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VOA – Shaghayegh Bapiri, an Iranian handball player who defected to Spain this week, told VOA Persian on Thursday that she saw no future for women handballers in Iran if conditions for players do not change. Bapiri, 30, has been a constant fixture on the Iranian women’s national handball team and at the Iranian government funded Sepahan Club since 2015 …

AL-Arabia – Talks to revive the Iran nuclear deal will be held in Vienna on Friday before breaking for a “few days”, Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani said. The indirect US-Iran talks on bringing both sides back into full compliance with the deal are in their seventh round. Bagheri Kani said on Twitter that he met EU political director …

RFL/RE – One day after Iran agreed to reinstall surveillance cameras at one of its nuclear facilities, a spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran said that the UN’s atomic watchdog will not be able to examine images from the cameras until sanctions are lifted. The cameras will store the images, and when their memory cards are full, they …

RFL/RE – Ukraine, Canada, Sweden, and Britain have told Iran that it has three weeks to reverse its refusal to address demands for reparations after the downing of a Ukrainian passenger airliner last year. “The Coordination Group’s patience is wearing thin,” the four countries said in a statement on December 16, adding that they told Tehran it had until Jan …

Iranwire – On Wednesday, December 15, at a gathering of Iranian ambassadors, First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber praised one of their number for smuggling. Sanctions, he said, had prevented Iran from importing equipment from China to make Covid-19 vaccines, but ambassador to China Mohammad Keshavarz-Zadeh had managed to get them sent to Iran as his “household items”. Mokhber is the highest-ranking official of …