Iran

"The well-regarded military journal Jane’s Defence Weekly later claimed that up to 70 percent of all the weapons Iran bought came from the logistics center in NIOC's premises in London. At its worst, Iran and Iraq spent almost ten billion dollars annually on weapons and equipment for the war."

"Nathan Gardels is now also one of the veterans of the World Economic Forum in Davos. In 1985, he founded the periodical New Perspectives Quarterly, which has been available since 1999 at www.digitalnpq.org and is allegedly read by 35 million people in fifteen languages. This is also the principle that Berggruen follows with his institute: Former heads of state, ministers, and diplomats comment on current world events. Almost forgotten figures like the former head of the UN arms control commission Hans Blix have emerged from obscurity. In New Perspectives Quarterly, the politician, who is now almost 90 years old, explains the similarities between North Korea and Iran. Gardels' "Club of Wise Old Men" aims to provide a spectrum of opinions on conflict topics, just like the Club of Rome. Thus, the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who chaired the influential private US think tank Council on Foreign Relations from 1977 to 1981, at the age of 90, is just as wise and cosmopolitan as Helmut Schmidt, Abolhassam Banisadr, the first elected president of Iran, comments for New Perspectives Quarterly on the Hollywood film Argo, and Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, explains why Arab democracy cannot be of American influence. Alongside the old guard, Nathan Gardels also allows writers such as Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, w"

"Gibbs struggled to work out the consequences for Iran of having four exchange rates operating in parallel: the official one, a favoured rate for exporters, a higher rate for tourists and the black market rate, which was something else again. The originally good rail system, meanwhile, was totally neglected since its rates were too expensive, while the roads were cluttered with lorries that paid no road charges and used subsidised fuel. Such blind spots in the logic of a national economy, though, were nothing new for someone who had lived in pre-1984 New Zealand."

"Much of his historical and biographical reading is directed by his travel. A favourite Gibbs aphorism is, ‘The more interests you have, the more interesting life is.’ ‘To see Yugoslavia, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan after the Taliban fell over, the copper mines north of Santiago, or to travel with the kids through areas of north India where they were fighting,’ he argues, ‘is a great source of stimulus. The consequence is that whenever you see anything about those places in the news, you’re interested.’ A biography of the great Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley is much more interesting when you’re just about to visit the Congo."