Social and Political

iranwire.com – On the evening of Friday, November 20, news broke that Reza Malekzadeh, Iran’s deputy minister for health research, and Ali Nobakht Haghighi, the newly-appointed secretary of the Coronavirus Advisory Council, had both resigned. News of the abrupt departures quickly gave way to political infighting. In an already febrile atmosphere following arguments over next year’s presidential election, various political …

iranwire.com – On November 9, 2020, a video was posted online that showed a middle-aged woman from Iran, talking about her son. She introduces herself as Shamsi Khamse, mother of Babak Asadi, a young man who became a casualty of the 2009 protests. This is the first time his name has come to light in connection with the tumult that engulfed Iran that …

iranwire.com – In just seven months’ time, Iranians will go to the polls to cast their votes in favor of the next President of the Islamic Republic. Against the bloody backdrop of the past three years, and amid a litany of broken promises and economic woes, there is every chance that turnout will be low in June 2021. But for …

gatestoneinstitute.org – To start with, the mini-victory he [Erdogan] has won against Armenia may have whetted Erdogan’s appetite for further conquests. Pro-Erdogan papers in Turkey are beating the drums about “victory in the Caucasus” as the first time, since the end of the Ottoman Empire, that Turks have managed to “liberate” a chunk of Islamdom from “infidel” rule. Worse still …

RFL/RE – Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has detained a Panama-flagged oil tanker in the Persian Gulf that was carrying 300,000 liters of illegal oil, local media report. The 10 foreign crew members were detained and the case was handed over to prosecutors in the port city of Parsian, the semiofficial Fars news agency quoted an IRGC spokesman as …

iranwire.com – For the last 16 years an Iranian-born doctor, Hassan Nayeb-Hashem, has been working on a remarkable project. The general practitioner and long-time human rights defender has produced a roadmap which, he says, can pave the way for a transition from the present bitter situation in Iran to a brighter, democratic future for Iran. Dr. Nayeb-Hashem now lives in Vienna, …

iranwire.com – For the first time, Canada has formally named Iran as being among the biggest cyber-threats to the country, alongside state-sponsored hackers from China, Russia and North Korea. On Wednesday, November 18, 2020, the Communications Security Establishment’s (CSE) Canadian Centre for Cyber Security published its second ever National Cyber Threat Assessment report (NCTA), in which the agency explicitly names the …

iranwire.com – Iran’s most stringent coronavirus measures yet are due go into effect across the country from the small hours of Saturday, November 20. The new “comprehensive lockdowns” have been approved by the Supreme National Security Council and will be backed up with the full force of the law. Up until now, measures introduced by the National Coronavirus Taskforce have …

Iran-HRM – A 45-year-old worker in Kermanshah set fire to himself and died on Wednesday, November 18, 2020. The destitute worker did this act of protest in front of the Workers’ Syndicate in the city of Kermanshah. He died after he was transferred to hospital due to severity of injuries. Simultaneous with the dissemination of the video clip of this …

PavandNews – Hossein Asadi, a teacher in Khuzestan province, has spent 12 billion rials (nearly $290,000) that he inherited from his father to educate students in deprived areas.   Source: Iranian daily Shahrvand ‘From my father’s inheritance, I was about to buy a car. But after a conversation with one of the school principals, I decided to talk to a girl who …