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Iranian Railways Company (RAI) spokesperson Mir Hassan Mousavi announced the new route after a meeting with Azerbaijani officials to discuss linking recently constructed lines. According to the initial plan, the railway will take the Baku-Astara-Tehran route.
Mousavi said: “The parties intend to address the issues that are necessary to accelerate the launch of the new route, especially the legal and customs issues.” He added: "The line will be put into operation after the launching of the Rasht-Astara railway line.”
This final piece of the railway puzzle will ultimately open up the vast market of Tehran – encompassing 12mn people in the metropolitan district – and eventually join railway lines laid east towards the second city of Mashhad and onwards to Turkmenistan.
Mousavi also noted that Iran and Azerbaijan were working to increase passenger flow on the Nakhchivan-Mashhad route, which is currently operating.
Serbia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure Zorana Mihajlovic and Iran’s Minister of Industry, Mining and Trade Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh signed air transport agreement between the two countries on June 21, reads the Serbian government’s statement . According to Mihajlovic, the agreement is going to be a framework for direct flights and other traffic between Serbia and Iran; direct flights were recently re-launched after a 27-year hiatus when IranAir resumed flights from Tehran to the Serbian capital Belgrade in March.
The new flight connection came as part of an overall warming of ties between Tehran and Belgrade. The Serbian authorities have lately removed visa restrictions on Iranians visiting their country. Only a few European countries have made such a move to date.
The agreement on air transportation between Serbia and Iran was signed within the 15th session of the Mixed Trade Commission of the two countries, which is underway in Belgrade.
9.1.4 TMT sector news
The ban that tens of millions of Iranians hoped would never happen appears to have arrived. State television and a news agency affiliated with the Iranian judiciary on April 30 reported that the encrypted Telegram Messenger mobile and desktop messaging app has been blacklisted on the grounds of protecting national security.
Telegram, subscribed to by more than half of Iran’s population of 80mn, has been attacked by both Iran and Russia i n recent months, while the UK has warned the secure messaging app is being used by Islamic State militants in Syria. However, it is concerns such as the service’s usefulness when it comes to secretly organising anti-regime demonstrations that is thought to have unnerved Tehran and Moscow, the latter of which has demanded the service’s encryption keys from its co-founder, self-exiled Russian Pavel Durov. Organisers of the nationwide protests that took place in Iran over December and January are known to have used Telegram.
State television report said the Tehran prosecutor was ordering internet service providers to block the cloud-based service in such a way that users would not be able to bypass the ban by using a VPN.
The order was issued one day after the app went down across several time zones on April 29.
38 IRAN Country Report July 2018 www.intellinews.com