WASHINGTON (AFP)— The US Treasury on Monday announced sanctions against Iran’s Bank Tejarat, claiming all of the Islamic Republic’s major state-owned banks have now been subjected to punitive measures.Just hours after the European Union slapped an embargo on Iranian oil, the Treasury Department announced measures to close a financial noose around the regime — which is accused of building nuclear weapons.The sanctions are expected to make it more difficult for Iran to do business with the rest of the world and to get revenue from its vast Iran and gas exports.“At a time when banks around the world are cutting off Iran and its currency is depreciating rapidly, today’s action against Bank Tejarat strikes at one of Iran’s few remaining access points to the international financial system,” said senior Treasury official David Cohen.Bank Tejarat, Iran’s third largest, is accused of aiding Iranian weapons of mass destruction programs, including moving tens of millions of dollars to help a state-run agency acquire uranium.Bank Tejarat is said to have around 2,000 branches in Iran and foreign offices in France and Tajikistan.

Since the start of the New Year, the Iranian regime has begun a campaign of death, executing 1 prisoner every 4 hours.  If the regime continues its rampage, by the months end they will have executed 186 individuals. If the rate of their killing spree continues further, by the end of the year Iran will have murdered over 2,200 individuals.  The regime has used an assortment of charges against such prisoners, in order to try to legitimize the massacre. The charges against each individual range from terrorism, espionage, drug trafficking, enmity with God, rape, and so on.  Each of the prisoners has gone through a judicial system that offers little fairness, transparency, or due process. As a result, differentiating between ordinary criminals and opponents of the regime can be very difficult.  Many prisoners face trumped up charges despite committing purely political offenses.

Jailed Iranian blogger Hossein Ronaghi Maleki has been transferred to hospital in critical condition.Iran’s House of Human Rights website reports that Ronaghi Maleki was transferred to Hasheminejad hospital on Thursday.In the past year, the jailed blogger has undergone four operations, including a kidney transplant. In the past, the authorities had refused to heed the advice of specialists to let him receive adequate treatment outside of prison facilities.Ronaghi Maleki had begun a hunger strike to protest what he described as “the unfair 15-year prison term, the authorities’ refusal to grant sick leave and the psychological and physical pressures” he has been subjected throughout his imprisonment.He began his hunger strike by protesting his condition in an open letter to Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi.Hossein Ronaghi Maleki, who ran a blog under the penname Babak Khoramdin, was arrested in 2009, during the wave of arrests triggered by widespread protests against the result of the presidential election, which the opposition claimed was rigged to re-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.After close to 300 days in solitary confinement, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Last February, he began experiencing kidney complications for which he was finally given a transplant, but the authorities immediately returned him to jail after the procedure