…In terms of ideology, the vetted candidates offer Iran’s voters the narrowest political choice in the Islamic Republic’s 40-year electoral history. Dissidents and critics of the establishment have called for a boycott of the vote. For the past three decades, turnout for Iran’s elections has been between 60% and 85%, which the clerical establishment has touted as a sign of its popular legitimacy. Among the Guardian Council’s seven approved candidates are former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, central bank chief Abdolnaser Hemmati, Revolutionary Guard veteran Mohsen Rezaei and relatively low-profile reformist Mohsen Mehralizadeh.
The Iranian authorities arrested freelance journalist Najaf Mehdipour last week in his home in the eastern city of Darreh Shahr, in Ilam province, without disclosing the reasons for his arrest. Mehdipour, an Iranian national known as Kaveh, was transferred to a local prison the next day where he is currently being held. Mehdipour previously worked as the editor-in-chief of the Bakhter Zamin magazine, which tackled politics, social and cultural and human rights issues prior to its suspension in 2018 for publishing articles critical of Iran’s leaders and alleged human rights abuses.
Russia and Iran were the leading purveyors of disinformation on Facebook over the past four years, and the American public was the top target, according to a new report by Facebook summing up the social media network’s efforts to purge itself of propaganda. Facebook says it shut down 150 networks of fake accounts between 2017 and the end of 2020 — many of them foreign disinformation efforts aimed at influencing Americans, others created in the U.S. by domestic extremists. Facebook reports having 2.85 billion users around the world.
Six prisoners from Iran’s Baluchi ethnic minority were executed on drug charges in Birjand Prison at dawn on Tuesday. According to Rasanak, a regional human rights news agency, one of the men is identified as Javad Nakhaei, while the names of the other five are not yet known. All the six men had previously been sentenced to death on drug-related charges. The execution of these prisoners has not been announced by the Iranian media or official sources.
The Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) has recently informed the family of political prisoner Mehran Gharabaghi in Behbahan that he had been sentenced to death. Mehran Gharabaghi, 29, a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, was arrested on January 18, 2020, along with a friend, Majid Khademi, 29, and transferred to Behbahan Prison after a month-long interrogation. The MOIS agents demanded that Mehran’s family pressure him to recant, collaborate with the ministry. This they said, must happened before a formal court ruling is issued.
Iran – a country notorious for silencing dissidents, persecuting religious minorities and carrying out other human rights violations – has now turned to Biometric technology to widen the scale of its surveillance operations and to further suppress minorities. In 2015, Iran introduced the Biometric National Identity Card. The card contains a chip which stores a huge amount of personal data such as iris scans, facial images, health status and religious or ethnic background. As these cards are linked to a central database monitored by the government, they can be used by the government illegally for spying on the personal activities of citizens.
Simultaneously with the beginning of a an emerging new wave of security and judicial pressures on Baha’i citizens in various cities of the country, the Islamic Republic of Iran Radio and Television, in a TV program that was broadcasted in the presence of program’s guests, started spreading hatred and plotting against the followers of this religion. This program, in the form of a one-sided tribune, attacked the religious beliefs of this Faith, clearly demonstrating the evidence of an obvious example of spreading fomenting hatred against the followers of a religion.
Iranian authorities must immediately release journalist Najaf Mehdipour, known as Kaveh, and stop arbitrarily arresting members of the press, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. On May 18, authorities in the eastern city of Darreh Shahr, in Ilam province, arrested Mehdipour, a freelance journalist, at his home and the following day transferred him to a local prison, according to reports by the exile-run Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) and SedayehZendani, a website that covers detained journalists and activists in Iran.
Iran’s national government is on a mission to stamp out digital currency block reward miners as it grapples with its electricity demand. In its latest effort, it has enlisted the services of its network of intelligence officers to dig out the miners as the national power supply firm doubles the reward for whistleblowers. Iran has been grappling with electricity demand at a time when its supply has dwindled.
Iran’s speaker of parliament has urged Muslim countries to adopt policies to put an end to Israel’s “apartheid policy and genocide of Palestinian people” according to Iran’s state media. That outlandish claim, made by Iran’s regime that is in the midst of its own presidential election, is just the tip of an emerging narrative in Iran that positions itself front and center for the Palestinians.
Hamas’s chief in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar has said his organization has sufficient financial resources mostly provided by the Islamic Republic of Iran and will not touch aid money sent for reconstruction. Palestinian groups in Gaza and Iranian officials more openly admit the degree of Iran’s support in providing arms, weapons know-how, training and cash to enable militants to fire rockets and missiles at Israel, after a ten-day-long military confrontation earlier this month.
The majority of Iranians will not vote in the upcoming presidential election, which is terrifying the state-run media and many officials, but the Guardian Council vetting body doesn’t see the problem or consider that the election is illegitimate. Meanwhile, infighting among regime officials is shining a light on the systematic corruption that is at the heart of the whole system and has created dire living conditions for Iranians, with 80% of the country living in poverty. Regime economist Ali Saadooni said that the growth forecasts for the Iranian economy since 1990 have not been met, explaining that “Iran became one of the manifestations of economic failure around the world.
