Social and Political

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 …

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 …

Al-Arabia – A European Union proposal to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal “can be acceptable if it provides assurances” on Tehran’s key demands, the state news agency IRNA said on Friday, quoting a senior Iranian diplomat. The EU said on Monday it had put forward a “final” text following four days of indirect talks between the US and Iranian …

RFL/RE – Mostafa al-Ahmad, one of the three prominent filmmakers jailed last month in Iran as part of a broad crackdown, was released on bail on August 10. He had contracted COVID-19 in prison. Ahmad, 52, was arrested in July as Iranian authorities cracked down on dissent in response to growing antiestablishment sentiment and near-daily protests across the Islamic republic. Fellow filmmakers …

Iranwire – The nonprofit United Against Nuclear Iran has called on the Biden administration not to grant Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi a visa to attend the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York. In an op-ed published on Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, chairman Joe Lieberman and CEO Mark Wallace said Raisi should be denied entry to the US due to …

Iranwire – The managing editor of Baloutestan, a socio-cultural digest focused on the Zagros Mountains area, has been sentenced to six months in prison and an eight-million-toman (US$252) cash fine for publishing so-called “fake news”. Mohammad Basati had criticized the performance of the state-backed Relief Committee in the city of Koohdasht, Lorestan province. These local bodies are expected to support the poor and …