Social and Political

Iranwire – Ebrahim Raeesi is now the frontrunner in Iran’s June 2021 presidential election, all of whose credible conservative rivals have been disqualified by the Guardian Council. This report examines some of the more under-reported details of his life and career to date, from birth in a famous district of Mashhad to becoming a member of Ayatollah Khomeini’s infamous death …

Iranwire – Days after being hit with another risible 30-month jail sentence, veteran Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi has taken to Clubhouse to speak out against the abuse of female prisoners by the Iranian regime. Speaking on Wednesday night in a chatroom entitled “Female Political Prisoners: from Humiliation and Sexual Assault to Corporal Punishment”, Mohammadi told the audience about …

Iranwire – With the announcement of the final list of seven presidential candidates, most observers now believe that Ebrahim Raeesi, the current head of the Islamic Republic’s judiciary, is the regime’s principal choice. Even with the changes in political weather that tend to happen in the days right before the vote, Raeesi is widely expected to have an easy win on June 18. …

(HRW) – Iranian authorities have engaged in a campaign of harassment and abuse against families of people killed in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in January 2020, Human Right Watch said today. On April 6, 2021, Iranian authorities announced that they had indicted 10 people for their role in the incident but have not provided any …

Al-Monitor – Iranians continue to react to the decision to bar well-known Reformists and centrists from running in next month’s presidential elections. Iran’s Guardian Council, a 12-member unelected body charged with vetting candidates, announced the final list of approved candidates earlier this week, and many prominent presidential hopefuls from the Reformist camp were absent. The most notable disqualification continues to be former parliament speaker …

Al-Arabia – One person died and two others were wounded in an explosion at a petrochemical complex in southern Iran on Wednesday, state news agency IRNA reported. The governor of the city of Asaluyeh in Bushehr province, where the explosion occurred, said the incident was due to the explosion of the oxygen transmission pipeline to two petrochemical companies in the …

Iranwire – Prominent activist Faezeh Hashemi has spoken publicly about Ali Larijani’s surprise ousting from the presidential race, stating that in doing so, Iran’s leadership had abandoned all pretense of an authentic election. The Guardian Council announced on May 25 that it had disqualified Ali Larijani, former speaker of parliament and a figure trusted by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, from …

RFL/RE – Outgoing Iranian President Hassan Rohani says he has urged the country’s supreme leader to widen the field in next month’s presidential election after only seven candidates were approved and several of his high-profile allies were rejected. Rohani said during a weekly cabinet meeting on May 26 that he wished the Guardians Council would select more candidates to ensure …

VOA – Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made more detailed allegations about Iran’s secretive relationship with al-Qaida, rekindling a debate about how the United States should respond to the decades-old cooperation between its Mideast rival and the anti-American terrorist network.   In an interview that aired Friday on VOA Persian’s TV channel, the former top U.S. diplomat, who …

VOA – Talks between Iran and the world powers still adhering to the 2015 nuclear deal resumed Tuesday in Vienna with the goal of bringing the United States back into the agreement. The fifth round of talks began a day after Iran and the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency agreed to extend a deal for monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities …