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The micro-blogging platform was barred at the time of mass anti-regime protests in 2009 that followed allegations of massive rigging in the re-election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

(Twitter) has announced that it is prepared to negotiate to resolve problems, Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi told the Iran daily newspaper.

Considering the current situation there are grounds for such negotiation and interaction. Twitter is not an immoral environment needing to be blocked, he added.

The 36-year-old Jahromi became Irans youngest-ever minister this week, and the first to be born after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

His selection has been criticised by rights groups over his involvement in surveillance during and after the mass anti-regime protests of 2009.

He rejected the criticism in a meeting with lawmakers this week, saying: I wasnt responsible for surveillance I was in charge of the technical infrastructure for the surveillance industry, and I consider it an honour.

But Jahromi is also seen as a critic of online censorship in Iran, where platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter remain banned even if millions use them daily through easily available privacy software.

He said officials were also looking at ways to unblock YouTube while still censoring immoral content on the video-sharing service, and that a pilot project would allow universities to access the site.

There was no immediate response from Twitter or YouTube.

Jahromi added that the final decision on unblocking sites lay with Supreme Council for Cyberspace, which includes members of the hardline judiciary.

The 2009 protests were considered the first time that Twitter and social media were widely used to organise protests a model replicated when the Arab Spring movement erupted across the region the following year.

At that time and based on remarks made by the director of this network, Irans government believed they had interfered in the countrys internal affairs and for this reason Twitter was filtered, said Jahromi, who has more than 4,000 followers on the service.

Cyberspace can uproot religion

Despite the ban, Twitter is widely used by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has official accounts in several languages, as well as President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Even Ahmadinejad joined the service this year.

But many conservatives remain worried about Western infiltration through social media.

In December 2016, Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Mohammad-Ali Movahedi Kermani, who heads the Committee for the Promoting Virtue and Prohibiting Vice, said the dangers of the internet were even greater than women failing to wear a headscarf.

Bad hijab is a bad thing but cyberspace is a hundred times worse, he said in a speech to religious officials, highlighting the presence of porn and anti-religious sites.

Cyberspace can uproot religion and Islam completely, he said.

Rouhani is thought to have favoured lifting the Twitter ban for some time, having even exchanged words with the sites co-founder Jack Dorsey back in 2013.

Good evening, President. Are citizens of Iran able to read your tweets? Dorsey posted shortly after Rouhanis first election win.

Rouhani replied: Evening, @Jack my efforts geared 2 ensure my pplll comfortably b able 2 access all info globally as is their #right.

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Iran in talks to unblock Twitter, says new minister - Citizen

DESPITE MUCH heated rhetoric, the Trump administration is doing little to counter Iranian aggression. In Syria, its strategy of striking deals with Russia has opened the way for Tehrans forces to establish control over a corridor between Damascus and Baghdad. In Afghanistan, Iran is steadily building a strategic position even as President Trump balks at a plan to strengthen U.S. support for the Afghan government. In Yemen, the United States enables its Persian Gulf allies to pursue an unwinnable proxy war with Tehran whose main result has been the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

In only one area has the Islamic Republics toxic ambition been relatively contained: the production of material for use in nuclear warheads. According to international inspectors and the U.S. intelligence community, Iran has largely abided by the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, which greatly reduced its stockpile of enriched unranium and placed strict limits on its nuclear activities. If the regime continues complying, it could be a decade or more before Iran could again threaten to become a nuclear power. Yet perversely, Mr. Trump is matching his passivity toward Irans regional meddling with an apparent determination to torpedo the nuclear pact.

After grudgingly certifying in July that Iran was meeting the terms of the deal a test mandated by Congress every 90 days Mr. Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he planned to find the regime noncompliant when the next certification is due in October. How to reach such a finding if the intelligence community judges otherwise? According to Foreign Policy, Mr. Trump ordered a group of political aides, including now- fired strategist Stephen K. Bannon, to cook up a rationale something that presumably will be made easier by their lack of data or expertise.

The real experts puzzle over what Mr. Trump could hope to accomplish by announcing that Iran is noncompliant other than satisfying what appears to be his compulsive urge to spoil President Barack Obamas legacies. Without proof of Iranian noncompliance, U.S. partners in the nuclear deal, including the European Union, Russia and China, would surely refuse to support the nullification of the accord or the reimposition of sanctions. Iran might respond to decertification by resuming uranium enrichment, even if Mr. Trump did not reimpose U.S. sanctions. That would present the White House with the ugly old problem of how to stop Iranian progress toward a bomb. Could Mr. Trump credibly threaten Iran with military action even while using the threat of force against North Korea?

