RFL/RE – The White House said on February 22 that it is pushing back until next week the release of President Donald Trump’s revamped executive order limiting entry into the United States for refugees and immigrants. Trump had said his administration would unveil the new order this week, but a White House official says that this has been delayed. Trump’s …

Al-Arabia – Iran said Wednesday it has sent a team for talks in Saudi Arabia on the next annual pilgrimage after missing the Hajj in 2016 at a time of rising tensions between the two countries. “A delegation has been sent from the Islamic Republic of Iran to Saudi Arabia to follow up on the Hajj,” Culture Minister Reza Salehi …

Al-Arabia – The supreme leader of Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urged the Palestinians to “continue the resistance” on the ground and “breakaway from the consequences of the Oslo Accords.” He also encouraged Palestinians to manage what he described as “internal differences,” before they turn into domestic conflict and confrontation, in a statement that echoed a threat. Khamenei’s assertion …

VOA – Iran is increasingly using Syrian battlefields as a proving ground for fresh military officers in training, according to Iranian media reports and Syrian opposition figures. Tehran-based Imam Hossein University, a school affiliated with The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said it recently deployed military leadership students to fight in Syria as part of an educational program designed for …

Amnesty – British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is suffering with severe arm, neck and back pain and needs urgent hospitalization. An appeal court has upheld her five-year prison sentence for the charge of “membership of an illegal group” in connection with her work with the BBC and Thompson Reuters Foundation. View report in English: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/MDE1357482017ENGLISH.pdf

Al-monitor – In a speech Feb. 15, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei directly addressed the idea of “national reconciliation” brought forward by Reformists over the past weeks. AUTHOR Reza Marashi “Some people talk about national reconciliation; however, that does not make sense to me,” he said. “The people are already united. So why do you talk about reconciliation? Are …

AL-monitor – On Feb. 20, former Iranian Vice President Hamid Baghaei announced his intention to run in the country’s May 19 presidential election amid efforts among conservatives to reach a consensus over a single nominee. As such, Baghaei, who served as deputy to former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is now, in effect, the representative of Ahmadinejad’s circle in the upcoming …

Iranhumanrights.org – Twitter’s growth in Iran can be tracked through three distinct stages; when it was banned in 2009, during the nuclear talks in 2013-15, and after the ban was partially lifted in 2016. Twitter Twitter was partially unblocked in Iran by the authorities during the last two months of 2016, paving the way for millions to access it, according to …

RFL/RE – The son of one of the founding fathers of Iran’s Islamic republic has been arrested to serve a six-year prison sentence for releasing a decades-old audio tape in which his father denounced the mass executions of political prisoners in 1988. Ahmad Montazeri, the son of prominent Iranian theologian Hossein Ali Montazeri Ahmad Montazeri was summoned to the special …

Radiozamaneh – A highly regarded professor in Zabol University in southeastern Iran has been sentenced to imprisonment and flogging for posting protests against university administration on Telegram, a cloud-based instant messaging application popular in Iran. Moosa Bohlooli, President of Zabol University Vaghayeh Etegafhieh daily reports that a member of Zabol University Science Faculty has been sentenced to four years in …