 5.

But strong economic indicators from the US, UK, and other western economies, supported by fiscal stimulus measures, could help absorb the coming barrels as more cars hit the roads and industrial activity rebounds, offsetting any demand weakness from Asian countries hit hard by resurgent coronavirus infections.

Platts Analytics forecasts robust global oil demand growth of 5.1 million b/d in June and July, with supply still bullishly remaining 1.5 million b/d in deficit.

"The summer demand uplift appears to make our expected timing of Iran's return to market fortuitous for OPEC+ and market balances," Platts Analytics said in a May 28 note.

The OPEC+ deliberations will begin May 31 with a meeting of the delegate-level Joint Technical Committee to review supply-demand forecasts and assess member country compliance with quotas, which Platts calculated at 111% for April.

A nine-country Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee co-chaired by Saudi Arabia and Russia is then scheduled to convene June 1, followed by the full OPEC+ meeting as soon as that ends.

Conformity levels have been enhanced over the past few months by an extra 1 million b/d cut that Saudi Arabia has implemented, papering over lackluster adherence by Russia, Kazakhstan, Iraq, and others. But with Saudi Arabia now dialing back its extra cut by 250,000 b/d in May, 350,000 b/d in June and 400,000 b/d in July, collective OPEC+ compliance levels could begin to drop below 100%, and pressure from the kingdom and other members on quota busters could grow.

Under the deal, countries that exceeded their caps have until September to make so-called compensation cuts of equivalent volume, although there is meager evidence of members making good on this requirement since it was instituted last year.

OPEC+ ministers also will be holding their meeting with the oil industry under a darkening environmental cloud, with ExxonMobil and Chevron shareholders rebuking the companies over their sustainability shortcomings and a court ordering Shell to slash its carbon emissions.

These actions came just after the International Energy Agency unveiled its roadmap to a net-zero world by 2050, which would require no new upstream oil and gas investments and significant declines in fossil fuel consumption.

OPEC has warned that advocacy around the IEA's roadmap could destabilize the oil market and lead to damaging price volatility, and ministers have been keen to defend their lifeblood industry while underscoring their commitment to clean energy.

Read more from the original source:
OPEC+ cheered by economy, but will monitor Iran talks as it meets to discuss oil cuts - S&P Global

Typical. You go for months without any culture, then 5,000 years of it come along at once. Thats what the V&As luxury coach tour of a blockbuster promises, and delivers, including quite brilliant recreations of Irans two most renowned sites, Persepolis and Isfahan. Epic Iran shows there is a cultural history that connects the country as it is today with the people who lived here five millennia ago. To put this in perspective, thats like telling the story of Britain from before Stonehenge to the present and hoping it all connects up somehow. But in Iran, it does.

Thats partly because of a pride in history that preserved traditions across the millennia. The most important document of that is The Shahnameh, The Book of Kings, written at the start of the 11th century CE by the poet Ferdowsi. Iran had been converted to Islam in the seventh century, but Ferdowsis epic is packed with the heroic deeds and bloody battles of the ancient, pre-Islamic Sasanian empire. It is also written in Persian, as opposed to Arabic. There are gorgeous manuscripts of this classic. A masterpiece made in Tabriz in the 1500s for the Safavid ruler is open on a battle scene in which bejewelled horsemen charge each other across a sea-like expanse of blue: the painter takes time to depict little flowers blooming on the battlefield, just before the horses trample them.

That eye for nature is rooted in antiquity. A pottery jug in the shape of a humpbacked bull from 1200-800 BCE, a golden bowl from the same period with exquisite 3D gazelles bursting from it, and many more horned and frolicking beasts fill the earliest art here with animal life. In the Persian empire, which ruled much of the Middle East in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, the beasts become even more mythic and ornate. An armlet has horned griffins on it, in gold, lapis lazuli and other precious stuffs.

The Persian empire is brought to stately, ceremonial life in one of the exhibitions big set pieces. Real treasures such as a spindly gold model of a chariot and huge horn of plenty drinking vessels are displayed among ever-changing virtual images of Persepolis, as it was and is now. Persepolis was built for rituals and tribute ceremonies, not living in: its mystique soaks in as you watch a cast of its sculptures change colour to show how it was originally painted. Yet even here there was room for artistic delicacy. A real chunk of the reliefs of Persepolis, lent by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, shows one courtier touching his friends beard in a gesture of intimacy: the other reciprocates with a similarly warm tap on the shoulder.

Alexander the Great torched Persepolis and crushed the Persian empire. You can read the ancient Greek historian Herodotus if you want to see what the Persian empire looked like to outsiders and how the Greeks defined themselves, and hence the west, against it. What you get here is the view from inside. The ruler Cyrus the Great speaks for himself on the Cyrus Cylinder from the British Museum, a clay roll incised with cuneiform letters telling how Cyrus has restored religious rights in his empire.

