Iranwire – Media activist Hossein Razzaq has been summoned to the intelligence office in the city of Amol, Mazandaran province, and forced to close his popular Clubhouse room. For the last six months Razzaq and fellow activist Vida Rabbani have hosted regular chats in a room called Azadi Square for Iranians to discuss daily social and political events in their …

Iranwire – The outlook of any future revival of the JCPOA remains opaque. In the meantime, the Islamic Republic is in desperate need of oil revenues. Officials from different arms of government and industry have been drafted in to help maintain a shady, mostly secret set of mechanisms for the ongoing sale of Iranian oil. When these covert activities occasionally …

Iranwire – Article 18, an organization promoting religious freedom in Iran with a focus on the Christian community, published news of a remarkable ruling by the Supreme Court in late November. The court found that nine Christian converts serving five-year prison sentences should not have been charged with “conspiracy against national security” for their role in setting up and managing house churches …

Al-Monitor – A senior Iranian health official warned that unless measures are tightened it will only be a few weeks before the new coronavirus variant, omicron, dominates the country. Hamid-Reza Jama’ati, who chairs the scientific committee of the National Coronavirus Taskforce, advised the Iranian government to reinstate strict measures for at least four weeks to curb the new variant. Those …

gatestoneinstitute.org – China’s coronavirus has now killed more than 806,400 Americans, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Biden these days sees China merely as a “competitor,” not, more appropriately, as an adversary or enemy. There are Chinese business links with Biden’s family and with members of his administration and doubtless he wants to accommodate campaign donors wishing to …

Al-Arabia – Iran has detected its first case of infection by the new omicron variant of the coronavirus, state TV reported Sunday. The announcement comes as the variant spreads around the globe less than a month after scientists alerted the World Health Organization to the concerning-looking version. Read the latest updates in our dedicated coronavirus section. Iran has vaccinated some …

RFL/RE – Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) kicked off five days of military maneuvers across the country’s south on December 20, state television reported, amid continued tensions with the West over Tehran’s nuclear program. The IRGC’s aerospace division, ground troops, and naval forces joined in the exercises, with maritime forces set to maneuver in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, …

RFL/RE – Iran has executed a Kurdish man convicted of armed rebellion despite international appeals that his life be spared, activists said on December 20. Heidar Ghorbani was executed early on December 19 in Sanandaj prison in western Iran’s Kurdistan Province, the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and the France-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) said, adding that neither his family nor his lawyer …

Iranwire – In Iran a project entitled “Smart Covid Management” project is under way, purporting to lay the foundations for a post-pandemic return to normal life. Since February 2020, when the coronavirus outbreak in Iran was confirmed, many such initiatives have been launched in a bid to control the pandemic (quite often prefaced with the word “smart”), including night-time curfews and the …

Iran-HRM – The authorities carried out the hanging execution at dawn on Tuesday, December 14, 2021. The woman, identified as Masoumeh Zarei had been imprisoned for seven years on the charge of murder. It is reported that one of the prison guards were willing to put the noose around her neck. Therefore, she had to wait for hours by the …