麻豆约拍

In Business Daily today, we look at the question of Iranian sanctions. Those against sanctions say we shouldn't tighten the screws on Iran because it's only developing nuclear technology for medical use. Those in favour say we should get tough with Iran because it's disguised its true military intentions.

So do tight belts make for a more rebellious populace? Or do they cow the people into quietude? All this matters in Iran because there's an intense debate going on there about subsidies for food and fuel. President Ahmadinejad proposed to cut the scale of support, so raising prices. The country's parliament disagreed and re-instated the subsidy. It's clearly a conflict with potentially explosive consequences in a country where the election result is still disputed nine months later.
John Lein, who was the 麻豆约拍's correspondent in Teheran until he was expelled just after the elections, gives us his view.

Outside the country, the face-off between Iran and much of the West, with America in the van, gets steadily more tense.
The US and its allies in Europe is pressing for a new tranche of UN sanctions in the hope of persuading Iran to rein in its nuclear ambitions - ambitions which it says are peaceful but which many in Washington and elsewhere suspect are military.

Hossein Askari is an Iranian exile who is also Iran Professor of Business and International Relations at George Washington University in DC. He says the current sanctions restricting financial activities by Iranian enterprises don't go far enough.

But there is a counter view. And that is from the Iranian government's defenders who say the aims of the nuclear programme are peaceful, that enrichment of uranium is to levels needed for medical use but insufficient for a bomb, and sanctions don't work anyway. Abbas Edalat is Professor of Computer Science at Imperial College in London.

The internet revolution is a bit like the railway revolution of two hundred years ago. It will be held up or not by the nuts and bolts of the system. In other words, the speed of building railways across continents determined the capacity of the network. Similarly, if we haven't got what's called band-width, the extent of communication will be limited. Bandwidth determines how much information a computer network can handle. It's the constraint on the internet, as our regular commentator Bright Simons in Accra explains.