The artistic richness of Iran has to have come from its geographical openness to east and west, absorbing influences from China, Mesopotamia, Greece, the Mongols. That gives Persian Islamic art a subtle strength that in turn influenced the whole Islamic world. Readers of Orhan Pamuks My Name is Red will know that as far away as Istanbul, miniaturists illustrated the Shahnameh and imitated the Persian masters.

This artistry went into overdrive when the Safavid empire united Iran behind Shia Islam in the 1500s. And the V&A makes its dazzling capital Isfahan materialise around you. One of the reasons it can do so is that the Victorian founders of this museum commissioned full size copies of some of Isfahans most beautiful decorated walls and domes. These flow up around you, their colours merging with video images of Isfahans architecture on a dome-shaped screen above. I have never been to Isfahan but in palaces and mosques Ive visited, it is the ensemble of light and space, sun catching on lustrous tiles, domes cooling the mood, that creates magic. They catch that rhapsodic feeling here.

Then, like Coleridge disturbed in his reveries of Kubla Khan, I was punched awake by reality. A 19th-century painting shows the women of a harem, and you realise the Persian past was not all poetry and paradise. Shirin Neshats 1998 video Turbulent makes a similar point. Across a dark space, two singers face each other on separate screens. While a man sings a medieval love poem by Jalal al-Din Rumi, a woman, alone in the dark, responds with an anguished wordless wail. There isnt any model for her feelings, or the world she imagines. Irans next 5,000 years are still to be written, and the past probably doesnt offer any answers.

Epic Iran at the V&A opens on 29 May.

The rest is here:
Five thousand years of mystical magnificence: Epic Iran at the V&A review - The Guardian

Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has revealed that the Revolutionary Guards' security chief for Tehran called on him at his house in east-Tehran Monday night, to tell him he was disqualified as a presidential candidate and ask him "to keep silent and cooperate."

Ahmadinejad had said during and after his registration as a candidate that if he is disqualified, he will not vote in the election, which was seen as a signal to his voters. However, fearing protests by Ahmadinejad's supporters, Iranian security officials installed security cameras all around his neighborhood during the past week and reports from Tehran said that his house has been surrounded by anti-riot forces from Monday night.

According to Ahmadinejad, the guards' security chief for Tehran told him that he is "not interested in arresting Ahmadinejad's supporters who are Hezbollahi and revolutionary individuals."

Several polls conducted in Iran and abroad indicated that Ahmadinejad could be the frontrunner in the June 18 presidential election if he were allowed by the Guardian Council to run.

The Guardian Council, an appointed body consisting of 6 high-ranking Shiite clerics and 6 lawyers, is a constitutional watchdog that vets parliamentary and presidential election candidates and operates under the supervision of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Reacting to the development, Ahmadinejad published a statement on his official website Dolate Bahar on Tuesday and said that he has told the same to General Hossein Nejat, the Commander of Sarallah Headquarters in charge of security in Tehran. Hours after the publication the page went temporarily off the grid.

Screen shot of a report Wednesday on Ahmadinejad's website about the IRGC threat.

In the statement, Ahmadinejad said: "The country's situation is really bad. The economic situation is catastrophic and the social situation is on the verge of collapse."

Ahmadinejad further charged that infiltrators have penetrated every part of the country. "It is a combination of weakness and treason," he said, in a veiled reference to multiple incidents against high-valued targets and individuals in the country.

He also reminded General Nejat whose real name is Mohammad Hossein Zibainejad, that a low turnout in election as a result of widespread disqualifications will have major domestic and international repercussions. "The system will fall in a way that it is hard to assume that it can rise once again," said Ahmadinejad.

"Why should they disqualify me. No one has the right to do that and I would never accept this or remain silent," Ahmadinejad stressed. He added that the Islamic Republic government and the Rouhani administration are responsible for his disqualification. "They can hardly explain that now but offering an explanation for my disqualification would be much more difficult in the future."

These were apparently threats and counter-threats exchanged by Nejat and Ahmadinejad, with the former alluding to arrests and the latter making reference to sending his supporters to defend him.

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad warned that the "current trend" will quickly worsen and the enemies will seize the opportunity to make the regime surrender and give them concessions.

Ahmadinejad charged that as people distance themselves from the regime, some elements in Iran are after disbanding the IRGC, doing away with the Guardian Council and bringing about foreign supervision of elections in Iran while the country is on course for a referendum and regime change.

The former President said that the people of Iran do not expect him to accept oppression and remain silent in the face of injustice and simply watch the destruction of the regime and the revolution as it happens. "The society is on the verge of explosion," he warned, adding that he cannot ignore people's demands.

He reiterated that he would not support any candidate and will resist against his disqualification as long as he is alive and those who have disqualified him shall remain responsible for the consequences. However, he said that he would not endorse or support protest movements as a result of his disqualification. "But those who are behind this disqualification should know that this will end in nothing other than the people's confrontation with them," Ahmadinejad warned.

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Iran's Guards Tell Ahmadinejad To Keep Silent, As He Warns Of Regime Change - Iran International