Radiofarda – Farzad Piltan, the Director-General of the Islamic Republic’s Trade Promotion Organization (TPO) ‘s Office of Arabian and African Countries, says that $2.5 billion of non-oil goods were exported to Arab states in the Persian Gulf region in the first five months of the current Iranian calendar year beginning March 20, 2020. Iran’s total non-oil exports to Arab countries …

Radiofarda – Oman welcomes Bahrain’s decision to normalise relations with Israel and hopes it will contribute to Israeli-Palestinian peace, Oman state media said on Sunday. Bahrain on Friday became the second Gulf country to normalise ties with Israel after the United Arab Emirates said they would do so a month ago, moves forged partly through shared fears of Iran. A …

RFL/RE – A British parliamentary deputy said on September 13 that the husband of British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been imprisoned in Iran for four years, has told her that his wife’s latest trial has been postponed.Parliamentarian Tulip Siddiq, who represents Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s London-area home district of Hampstead and Kilburn, did not offer details of any possible reasons for …

Al-Arabia – Iran executed champion wrestler Navid Afkari on Saturday despite widespread pleas to spare him, prompting angry reactions from Iranians at home and abroad on social media platforms. Afkari, 27, was arrested during anti-government protests in 2018. He was given two death sentences, six and a half years in prison and 74 lashes for the alleged murder of a water company …

Radiofarda – The European Film Academy and the Berlin International Film Festival, known as Berlinale, have jointly called for the immediate release of renowned Iranian lawyer and human rights defender, Nasrin Sotoudeh, featured in Jafar Panahi’s Golden Bear-winning “Taxi.” Ms. Sotoudeh has been on a hunger strike since August 10, protesting the dire condition of political prisoners and demanding their immediate release …

Radiofarda – Iran said Saturday it condemned a former top judiciary official to 31 years in prison for corruption, one of the heaviest sentences against a former official in the Islamic republic. Akbar Tabari received the jail term after being convicted of “setting up and heading a bribery network”, judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili told state television. The high-profile trial of …

Ayatollah Yousef Saanei, a pro-reform Iranian cleric and a critic of the establishment who sided with the opposition movement following the controversial 2009 presidential election, has died. He was 83. Ayatollah Saanei died in a hospital in the holy Shi’ite city of Qom after being hospitalized for two days with a broken hip and wrist, Iranian state media reported.In 2009, …

HRW : Iran authorities executed Navid Afkari, who confessed to crimes under torture. This cruel act, in defiance of an international outcry for a fair retrial, shows an utter disregard for the most fundamental human rights norms. Iran: Wrestler on Death Row for Alleged Murder  (Beirut) – The case of an Iranian wrestler on death row is part of a systematic pattern in …

Amnesty – The secret execution this morning of wrestling champion Navid Afkari, without prior notice to him, his family or lawyer, after a grossly unfair trial, is a horrifying travesty of justice that needs immediate international action.“Navid Afkari was a young man with a promising future ahead of him. Carrying out his death sentence with such utter disregard for the …

The Third Reich and the USSR could not behave as normal nation-states…. Their prime interest was “exporting” their ideological brand, by war if necessary. Regardless of the obvious differences of belief systems and discourse, all ideology-driven movements from Lenin and Hitler to Khomeini and Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi aim at replacing the biological human with an ideological one, ostensibly to complete the …