Al-Monitor – As the United States and other Western nations await for the new Iranian administration to take over Aug. 3 in order to complete negotiations on the nuclear deal, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has suggested that deep differences still remain. In a July 28 meeting with outgoing President Hassan Rouhani and his Cabinet, Khamenei summed up the Rouhani administration’s performance …

Al-Monitor – The State Department on Wednesday condemned the use of violence against anti-government protesters in Iran, a rebuke that comes as nuclear negotiations with Tehran remain at a standstill. The widespread protests, which erupted nearly two weeks ago over chronic water shortages in the southwestern region of Khuzestan, have spread to several cities including the capital, Tehran. Amnesty International has …

environmentalsystemsresearch – The climate change fact is intensive among the Middle East countries and especially Iran. Among the Middle East countries, Iran will experience an increase of 2.6 °C in mean temperatures and a 35% decline in precipitation in the next decades. In vice versa, Iran by total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions nearly to 616,741 million tons of CO2 is the first …

washingtontimes – The plot was audacious: Agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran would kidnap an American citizen on American soil. Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born journalist and human rights activist, was to be grabbed, spirited out of Brooklyn to Venezuela, and then on to Tehran where she would have been imprisoned, tortured, and, almost certainly, executed. Last week, the FBI, to its enormous credit, …

RFL/RE – Saeid Mollaei, an Iranian defector representing Mongolia at the Tokyo Olympics, has won a silver medal in judo for his adopted country. Mollaei, 29, lost to Japan’s Takanori Nagase in the men’s 81-kg judo final on July 27. Mollaei, who won the 2018 world championship title, left Iran two years ago after being ordered to deliberately lose at …

Iranwire – Furious anti-government protests continued in cities across Iran last night, almost two weeks after demonstrations first began over the water crisis in Khuzestan. In videos published from the city of Isfahan in central Iran, a large night-time crowd could be heard chanting “Isfahan, Khuzestan, Unity, Unity” while protesters tore down a banner depicting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Similar slogans were …

Iranwire – Former Iranian prison official Hamid Nouri is to stand trial on the charges of grave war crimes and murder in a Swedish court next month. Swedish public prosecutors Kristina Lindhoff Carleson and Martina Winslow have brought the case against the 60-year-old for his alleged part in the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners in Iran in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq …

Iranwire – The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has had heart disease for the best part of 25 years. The fact that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was diagnosed with this condition as far back as 1998 was only recently revealed in the latest instalment of former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s memoirs. In his diary entry for May 30, 1998, which was …

VOA – When the civil war erupted in Syria a decade ago, some Middle East observers and climate scientists argued drought was one of the significant drivers of the conflict. Drought in the years preceding the war caused an agricultural collapse in parts of eastern and northern Syria, forcing rural families to migrate to cities in ever larger numbers and …

Al-Monitor – On their 12th day, the rallies that initially began in the Iranian oil-rich but underdeveloped province of Khuzestan attracted growing solidarity from across the country. Videos have gone viral of demonstrations in Tehran, Karaj, Kermanshah, Isfahan and Bushehr, where protesters have been chanting slogans against Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with calls for an end to the clerical ruling establishment. …