Khamenei has cut short the brawl between Ahmadinejad and Speaker Larijani in the run-up to the June presidential election, by picking a bland, unassuming professor as his favorite candidate for next president.

Revolutionary Guards and army chiefs are weighing a military takeover in Tehran to end the ferocious infighting within the regime and prevent Ahmadinejad stirring up trouble to get his candidate elected in the June presidential vote.

The West and Israel have no option but to admit the failure of a decade of sanctions, military threats, diplomatic penalties, cyber war and covert operations to abort Iran's drive for a nuclear bomb. Tehran has never wavered from its goal, citing the "Persian Carpet Doctrine" as its secret ...

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the driving force behind Iran's nuclear program and most vocal of Israel's enemies, is on his last legs as president. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stripped him of most of his powers and shut the door against his allies running for the Majlis (parliament) in March 2012.  debkafile's Iranian sources: The coming men in the presidential stakes of 2013 are Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, a former nuclear negotiator with the West, and ex-foreign minister Ali Akhbar Veliyati. Both are hardliners.

Iran's 20 percent enriched uranium production exceeds its needs. debkafile' reports that this disclosure by Iran's atomic energy agency head Fereydoon Abbas enables the program to move into the production of 60 percent grade fuel, one step before weapons grade. This progress plus the relocation to an underground location near Qom of accelerated enrichment brings forward to the spring of 2012 the potential completion of between two and four bombs and Tehran's ability to conduct a nuclear test.

Daryush Rezaee-Nejad, 35, who died Saturday, July 23, when two motorcyclists shot him in the head and throat in front of his home in Tehran, was a rising star of the new generation of Iranian nuclear scientists. debkafile's Iranian sources disclose he was attached to one of the most secret teams of Iran's nuclear program, employed by the defense ministry to construct detonators for the nuclear bomb and warhead already in advanced stages of development.