Ebrahim Raisi, the henchman of the 1988 massacre, one of the worst criminals against humanity, will be the regime’s next president. Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), said that Khamenei took steps to consolidate the regime and maximize repression by purging presidential candidates who had participated in all of the regime’s crimes over the past 40 years. This is a clear sign of the regime’s crisis of overthrow and the final phase of the religious, terrorist dictatorship.
Iran’s Guardian Council has prepared a list of seven candidates eligible to run in the June 18 presidential election. The official list was released on Tuesday, hours after a leaked copy was obtained by Fars news. The list released by the Council included mostly hardline and conservative candidates and was notably missing Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani and Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri. Another notable absentee was former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, although he wasn’t expected to have made the list. Mr Ahmadinejad was also rejected by the council in Iran’s last presidential election.
While Israeli attention was focused on the latest round of fighting in Gaza and its diplomatic aftermath, the Iranian regime took a drastic step in the lead-up to June’s presidential elections, one that could be an indication of how Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will approach the ongoing nuclear talks in Vienna in coming weeks. On Tuesday, Iran’s Guardian Council barred the leading reformist candidates from running for the presidency, removing the key obstacles for Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative cleric running Iran’s judiciary, to replace President Hassan Rouhani in August.
The presidential elections scheduled for June 18 in Iran will, as usual, be a sham. This time, they may be a bigger deception than ever before. After eight years of Hassan Rouhani as president, 80 million Iranians are sick of him, sick of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and sick of the theocratic dictatorship that has wrecked their lives, ruined the economy, forced the majority of the population into abject poverty and turned Iran into an international pariah.
The death penalty is irreversible therefore it must be abolished. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the death penalty violates the very basic human rights. Article 3 states that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. A report published in 2015 stated that Iran is believed to execute the most people per capita. A report by Amnesty showed Iran had executed at least 246 people, including 9 women in 2020. Another 2020 annual report indicated at least 6 executions of juveniles.
As horrible as the recent fighting in Gaza was, it’s important that the Biden administration realize that the eleven-day conflict served as a dry run for the much larger and more devastating war that Iran is planning to wage against Israel. In terms of the terrorist “ring of fire” that Iran is now surrounding Israel with, Hamas is the minor league. Hezbollah in Lebanon is the real A-Team. At the high end of the range, it’s estimated that Hamas could possess as many as 30,000 rockets. Hezbollah’s arsenal may be up to five times larger. It could fire as many missiles at Israel in a single day as Hamas fired over the course of an entire week. And unlike Hamas, Hezbollah has a growing stockpile of long-range Iranian precision weapons (and an indigenous production capability to make more) that, in theory, could accurately strike most of Israel’s most important economic and military targets, effectively shutting the country down and making life almost unbearable for America’s most important Middle East ally.
فدراسیون بینالمللی روزنامهنگاران «آزار و اذیت اهالی رسانه در ایران» را در آستانه انتخابات محکوم کرد | Voice Of America
فدراسیون بینالمللی روزنامهنگاران «احضارها و اخطارهای قضایی صورت گرفته علیه روزنامهنگاران ایرانی» در آستانه انتخابات ریاست جمهوری ایران را «اعمال فشار و آزار و اذیت اهالی رسانه در ایران» توصیف کرد و آن را محکوم کرد. این نهاد بینالمللی که از آزادی رسانه ها و روزنامه نگاران حمایت می کند، روز چهارشنبه ۵ خرداد با صدور اطلاعیه ای در سایت خود، اعلام کرد که آنتونی بلانگر، دبیرکل فدراسیون بینالمللی روزنامهنگاران درباره اقدامات اخیر مقامات جمهوری اسلامی ایران گفته است: «این یک نمونه دیگر از روش استفاده دولت ایران از سیستم حقوقی برای سرکوب صداهای مستقل در کشور است. آنتونی بلانگر تاکید کرد: «روزنامهنگاران ایرانی باید بتوانند در مورد رقابت انتخاباتی فارغ از هشدارها و فشارهای قضایی مقامها، گزارش دهند.
انتخابات ۱۴۰۰- حبیب الله سربازی: وضع اقلیتهای قومی در ایران با این انتخابات هم بهبود نمیابد | Voice Of America
حبیب الله سربازی، فعال سیاسی بلوچ، میگوید، وضعیت اقلیتها با انتخابات ریاست جمهوری ۱۴۰۰ بهبود نمییابد و مردم بلوچستان میبینند که وضعیت به سمت بدتر شدن حرکت میکند. انتخابات ریاست جمهوری اسلامی ایران در حالی قرار است برای سیزدهمین بار در ایران برگزار شود که بنابر برخی تحلیلها، آمار شهروندان ایرانی که تمایلی به شرکت در انتخابات ندارند، در این دوره نسبت به گذشته افزایش بیسابقهای داشته است و برخی از فعالان حقوق اقلیتهای قومی به صورت علنی، از تحریم انتخابات حرف میزنند.