The principal weakness of the nuclear accord is its temporary nature. Most of its provisions will expire in eight to 13 years, leaving Iran free to stockpile an unlimited quantity of nuclear materials. It follows that the challenge for a rational U.S. administration would be not how to get out of the deal now, but how to extend its restrictions into the future. U.S. partners would likely be ready to cooperate in a strategy aimed at that goal and they ought to be pressed to do more to stop Irans non-nuclear misbehavior. But there is no reason to expect support for a foolish U.S. move that would rekindle a dormant Iranian threat while tolerating its truly dangerous behavior.

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Trump may be planning to make a very bad decision on the Iran deal - Washington Post

Since the real estate company owned by President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, started doing business in Maryland in 2013, it has been the state's most aggressive practitioner of a controversial debt-collection method called body attachment, where a landlord gets a judge to order the arrest of former tenants who fail to appear in court for allegations of unpaid rent, fines, and fees, The Baltimore Sun reports, citing court records. In all, 20 former tenants have been detained, and a dozen have filed for personal bankruptcy protection to avoid arrest.

Kushner Cos. owns 17 apartment complexes with nearly 9,000 units in Maryland, mostly in the Baltimore area, and pays other firms to manage them. The company earns at least $30 million in profit a year off $90 million in revenue from the properties, The Baltimore Sun reports, and the Kushner-controlled entities have managed to collect $1 million out of the $5.4 million in judge-approved judgments against 1,250 tenants since 2013, averaging $4,400 per judgment including original debt, court costs, lawyer fees, and interest.

Kushner Cos. "follows guidelines consistent with industry standards" and state law, and its management partner, Westminster Management, "only takes legal action against a tenant when absolutely necessary," company CFO Jennifer McLean said in a statement. And real estate interests say that body attachments for former tenants who miss two court appointments can be the only way to make delinquent tenants pay up. At least some tenants say they were never notified of the court dates, or dispute the money owed.

Not all collection agencies use body attachments, in part because "they don't want to risk the public relations issue," Amy Hennen at the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service tells the Sun. Garnishing wages, which can be ruinous for poor people barely scraping by, is "harsh" enough, she said. "But certainly the body attachment is probably the worst, because we're talking about what is effectively a debtors' prison, which is something out of Charles Dickens." You can read more at The Baltimore Sun. Peter Weber

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Assad credits Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah for his army's gains - The Week Magazine

Nintendos biggest competitors in the console market, Sony and Microsoft, both recognize a handful of Middle Eastern regions on their respective websites, including Saudi Arabia, The United Arab Eminence, and Israel. The full list from the official Xbox site even includes often overlooked countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Azerbaijan.

But no Iran. The second largest population in the middle east, home to over 78 million residents, has no representation in the world of console gaming.

According to research -- from a 2015 Landscape Report provided by the Iran Computer and Video Game Foundation (IRCG) and the Digital Games Research Center (DIREC) -- there are roughly 23 million gamers in Iran. Its an absolutely enormous market, but ultimately ignored for a variety of reasons. Nintendos annual fiscal report for 2017 offers at least a surface-level explanation as to why the company (and many others) would avoid such a region.

The report states, Domestic and overseas business activities involve risks such as a) disadvantages from emergence of political or economic factors, b) disadvantages from inconsistency of multilateral taxation systems and diversity of tax law interpretation, c) difficulty in recruiting and securing human resources, and d) social disruption resulting from terror attacks, war and other catastrophic events.

But despite the lack of love from major gaming companies, Iranians continue to buy, sell, and play games through any means necessary. Its an odd market controlled by a sometimes unpredictable fluctuation of supply from outside sources and demand from Iranian players. This economic rollercoaster -- coupled with a rise of online-only titles and Irans less than stellar internet speeds -- can make the gaming climate in Iran seem unstable.

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A Hard Sell - Mashable

Iran's Judiciary Spokesman Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei speaks during a press conference in Tehran.

The Iranian Judiciary has issued a ruling demanding that the US government pay around 245 million dollars in damage to a number of victims of chemical attacks carried out by Saddam Husseins troops during the 1980 to 1988 imposed war on Iran.

Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, Iran's Judiciary spokesman, made the remarks on Sunday, while noting that the amount would be distributed among 18 victims of the attacks who had filed for the legal action.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed in the Iraqi-imposed war and many more were affected by the chemical weapons like mustard gas that were used by the regime of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Many of those Iranians who were attacked by chemical weapons and are alive today continue to suffer the lingering aftereffects.

Iraq once possessed a huge arsenal of chemical weapons, the production of which was facilitated by exports of chemicals as well as financial and technological support from the United States and other Western countries.

Iraq is believed to acquire the technology and the materials to develop chemical weapons from the US and a number of Western countries. According to reports, US spy agency, CIA, had knew about Iraqs use of chemical weapons as early as 1983, but the US took no action against the violations of international law, and even failed to alert the UN.

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US must pay $245mn in damage to chemical victims of Iraq-Iran war: Judiciary - Press TV