A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit the town of Iraan, on the way to the Big Bend National Park. Iraan is a small oil town in west Texas with population of 1200.
August 23, 2008: the Iranian government hanged a man convicted of murder in the northeastern town of Bojnourd, a press report said. The man, only identified as Ali, was executed in a prison in North Khorasan province for killing his friend in 2005, the reformist Etemad newspaper said. (Sources: 7 Days, 24/08/2008)
August 25, 2008: Iran hanged a man convicted of raping and murdering a relative in the northwestern city of Tabriz. The man, only identified as Bahram, was hanged in a prison for raping and killing his sister-in-law 19 years ago, the Etemad newspaper said, without specifying when the execution took place. (Sources: Agence France Presse, 25/08/2008)
August 21, 2008: Saudi Arabia executed two Pakistanis convicted of smuggling heroin into the kingdom, the Saudi Interior Ministry said in a statement. Shirzada Sahib Zada was convicted of smuggling heroin into the kingdom while Yusuf Khan Noor Muhammad was found guilty of taking delivery and selling the drugs. The two were beheaded by the sword in Dammam, in eastern Saudi Arabia. Sources: RTT News, 21/08/2008
The public relations unit of the Sistan-Baluchestan Province judiciary department in Iran announced that the Zahedan Islamic Revolution Court issued a ruling on the execution of Bahram Nikpur. He was charged with carrying and possessing 14 kg of opium and 6 kg of heroin. The execution was carried out in Zahedan prison after approval by officials of the top judiciary department. (Sources: BBC, 20/08/2008)
Four unidentified people were hanged for rape and drug trafficking in an unspecified prison in Iran. (Sources: Agence France Presse, 20/08/2008)
Associated Press is reporting that Abie Nathan, the Iranian born Israeli peace activist has died in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov hospital. In a 1996 interview with The Associated Press, Nathan said that during one of his prison hunger strikes, he was certain he was going to die. He bought a grave and a tombstone. When asked what he would want written on the stone, he replied “Nissiti,” the Hebrew word for “I tried.”
…Abraham Jacob Nathan was born April 29, 1927 in Iran, educated in India, and served in the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot, before joining the Jewish immigrant influx into newborn Israel in 1948…
After two more fruitless flights on commercial airlines, Nathan changed his tactics, buying a 188-foot, 570-ton freighter that was partially funded by John Lennon. He anchored it off the coast of Tel Aviv and turned it into a pirate radio station, “The Voice of Peace,” with a mix of pop songs and peace messages.
“Shalom, salaam and peace to all our listeners,” Nathan declared in his maiden broadcast in 1973. “The Peace Ship is a project of the people. We hope through this station we will help relieve the pain and heal the wounds of many years of suffering of the people of the Middle East.”
Over the next 20 years, “The Voice of Peace” became especially popular among youth. It was the only radio station in the Middle East that broadcast music from the world’s “Top 40″ charts and used English as its primary language, yet offered both Israeli and Arabic news.
Apart from his peace efforts, Nathan flew or shipped emergency supplies to victims of war, earthquakes and famine around the world, including to Biafra, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Lebanon and the former Zaire.
In an unprecedented measure, the Iranian judiciary froze a joint bank account that had been opened by three of the country’s most prominent movie directors and actors with the purpose of collecting money to pay the “Diye” (i.e. blood money) set for a man currently on the death row. The three revered personalities are Ezzatollah Entezami, Parviz Parastooyi, and Kiyumars PoorAhmad who have been active to prevent the execution of a death sentence on Behnood Shojayi, who is on the death row.
(Behnood) Shojaee was sentenced to death by an Iranian court for having killed his playmate, when both were still juveniles. To complicate matters, his family has been unable to meet the Diye, which if collected and handed over to the victim’s next of kin, could open the door for the latter’s consent not to execute the death penalty over the accused. The initiative of the three film actors has been widely welcomed by the public, and young Iranian journalists who have expressed public gestures of support. This public enthusiasm and response to collect money for the Diye has been so wide that the victim’s relatives agreed to provide the necessary consent before the Diye amount had been collected; a move that can prevent the execution of Shojayi.
Under these circumstances, it was surprising that the names of the three well-known and liked Iranian artists made news when they were summoned by a court whose prosecutor had pretty harsh words for the good Samaritans. “By opening a joint account, these individuals wanted to impress upon people to sympathize with the convicted criminal, whose punishment remains the Ghesas” (loosely translated to mean ‘eye-for-an-eye punishment’ as prescribed in Islam), the prosecutor announced.
Shamloo, the prosecutor of the first bench of Tehran’s criminal court added, “A newspaper published a news report about the sympathy of journalists and cinema actors for a convicted criminal by opening a joint bank account, an act that is illegal and which is why the court issued a freeze on the bank account.”
Iran’s official state news agency, ISNA, reported that in addition to freezing the bank account, the prosecutor had summoned the three cinema stars to learn of the “basis on which they had opened the account.”
Following the publication of this news, Jame Jam Online website reported that Tehran’s deputy prosecutor, judge Fakhreddin Jaafarzadeh announced that the bank account had been frozen because it was not clear who was its owner.” At the same time, he denied reports that three actors had been summoned to the court, but in remarks that seemed to substantiate the summons said, “If an artist were to be summoned to court, it would be for information purposes, and not as suspects.”
But perhaps most surprising were his comments that appeared to be threatening the artists, even though he made some positive remarks about them by saying that artists enjoy greater respect than the accusations that have been flouted against them.” He added that, “Even if it is established that a group of artists are the owners of this bank account, they shall be investigated and it shall be assumed that they are not aware of the special laws that were passed in 1997 by the State Expediency Council which have strengthened the punishments against corruption, embezzlement, and misappropriation and which carry punishments ranging from one to seven years of prison.”
Thats title of a recent Newsweek article about Iranian students.
Forget Harvard—one of the world’s best undergraduate colleges is in Iran.
Published Aug 9, 2008
Aug. 18-25, 2008 issue
In 2003, administrators at Stanford University’s Electrical Engineering Department were startled when a group of foreign students aced the notoriously difficult Ph.D. entrance exam, getting some of the highest scores ever. That the whiz kids weren’t American wasn’t odd; students from Asia and elsewhere excel in U.S. programs. The surprising thing, say Stanford administrators, is that the majority came from one country and one school: Sharif University of Science and Technology in Iran.
Stanford has become a favorite destination of Sharif grads. Bruce A. Wooley, a former chair of the Electrical Engineering Department, has said that’s because Sharif now has one of the best undergraduate electrical-engineering programs in the world. That’s no small praise given its competition: MIT, Caltech and Stanford in the United States, Tsinghua in China and Cambridge in Britain.
Sharif’s reputation highlights how while Iran makes headlines for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s incendiary remarks and its nuclear showdown with the United States, Iranian students are developing an international reputation as science superstars. Stanford’s administrators aren’t the only ones to notice. Universities across Canada and Australia, where visa restrictions are lower, report a big boom in the Iranian recruits; Canada has seen its total number of Iranian students grow 240 percent since 1985, while Australian press reports point to a fivefold increase over the past five years, to nearly 1,500.
Iranian students from Sharif and other top schools, such as the University of Tehran and the Isfahan University of Technology, have also become major players in the international Science Olympics, taking home trophies in physics, mathematics, chemistry and robotics. As a testament to this newfound success, the Iranian city of Isfahan recently hosted the International Physics Olympiad—an honor no other Middle Eastern country has enjoyed. That’s because none of Iran’s neighbors can match the quality of its scholars.
Never far behind, Western tech companies have also started snatching them up. Silicon Valley companies from Google to Yahoo now employ hundreds of Iranian grads, as do research institutes throughout the West. Olympiad winners are especially attractive; according to the Iranian press, up to 90 percent of them now leave the country for graduate school or work abroad.
