Al-Arabia – Iran confirmed Wednesday it would start producing by next week uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, days after a blast it blamed on Israel hit a key nuclear facility in Natanz. “Modification of the process just started and we expect to accumulate the product next week” from centrifuges at Natanz, tweeted Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, …

Iranwire – Even the most pessimistic observer could not have imagined that Iran’s economic crisis would reach a point that a “chicken crisis” – a shortage of poultry – would emerge as the country’s most pressing economic and social issue at the start of the new Iranian calendar year. Nowhere else, not even the world’s poorest countries, has anything like this vulgar-sounding …

Iranwire – Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, has decided against running for the presidency after a meeting with the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, according to his brother Yaser. Khamenei reportedly told Hassan Khomeini that his candidacy was “not prudent” under the prevailing conditions in Iran. Hassan “was hesitantly consulting and studying the …

Iranwire – Censorship became a fact of life for art and culture in Iran with the 1979 Islamic Revolution and many artists and writers were sacrificed to the repression of the freedom of expression. Many were forced to leave Iran – those who were forced to stay were also forced to censor themselves to support the new Islamic Republic’s ideology. Censorship …

gatestoneinstitute.org – A basic rule in negotiations is to keep or gain leverage against the other party. The Biden administration, mystifyingly, is doing exactly the opposite in its negotiations with the regime of Iran. Iran enriching uranium at any level — it is a negligibly small step to enrich uranium from “acceptable levels” to “nuclear” levels — puts the world at risk, …

VOA – Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday that his country’s decision to enrich uranium up to 60% purity is in response to the sabotage attack that damaged the nation’s Natanz nuclear site.  Speaking at a Cabinet meeting, Rouhani called the move “an answer to your evilness.”  Iran had previously enriched uranium to 20%.  In addition to higher enrichment levels, …

Iran Human Rights (IHR) – A prisoner sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder, has been executed in Shiraz Central Prison. According to Iran Human Rights, a man was executed at Shiraz Central Prison in the early hours of April 12. His identity has been established as Arsalan Zare, who was around 45 years old and had been sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) for murder. “Arsalan …

Iran Human Rights (IHR) – According to Iran Human Rights’ reports, at least 4,047 people were executed during the 7.5 years of Rouhani’s presidency. The 13th Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran provides an analysis of the number of executions under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad compared to Hassan Rouhani. The following is an excerpt from the Annual Report on the …

Al-Monitor – The Iranian public’s rage at the state-led crackdown on fuel price hike protests in November 2019 has only accumulated over the past 18 months, as authorities refuse to come clean or release any official report into the killings and abuses. A series of inflammatory comments and decisions by Iranian officials over the past week seems to have further intensified the …

Al-Monitor – The European Union’s decision to add eight Iranian security officials and three entities to its list of sanctions over human rights violations has drawn strongly worded statements of condemnation from the Islamic Republic. On April 14, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif slammed the move as “shameful” and criticized the European bloc for “giving in to pressure from hard-line groups” in the United States …