President Emmanuel Macron began fine-tuning his government team on Monday after his centrist party redrew France's political map with a resounding victory in parliamentary elections, dealing him a strong hand to forge ahead with pro-EU, business-friendly reforms.

Iran's growth of gross domestic product (GDP), including oil sector, hit 12.5 percent in the previous Iranian calendar year 1395 (ended on March 20, 2017), the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) reported.

Throughout the same period, 10,314 foreign travelers visited the city with French travelers accounting for 6,000, Alireza Abdollahzadeh, a data analyst at the Statistical Center of Iran, said in a press conference on June 17. 

Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is in Mauritania, stressed on Monday that Iran’s missile capability protects its citizens in lawful self-defense.

Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the Iran to the United Nations Gholamali Khoshroo said that Tillerson’s remarks about working towards “a peaceful transition of government” in Iran is clearly an “interventionist plan” that is against norms and principles of the international law.
 

Mohammad Ghaedi
US President Donald Trump made an arms deal valued at $110 billion with Saudi Arabia during his recent visit to this country a few weeks ago. The British government had made a similar arms deal with Saudi Arabia a few months earlier. These deals have been discussed as economic deals and been argued for because they could create jobs in the US and the UK. There are also some analysts who argue that these deals make a US ally, Saudi Arabia, stronger in the Middle East. However, since there are major differences between dealing in weapons and other commodities, arms deals cannot be considered as a common business. 

Madjid Raoufi
Although the first Indian vessel, which set out from the country’s Kandla port, has already berthed at Iran’s Chabahar port, Indians have not worked fast enough to develop this Iranian oceanic port. China, which is now focused on developing Pakistan’s Gwadar port, also has an eye on Chabahar and Iran’s presence in Beijing’s “One Belt and One Road” initiative. Japan is another serious actor, who is openly interested in taking part in development of Chabahar. The question is which one of these three countries will be of priority to Iran for cooperation in development of Chabahar port and the country’s eastern rail routes?

Farzad Ramezani-bonesh
Pakistan’s Gwadar port is located along the coast of Makran at an approximate distance of 533 kilometers from Karachi port city and 120 kilometers from Iran’s shores. During the past decade, China has made a lot of investment in Gwadar port and was committed to investing 1.62 billion dollars in that port in 2015. From another viewpoint, Gwadar port is located in the southern part of the “China-Pakistan Economic Corridor,” which is supposed to be made operational through an investment of about 52 billion dollars to connect Xinjiang in northwestern China to Gwadar. The corridor is expected to come on-stream in 2017. 

Jalil Bayat
Tensions are soaring in Qatar’s relations with Saudi Arabia and some other Arab states in the Persian Gulf. Following a spate of verbal and media contentions during past weeks, Saudi Arabia finally decided last Monday to cut all diplomatic ties with Qatar. Following suit with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Yemen and a number of other countries severed their relations with Qatar as well. Pressures mounted on the Qatari government did not remain limited to severance of political relations and included banking and trade relations as well

Amanollah Safaei
It was believed that following the fall of the Taliban in 2001, dismantling of al-Qaeda’s bases in Afghanistan and election of a broad-based government in this country, insecurity that reigned there for the past three decades would come to an end. However, despite presence of tens of thousands of international forces as well as the Afghan army and a 300,000-strong police force in the past 16 years, Afghanistan is still not considered a safe country and the wave of immigration out of the country still continues with full force. Although presence of international forces has been effective in catalyzing the fall of the Taliban regime and has dealt drastic blows to al-Qaeda terrorist outfit, it has inflicted heavy material and spiritual costs on the Afghan government and nation.