Iran nuclear showdown still in diplomacy stage: Barak

One of Britain's biggest companies has made millions of pounds selling goods to Iran, including to a state-owned firm that supplies the regime's nuclear programme. Glencore, a commodity trading house run by the billionaire Ivan Glasenberg, traded $659m (£430m) of goods, including aluminium oxide, to Iran last year, the Guardian has established.

Experts of Iran and six world powers will meet behind closed doors in Istanbul tomorrow for “technical-level” nuclear talks aimed at turning recent diplomatic progress into concrete measures. 

Iran is developing a second path to a nuclear weapons capability by operating a plant that could produce plutonium, satellite images show for the first time. The Daily Telegraph [Wednesday] disclosed details of activity at a heavily-guarded Iranian facility from which international inspectors have been barred for 18 months. The images, taken only days ago, show that Iran has activated the Arak heavy-water production plant.

Henry Kissinger recently gave an ominous forecast on the future of Iran's nuclear program: that it will be taken care of one way or another very soon.

Israel is skeptical that a new round of sanctions targeting Iran's nuclear program will be effective, but there is "still time" for them to work, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Friday."They're determined to get nuclear military capability. We see it," he said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" television program. "I don't believe that sanctions will work."But he said that despite skepticism, Israel was willing to give the latest round of United Nations pressure on Tehran more time to have an effect.

Fareed Zakaria points out that much of what “everyone knows” about Iran may be wrong:

Talk of bombing Iran surfaced in the news late last week when Israel's departing defense minister, Ehud Barak, said his country had written off plans to attack Tehran on its own in the face of a "surgical" plan put forth by the Pentagon.