Social and Political

Radiofarda – Iran said Saturday it condemned a former top judiciary official to 31 years in prison for corruption, one of the heaviest sentences against a former official in the Islamic republic. Akbar Tabari received the jail term after being convicted of “setting up and heading a bribery network”, judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili told state television. The high-profile trial of …

Ayatollah Yousef Saanei, a pro-reform Iranian cleric and a critic of the establishment who sided with the opposition movement following the controversial 2009 presidential election, has died. He was 83. Ayatollah Saanei died in a hospital in the holy Shi’ite city of Qom after being hospitalized for two days with a broken hip and wrist, Iranian state media reported.In 2009, …

Amnesty – The secret execution this morning of wrestling champion Navid Afkari, without prior notice to him, his family or lawyer, after a grossly unfair trial, is a horrifying travesty of justice that needs immediate international action.“Navid Afkari was a young man with a promising future ahead of him. Carrying out his death sentence with such utter disregard for the …

The Third Reich and the USSR could not behave as normal nation-states…. Their prime interest was “exporting” their ideological brand, by war if necessary. Regardless of the obvious differences of belief systems and discourse, all ideology-driven movements from Lenin and Hitler to Khomeini and Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi aim at replacing the biological human with an ideological one, ostensibly to complete the …

Shabtabnews – In a statement today IOPHR condemned the “spineless execution of the Iranian wrestling champion, Mr. Navid Afkari. The statement called the execution a ” desperate attempt by the Iranian regime to implement the hated policy of fearmongering, or achieving “victory through fear”, in order to dissuade the Iranian young men and women from demanding their basic human rights.” …

Radiofarda – Navid Afkari, an Iranian wrester convicted of murder in a case that was condemned by rights groups and U.S. President Donald Trump, has been executed, Iranian state media reported on September 12. Afkari was executed “this morning after legal procedures were carried out at the insistence of the parents and the family of the victim,” the head of the justice …

Al-Arabia – Iran’s coronavirus death toll rose by 116 to 23,029, a health ministry spokeswoman told state TV on Saturday. The total number of identified cases spiked by 2,139 in the last 24 hours to 399,940 in one of the Middle East’s worst-hit countries, Sima Sadat Lari was quoted as saying. Read the latest updates in our dedicated coronavirus section. …

Radiofarda – The members of a group charged with “promoting corruption and promiscuity in native clothes” are under arrest, Islamic Republic Judiciary official Hossein Negin Taji, from the province of Kohgilouyeh and Boyer Ahmad, said on Friday, September 11. IRAN — social distancing — Women in a village in Iran’s Lorestan province have gathering while respecting social distancing rules. Without …

Radiofarda – A new version of the third-grade math textbook no longer features images of girls in school uniforms on the cover. Meanwhile, the schoolboys’ image has been kept untouched on the cover of the newly-published textbook for the new Iranian academic year. Iran–Third-grade math textbook no longer features images of girls. The previous version of the boom for the …

Radiofarda – The chairman of the Islamic City Council of Tehran, Mohsen Hashemi, has shared that the bid to build the city’s line 7 metro was granted to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)-linked Khatam-al Anbiya Construction Headquarters (KCH) under pressure from Tehran’s former mayor. IRGC Brigadier-General Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who served as mayor of Tehran for twelve years, is …