Social and Political

Iranwire – Police units, IRGC commanders and local governors in Iran have been hit by a cascade of new sanctions from the US Treasury for the violent suppression of peaceful protests and mistreatment of political prisoners. In a dispatch on Tuesday, December 7, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced it was designating 15 individuals and entities in Iran, Syria …

Al-Monitor – In mid-November, Colombian Defence Minister Diego Molano startled the international community by declaring Iran and Hezbollah “enemies” of his country. Molano claimed that two months previously, “we had to deal with a situation in which we had to organize an operation to capture and expel two criminals commissioned by Hezbollah with the intention of committing a criminal act in Colombia.” …

Iranwire – The seventh round of talks to revive the JCPOA nuclear deal already appear to have foundered. Renewed talks were held last week after five months in the long grass following Ebrahim Raisi assuming the presidency of Iran, and led on Iran’s side by Ali Bagheri-Kani, a JCPOA sceptic and relative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The rescue of the JCPOA …

Iranwire – Countries around the world, one after the other, are joining the list of areas known to have been struck by the Omicron variant of coronavirus. First detected and registered by doctors in South Africa, Omicron has now reached several American and European countries, Japan and even Iran’s neighbor, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Health officials in Iran have …

Iranwire – By now, any Iranian citizen who pens a critical open letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei knows to expect not a considered response, but harassment by the authorities, imprisonment or even death. IranWire has already published several articles documenting the fates of such writers over the decades. This one is different: the would-be correspondent wasn’t just anybody in Khamenei’s eyes, not …

Al-Monitor – Iran and world powers finally met last week in Vienna to continue the nuclear talks after a five-month delay due to the Iranian elections, which changed the administration in Tehran. The sixth round of talks, designed to bring the US back into the agreement and remove sanctions and bring Iran back into full compliance, did not go as …

RFL/RE – Germany’s Foreign Ministry has said that it does not consider Iran’s proposals regarding its nuclear program acceptable and expects Tehran to return to international negotiations with “realistic” bargaining positions. “We reviewed the proposals…carefully and thoroughly, and concluded that Iran violated almost all compromises found previously in months of hard negotiations,” a ministry spokeswoman said on December 6. The …

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) – Prominent human rights defender, Narges Mohammadi who was arrested on November 16 has so far been denied phone calls to her family or access to her lawyer. She was arrested at the memorial service of Ebrahim Ketabdar who was killed during the November 2019 nationwide protests. According to information obtained by Iran Human Rights, Narges …

Al-Arabia – Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday urged world powers to take a hard line against Iran in negotiations to curb the country’s nuclear program, as his top defense and intelligence officials headed to Washington amid the flailing talks. Israel has been watching with concern as world powers sit down with Iran to jump-start talks on the tattered …

gatestoneinstitute.org – [W]hen you lack a foreign policy, why not pretend that you have one by holding an international summit? To start with, what does Biden mean by democracy? Biden’s invitation excludes at least 20 long-standing allies of the United States. … Obama went around the UN and its agencies on a number of issues, including the “nuclear deal” with …