The shocking news of Navid Afkari’s execution, an Iranian wrestling-champion who was only 27 years old, has shaken many in our community, the sporting world, and the global community. For Iranians and Iranians of the diaspora alike, yesterday was a day of grief not only for the loss of life of this young man, but the shared pain of ceaseless injustice. While Iranian authorities accused Navid of a heinous crime, it is important to remember the most basic element of any justice system—one is innocent until proven guilty.
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2020-09-13
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2020-09-12
Iran said Saturday that it had executed a 27-year-old wrestler accused of murder after he took part in antigovernment protests two years ago, a case that set off a campaign by international sports groups to demand clemency for the athlete. The wrestler, Navid Afkari, was executed on Saturday morning at a prison in the southern city of Shiraz, his lawyers confirmed. Mr. Afkari was accused of fatally stabbing a water-utility worker amid unrest in his home city, Shiraz, a center of the antigovernment protests that swept the country in 2018.
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2020-09-11
Iran’s electricity grid will be connected with Russia and Azerbaijan in a few months, once grid compatibility studies are completed, Iran’s Energy Minister Reza Ardakanian said on Friday. […] The idea of connecting Iran’s power grid with Russia via Azerbaijan was first aired in March 2019, when Ardakanian met with the then Azerbaijani minister of economy and industry, Shahin Mustafayev, in Tehran. […] Iran and Russia are looking to boost their energy cooperation, including via joint projects, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported earlier this week after Iranian Ambassador to Russia, Kazem Jalali, held a meeting to discuss the future energy cooperation with Russian Deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Tikhonov.
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2020-09-08
This is the second installment of a two-part roundtable on abolitionism and Iran featuring Naveed Mansoori, Golnar Nikpour, and Omid Tofighian.
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2020-09-05
British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has acknowledged for the first time that he is actively seeking to pay a debt to the Iranian government owed over a decades-old arms deal. The admission came in a letter seen by The Guardian. The UK is thought to owe as much as £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain tanks ordered by the late Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
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2020-09-05
The Iranian government will soon divest parts of its shares in the Persian Gulf Star Oil Company (PGSCO) which runs the world’s largest refinery working on natural gas condensate.
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2020-09-04
Geopolitically the China-Iran Strategic Partnership Agreement needs to be analysed by an examination of the following questions. (1) Does the reported China-Iran Strategic Agreement have the potential to upset the balance of power in The Gulf? (2) Would China militarily build up war-waging capabilities of Iran substantially? (3) Would the United States be seriously impacted by China-aided enhanced war-waging capabilities? (4) Would Iran with Chinese backing emerge as an overt Middle East nuclear weapons power?
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2020-09-03
A prize-winning Iranian lawyer is over three weeks into a hunger strike to draw attention to the plight of political prisoners in the country during the Covid-19 pandemic, as international concern grows over the state of her health. Nasrin Sotoudeh, co-laureate of the European Parliament's prestigious Sakharov prize in 2012, is serving a 12-year sentence in Tehran's Evin prison, imposed last year, after she defended women arrested for protesting compulsory headscarf laws.
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2020-09-03
Some Iranian government supporters have described the massive fluctuation in share prices on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) in July as a necessary correction. Others are blaming the government. Iran announced a plan to sell its shares in some oil refineries on the TSE in July. However, two days before the shares were supposed to be offered on the TSE, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance, the Iranian Privatization Organization (operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Economy), and the Iranian Oil Ministry released contradictory statements which confused investors and rattled the stock market. After the government promised a good return on their investment, many traders who had been lured back to the stock market are now worried about losing their money. Kayhan Life recently spoke to a stock-market expert who wished to remain anonymous about the market crash and the TSE’s uncertain future.
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2020-09-02
[…] Scholars have also discussed and critiqued modern prisons in Iran at length, from Ervand Abrahamian to Darius Rejali and recently Nasser Mohajer. Recently, Middle East activists and writers concerned with peoples incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic have added their voices to the global call for abolition. This roundtable adds to these efforts, asking does US-based research and activism organized around abolitionism provide insight into the condition of imprisoned Iranians in the Islamic Republic and abroad? Can and should the call to abolition prisons be a global one? Do these disparate settings need movements and languages attentive to their specificity? We asked three scholar-activists of Iran and Iranians whose work concerns prisons and abolition transnationally to address these questions in conversation: Australian philosopher, translator, and community advocate Omid Tofighian and Jadaliyya Iran Page co-editors Golnar Nikpour and Naveed Mansoori. Their responses appear as a two-part roundtable.