Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.

RFL/RE – France has confirmed that a second French academic is being detained in Iran, condemning what it described as “an unacceptable situation.” Franco-Iranian academic Adelkhah Fariba, 2012 Roland Marchal was arrested in June, at the same time as Fariba Adelkhah, a dual French and Iranian citizen, France’s Foreign Ministry said on October 16. Both are senior researchers from Paris’s …

Radiofarda – The brother of Iranian President Hassan Rohani has begun serving a five-year prison sentence for corruption claiming his case was based on an “illegal” wiretap.A lawyer for Hossein Fereidoun said his client entered Tehran’s Evin prison on October 16 to serve his sentence, which was handed down 15 days earlier.In a text released as he began his sentence, Fereidoun, who …

CHRI – Move Would Limit Iranians to State-Controlled App Store, Vulnerable to State Surveillance, Malware A judicial order to block Google Play in Iran, which would deny millions of Iranians access to the world’s largest app store for Android devices, has been issued but not yet implemented, according to investigations by the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). Blocking the Google apps store will directly endanger the security of Iranian users of Android devices, as it will limit Iranian users to …

CHRI – Female Prisoners of Conscience Denied Phone Contact with Children The appointment of Gholamreza Ziaei, former director of two disreputable prisons in Iran, as the new chief of Evin Prison on July 27, 2019, has been followed by unlawful restrictions against political prisoners, according to investigations by the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). Ziaei was in charge of the Kahrizak …

Al-Monitor – Plans to make a movie about Rumi, a 13th-century Persian Sufi poet, have once again revived an old quarrel between two currents among Iranian clerics — one that celebrates him as a great mystic and another that opposes his teachings as deviation and heresy. Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, known in Iran as Mowlana, was born in 1207 in Balkh, which was …