Culture

PayvandNews – Four-time Iranian Grammy Award nominee Kayhan Kalhor was one of the two winners of the Isaac Stern Human Spirit Award at the Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition, the organizers announced last Tuesday.

RadioFarda – WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (Reuters) U.S. President Donald Trump criticized social media companies on Friday for silencing “millions of people” in what he called an act of censorship.

Iran HRM – An Iranian journalist Amir Hossein Miresmaili, has been sentenced by an appeals court to a 10-year prison sentence, media and social media ban, two-year ban on leaving the country and paying a fine.

There have been 35 instances of marriages of girls between the ages of 10 to 13 in Markazi Province in central Iran.

PayvandNews – Some 50 kilometers north of Yazd, central Iran, lies the sprawling mud-brick city of Meybod, whose tourism officials are planning to internationally promote it as the “city of watermills”. Meybod seeks UNESCO status for long being a cradle of watermills and for its cultural evolution of water supply through the millennia, ISNA reported.

PayvandNews – Some 1,884 tourism projects valued at 430 trillion rials (nearly $10.2 billion) are underway in Iran, tourism chief Ali-Asghar Mounesan said on Sunday.  Projects including construction of hotels and eco-lodges as well as projects aiming at attracting tourists are already underway and herald good days for tourism industry of the country, CHTN quoted Mounesan as saying.

Iranian Film Festival – San Francisco, the first independent Iranian film festival outside of Iran, which showcases independent feature and short films made by or about Iranians from around the world, will present 48 films at its 11th annual event September 22-23, 2018. The films range from fiction, documentary, animation, short….to music video.

Al-Monitor – Mashhad, Iran’s second most populous city, houses the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth imam of the Shiites. As a result, the city attracts a large number of religious tourists and perhaps unsurprisingly is a stronghold of Iranian hard-liners. For years now, it has also had a reputation as the city where concerts are banned. This, however, might have changed two weeks ago.

PayvandNews – Shots of the moon eclipse were captured by IRNA photographer Reza Ghaderi beside the ancient city of Persepolis, near the city of Shiraz in southern Iran. The below multi-exposure photo shows penumbral eclipse to partial and total eclipse; and then a gradual ending of eclipse from total to penumbral. The so-called blood moon was visible at different times …

Radiofarda – A U.S. judge said on Monday an Achaemenid-era (550-330 BC) bas-relief should be returned to Iran, where the object was originally stolen from some 80 years ago. The limestone relief, which depicts a Persian guard, was confiscated in October from the Park Avenue Armory in New York, where it was being offered for sale at an art fair, …