So what explains Iran’s record, and that of Sharif in particular? The country suffers from many serious ills, such as chronic inflation, stagnant wages and an anemic private sector, thanks to poor economic management and a weak regulatory environment. University professors barely make ends meet—the pay is so bad some must even take second jobs as taxi drivers or petty traders. International sanctions also make life difficult, delaying the importation of scientific equipment, for example, and increasing isolation. Until recently, Iranians were banned from publishing in the journals of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the industry’s key international professional association. They also face the indignity of often having their visa applications refused when they try to attend conferences in the West.
Yet Sharif and its ilk continue to thrive. Part of the explanation, says Mohammad Mansouri, a Sharif grad (‘97) who’s now a professor in New York, lies in the tendency of Iranian parents to push their kids into medicine or engineering as opposed to other fields, like law. Sharif also has an extremely rigorous selection process. Every year some 1.5 million Iranian high-school students take college-entrance exams. Of those, only about 10 percent make it to the prestigious state schools, with the top 1 percent generally choosing science and finding their way to top spots such as Sharif. “The selection process [gives] universities like Sharif the smartest, most motivated and hardworking students” in the country, Mansouri says.
Sharif also boasts an excellent faculty. The university was founded in 1965 by the shah, who wanted to build a topnotch science and technology institute. The school was set up under the guidance of MIT advisers, and many of the current faculty studied in the United States (during the shah’s era, Iranians made up the largest group of foreign students at U.S. schools, according to the Institute of International Education). Another secret of Sharif’s success is Iran’s high-school system, which places a premium on science and exposes students to subjects Americans don’t encounter until college. This tradition of advanced studies extends into undergraduate programs, with Mansouri and others saying they were taught subjects in college that U.S. schools provide only to grad students.
Several Sharif alumni point to one other powerful motivator. “When you live in Iran and you see all the frustrations of daily life, you dream of leaving the country, and your books and studies become a ticket to a better life,” says one who asked not to be identified. “It becomes more than just studying,” he says. “It becomes an obsession, where you wake up at 4 a.m. just to get in a few more hours before class.”
Iran’s success, in other words, is also the country’s tragedy: students want nothing more than to get away the moment they graduate. That’s a boon for foreign universities and tech firms but a serious source of brain drain for the Islamic republic. There simply are not enough quality jobs for graduates in Iran, says Ramin Farjad Rad, another Sharif grad (‘97) who’s now an executive at Aquantia in Silicon Valley. What’s worse, star students who stay in Iran and try to launch businesses complain that predatory government officials demand a cut of their profits or impose unnecessary obstacles. Thus many Iranians who can’t make it to the West head to Dubai instead. As one Sharif grad in the Persian Gulf port city puts it, “Here, our education is properly valued. We are given freedom to succeed. In Iran, we are blocked.”
Such frustrations augur ill for Iran’s future. True, it’s produced a startling number of top students in recent years. And the country’s history is rich with achievement, featuring Avicenna (also known as Ibn Sina), the medieval world’s greatest scientist; Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, the ninth-century inventor of the mathematical algorithm (the basis of computer science), and Omar Khayyam, the famed mathematician and astronomer. That’s a fine legacy. But unless the Islamic republic changes directions soon, all of that history and potential could be squandered.
Molavi has reported from Iran for The Washington Post and Reuters, and is the author of ‘The Soul of Iran.’
On May Day this year in Iran, two brave women – Sousan Razani and Shiva Kheirabadi – participated in open celebrations of the international workers’ holiday.
The regime considers this to be a crime and the women were arrested.
They have just been sentenced to 15 lashes apiece, as well as four months in prison.
They’re not alone. In a new and ferocious wave of repression directed against worker activists, a Kurdish teacher (Farzad Kamangar) has been sentenced to death. Three men (Abdullah Khani, Seyed Qaleb Hosseini, and Khaled Hosseini) have been sentenced to 120 lashes between them, as well as prison sentences. Afshin Shams has been arrested and awaits trial.
