Al-Arabia – Local authorities in Lebanon’s southern village of Yaroun said that Salman Rushdie stabbing suspect Hadi Matar is of Lebanese descent, Lebanese daily An-Nahar reported on Saturday. Ali Qassem, the chief of Yaroun’s municipality, told the newspaper that Matar’s father and mother are from Yaroun, noting, however, that Matar was born in the US and never visited Yaroun. Rushdie, …

RFL/RE – Several relatives of victims of a passenger flight that was shot down in Iran in January 2020 by missiles fired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have set off on a 400-kilometer protest march in Canada. The march started on August 10 in Toronto and is scheduled to end in 15 days in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, in front …

RFL/RE – Skyrocketing inflation is forcing an increasing number of Iranians to limit buying fruit and vegetables, industry experts say, as Iran continues to grapple with crippling international sanctions. Asadollah Kargar, the head of the Fruit and Vegetable Sellers Association, said that fruit consumption has decreased by 50 percent because of rising prices.“This increase in the price of fruit has caused some …

Iranwire – IranWire can report that now 128 Baha’is in Iran have now suffered specific acts of persecution in the past two weeks, with that number increasing almost every day. Baha’is have been variously imprisoned, arrested, endured raids on their residences or businesses, and yet again been denied access to higher education. On August 2, in the village of Roshankouh, …

VOA — Iranians reacted with praise and worry Saturday over the attack on novelist Salman Rushdie, the target of a decades-old fatwa by the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for his death. It remains unclear why Rushdie’s attacker, identified by police as Hadi Mattar of Fairview, New Jersey, stabbed the author as he prepared to speak at an …

Iran-HRM – Iranian authorities have ramped up their pressure and harassment of members of the Baha’i community, a long-persecuted religious minority, arresting dozens of people and destroying property belonging to members of the group. Hundreds of cases of persecution of Baha’is, including arrests, summonses, searches and destruction of houses, confiscation of agricultural lands, deprivation of education, etc., have been registered …

Iran-HRM – Hanan Hashemi, a young Bahai woman in Shiraz, southwestern Iran currently detained in the Shiraz Intelligence Center, informed her family in a phone call that she is under pressure to make forced confessions. The 22-year-old Bahai woman was arrested on July 19 by security forces along with four other Bahais including Behieh Manavipour, Misagh Manavipour, Elhan Hashemi, and …

gatestoneinstitute.org – When the regime’s television host asked him about the video showing concrete being poured into the Arak reactor’s pipes to block them, Ali Akbar Salehi, former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran responded: “[N]ot the pipes you see here. We had purchased similar pipes, but I couldn’t announce it at that time…. We needed to be …

CHRI – Despite a renewed wave of COVID-19 infections in Iranian prisons, a growing number of infected political prisoners have been denied proper treatment, raising fears of more unnecessary deaths of prisoners in state custody. In a non-exhaustive study, Amnesty International has reported that at minimum, 92 men and four women in 30 prisons across Iran have died in state custody since January 2010 …

Al-Monitor – After months of deadlock and near death, the Iran nuclear deal has a new chance for revival. On Aug. 8, the European Union, which for the past 16 months has been acting as a broker between Iran and the United States in talks to restore the accord, presented what it called a final text of a compromise package that it …