Social and Political

Al-Arabia – Iranian authorities have shut down one of the offices of the country’s biggest e-commerce company and launched judicial procedures after it published pictures online showing female employees not wearing the mandatory headscarf, semi-official media reported. The move appears to be part of a new campaign launched last week to impose the Islamic dress code nearly a year after the morality …

RFL/RE – Iranian authorities have banned a film festival that put out a publicity poster featuring an actress who was not wearing a hijab, state media reported on July 23. The ban comes after the Iranian Short Film Association (ISFA) released a poster for its Short Film Festival featuring Iranian actress Susan Taslimi in the 1982 film The Death Of …

Iranwire – Jailed human rights activist Narges Mohammadi has responded to a new round of pressure by the government of the Islamic Republic to impose mandatory hijab on women, calling it a conspiracy by the country’s theocracy to subjugate women. “Contrary to claims by the theocracy, covering women’s hair was not meant to ‘protect women’s dignity’ and ‘control men’s sexual …

VOA – Iran on Sunday began an annual air force drill in the central part of the country, state media reported, as the United States sends more fighter planes to the region to deter the Islamic Republic from seizing commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf area. The official IRNA news agency said 11 Iranian air force bases participated in the …

VOA – Four Iranian policemen were killed on Sunday after attackers fired on a patrol in the restive southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan near the border with Pakistan, state media reported. “Three policemen were martyred in a terrorist attack on a police patrol unit,” state news agency IRNA reported. A fourth died later after succumbing to his wounds, state television reported. …

RFL/RE – Judges in Iran have diagnosed three prominent actresses sentenced for not wearing the hijab as mentally ill, anti-family, and antisocial, prompting top psychologists in the country to condemn the “abuse of psychiatry and psychology in the judiciary.” The heads of four leading psychiatry boards in the country went public with their criticisms after actresses Azadeh Samadi, Leila Bolukat, and Afsaneh …

RFL/RE – Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Danish ambassador to protest against “the desecration of the Koran in Copenhagen,” the ministry tweeted on July 22. A day earlier, a man set fire to a book purported to be the Koran on a square across from the Iraqi Embassy in Copenhagen. Koran burnings are permitted in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, which …

VOA – Accusations of beatings and the use of tear gas have been made against members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps by tourists in a scenic resort area of the country.Witnesses say that Thursday evening, a group of security officers — said to be wearing uniforms associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC — attacked tourists at …

BBC – It was the middle of the night when the phone call came. Gazelle Sharmahd was woken up by her mother, who told her that her father, Jamshid, was calling from his jail cell in Iran. Gazelle hadn’t been allowed to talk to her father, an Iranian-German businessman, for two years. “We didn’t even know if he’d already been …

Al-Arabia – Iran announced on Sunday that its morality police patrol units would resume operations after a monthslong absence following the death of Mahsa Amini while in their custody. Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, died last September, three days after being arrested by Tehran’s morality police for allegedly breaching the country’s strict dress code for women. News of her death fueled …