Meanwhile, Mansour Osanloo, leader of the Tehran bus workers, has languished in jail since July 2007.
Enough is enough.
The Iranian regime must now receive a loud and clear message from the international labour movement that we have not forgotten our sisters and brothers in Iran. Thousands of us must raise our voices.
You can help send that message by going to LabourStart’s new campaign page here:
http://www.labourstart.org
We have also launched a cause on Facebook :
http://apps.facebook.com/c
Spread the word – build the campaign. No to whippings and executions!
I know that I can count on you.
Michael Phelps’ diet – which involves ingesting 4,000 calories every time he sits down for a meal – resembles that of a reckless overeater rather than an Olympian.
Phelps lends a new spin to the phrase “Breakfast of Champions” by starting off his day by eating three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise.
He follows that up with two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.
Critical Mass is a monthly celebration of bicycles and other nonpolluting means of transportation by people exercising their right to the road. New York City’s first Critical Mass was in 1993. Below is video of the recent Critical Mass bike ride in New York. Note how much the police reports are different from what was captured on camera. Now guess how much of NYPD police reports are made up. Make sure to what the troubling section of the video which starts after three minutes.
“…Yaghoub Mehrnahad was executed on the morning of August 4, 2008, in Zahedan Central Prison. His only crime was the expression of his thoughts and his efforts to promote basic human rights to the deprived people of Baluchistan.
His voice will never be silenced. We Iranian bloggers will put down our pens during a one day strike on Thursday, August 7, 2008. We do this in order to protest against this unjust sentence. Let us send a message to the enforcers and executors of this case that they should not treat bloggers as their enemies
We would like to send a message to the “non-judges” of this case not to be hostile enemies to the pen of the conscious, committed bloggers of Iran, because they will be held accountable in front of the Iranian people for their unfair and unjust rulings against humanity.
The Iranian Human Rights Defenders Association
The International Writers Association
And
All Iranian Bloggers
اعتصاب يک روزه وب لاگ نويسان به خاطر اعدام يعقوب مهرنهاد
“اما من يعقوب مهرنهاد متولد سال ۵۸ شمسی و ساکن ديار مردان و زنان خونگرم و صبور و نوع دوست بلوچستان می باشم و به روز نمودن وبلاگ نيز به دليل مشغله های فراوان در انجمن جوانان صدای عدالت که سازمانی مردمی و غيرحکومتی و برای خدمت به همنوعان و جامعه بشری می باشد…”
اين صدای جوانی وبلاگ نويس بود که در سحرگاه چهاردهم مرداد ماه ۱۳۸۷ در زندان مرکزی زاهدان اعدام گرديد و يگانه جرم او ابراز انديشه و تلاش در جهت حقوق اوليه مردم محروم بلوچ بود
اما صدای او خاموش نخواهد ماند و ما وبلاگ نويسان ايران با اعتصاب ۱ روزه ی سکوت قلم خود و انتشار اين اعلاميه در در تاريخ پنج شنبه ۱۷ مرداد ماه ۸۷ اعتراض خود را به حکم ناعادلانه او اعلام خواهيم کرد و به ناقاضيانی چون جلاد پرونده يعقوب مهر نهاد هشدار ميدهيم اينگونه با قلم وبلاگ نويسان با تهعد و با وجدان ايران زمين به جدال و دشمنی نپردازند چرا که روزی در پيشگاه مردم ايران در مقابل احکام صادره که مخالف با شرع و انسانيت است جوابگو خواهند شد .
وبلاگ نويسان ايران زمين
رونوشت : دبيرخانه مجموعه فعالان حقوق بشر در ايران
سازمان جهانی نويسندگان
و کليه وبلاگ های ايرانی
پی نوشت : با انتشار اين اعلاميه در وبلاگ های ديگر اين ندای حق خواهی را انسجام و گسترش دهد.