palashbiswaslive: Fwd: Breaking News: New OFAC Regulations Ban All Imports From Iran

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Fwd: Breaking News: New OFAC Regulations Ban All Imports From Iran

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: PAAIA <info@paaia.org>
Date: Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 1:17 AM
Subject: Breaking News: New OFAC Regulations Ban All Imports From Iran
To: palashbiswaskl@gmail.com

PAAIA: Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans

Breaking News: New OFAC Regulations Ban All Imports From Iran

By PAAIA Government Affairs Office

Aug. 19, 2010, Washington, D.C. — The Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) has issued new sanctions regulations against Iran since PAAIA's most recent report on August 5th. According to Erich Ferrari, of McNabb Ferrari, P.C., all imports from Iran will be banned effective Sept. 29, 2010. The new regulations eliminate previous exemptions for imports of carpets, caviar, pistachios, and other Iranian products and implement sections of the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2010, which was signed into law by President Obama on July 1^st. More to come as we learn the details.

Teaching The Divan Of Hafez, One Ghazal A Week

Q&A by Sanam Zahir

Aug. 19, 2010, Los Angeles, CA — Born in Iran, raised in England and the U.S., architect, artist, and teacher Afsaneh Mirfendereski shares her passion for Persian poetry by teaching Hafez on Saturday afternoons. With a BA form the University of London and two Masters from Cambridge University and UC Berkeley, Afsaneh taught English as a Second Language in Rome, London, and Boston for 10 years while exhibiting her watercolor paintings. To teach her classes, she draws from her personal experience of Hafez, training with two ostads, and the many books she has studied in Persian and English. I had a chance to sit down with Afsaneh to become her "Mahram-eh Raz".

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Mehdi Kalantari's Revolutionary Sensor Detects Faulty Bridges

By Michael Dresser, The Baltimore Sun

Aug. 16, 2010, New York, NY – "The device that Mehdi Kalantari hopes will revolutionize monitoring of the structural integrity of bridges around the world is about as small and flat as a credit card and is powered by the sun, by ambient light or even by stray radio waves it can pick out of the atmosphere.

An Iranian immigrant and electrical engineer at the University of Maryland, College Park, Kalantari has devised what he calls a lightweight, low-power, wireless sensor that he hopes will detect weaknesses in bridges and other infrastructure before they can turn into calamities such as the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge that killed 13 people in Minneapolis in 2007.

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Passing The Torch Speaker Davar Ardalan Appointed Exec Producer, Michael Eric Dyson Show

By Sara Sepidzadeh, Special Contributor for PersianMirror

Aug. 17, 2010, Los Angeles, CA — Haleh

"Social media innovator and veteran NPR News Senior Producer Davar Ardalan, joins The Michael Eric Dyson Show as Executive Producer today.

The Michael Eric Dyson show is a new one-hour daily news/talk program supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. From politics to pop culture, the show delivers thoughtful analysis on the biggest stories of the day, intimate conversations with your favorite news makers and biting commentary on the hottest issues. "

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Mahmoud Reza Banki Gets 2 ½ Years For Havaleh

By Benjamin Weiser, NY Times

Aug. 16, 2010, New York, NY — An Iranian immigrant who had earned a Ph.D. from Princeton and aspired to a career in biotechnology was sentenced to two and a half years in prison on Monday for violating the Iran trade embargo by using an informal money-transfer system known as hawala to move millions of dollars between the United States and Iran.

The defendant, Mahmoud Reza Banki, 34, must also pay the government about $3.3 million, which prosecutors say was the amount of money involved in the illegal transactions. "

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