Al-Arabia – More than 3,000 US military personnel have arrived in the Red Sea aboard two warships, as part of increased deployments after tanker seizures by Iran, the US Navy said Monday. The US sailors and Marines entered the Red Sea on Sunday after transiting through the Suez Canal in a pre-announced deployment, the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet said in a …

RFL/RE – Iran on August 7 began registering candidates for parliamentary elections in March, which will be the first since nationwide protests rocked the country last year. Iran has held regular presidential and parliamentary elections since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. A clerical body vets candidates, disqualifying any seen as disloyal to the Islamic republic. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has …

RFL/RE – Iran’s foreign minister visited Japan on August 7 for the first time since 2019 to meet his counterpart, officials said, with a meeting with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also reportedly on the agenda. The purpose of the rare visit by Hossein Amir-Abdollahian to a G7 member country was not announced, but reports said Japan would press Iran to …

Iranwire – Seventy Iranian cities have witnessed more than 406 labor protests since the beginning of the year, as dozens of trade union and labor activists have been subjected to severe reprisals just for trying to assert labor rights. That’s according to the second Worker Rights Watch biannual report on worker protests and legal developments in Iran between January to June 2022 …

Iranwire – Iranian authorities have sentenced a feminist activist, Zainab Zaman, to one year in prison for engaging in “propaganda activity” against the Islamic Republic, according to her brother. Branch 26 of the Islamic Revolution Court also banned Zaman from traveling, prohibited her from participating in the activities of political or social organizations and barred her from using a smartphone …

Iranwire – Multiple Iranian security and intelligence institutions have filed a joint legal case against Mohsen Borhani, a prominent lawyer who harshly criticized the government’s brutal crackdown on anti-establishment protesters.  The case was initiated by the Judicial Information Protection Center, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Intelligence Organization, the Police Information Protection and a member of the Guardian Council, Borhani …

Iranwire – In recent weeks, the Tehran Municipality has decided to close several care centers catering for working and street children, as well as those with incarcerated parents, amid evidence pointing to a lack of support for vulnerable children in the Iranian capital and other cities.  The closed centers include the Nasser Khosro Children’s House, Navid Mehr Children and Family …

Iranwire – A Kurdish woman incarcerated in north-western Iran has sewn her lips together at the start of a hunger strike to protest being denied leave from prison, a rights group has said. Soheila Mohammadi took the action in Urmia Central Prison because she was not granted a meeting with the regional prosecutor to ask for the furlough leave, the …

Iranwire – In recent days, videos of sexual relations allegedly involving a number of male officials of the Islamic Republic made the news. Reza Saghati, the dismissed director-general of Culture and Islamic Guidance in northern Gilan province and Hojatolislam Mahdi Haghshenas, former deputy of the Headquarters for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in the same province, are …

Iran-HRM – On Saturday, August 5, 2023, Nazila Maroufian was transferred from Evin Prison to Taleghani Hospital in Tehran due to “nervous and psychological stress and rapid heartbeat.” After a few hours of hospitalization, she was returned to Evin Prison. Nazila Maroufian is a 23-year-old Kurdish journalist from Saqqez, who resides in Tehran.According to a reliable source close to Nazila …