An Iranian singer and composer who has been likened to Bob Dylan has received a five-year jail sentence in absentia for disrespecting religious sanctities, according to Iranian television.
An Iranian Koran scholar filed a complaint against Mohsen Namjoo, who also plays a traditional Persian lute, for the way he had performed using verses from Islam's holy book, Iran's official English-language Press TV said on its website late on July 13. The scholar, who Press TV did not name, accused Namjoo of "an insulting, sneering performance of Koranic verses with musical instruments." It quoted the singer's brother and lawyer as dismissing the accusation, saying he "did not mean any disrespect". Press TV said Namjoo, who apologized a few months ago for the incident, was abroad but did not say in which country.
Iran's Fars news agency quoted a judge on July 13 as confirming that Namjoo was found guilty "subsequent to an investigation of the complaint against him" but he did not give details on the sentence.
In a report posted on its website last week, the semi-official Iran's Quran News Agency named the plaintiff as Abbas Salimi and quoted him as saying Namjoo was accused of "derisive rendering of Koran verses and disrespect towards" the holy book. The news agency said the sentence against Namjoo, who is in his early 30s, was handed down last month.
In a 2007 profile, "The New York Times" said Namjoo's "playful but subtly cutting lyrics about growing up in an Islamic state" had made him "the most controversial, and certainly the most daring, figure in Persian music today." It added, "Some call him a genius, a sort of Bob Dylan of Iran, and say his satirical music accurately reflects the frustrations and disillusionment of young Iranians."
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BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency believes Iran is capable of producing and testing an atomic bomb within six months, much sooner than most analysts estimate, according to a report in German weekly Stern. The report, which quotes BND experts, says the agency has information supporting the view that Iran has mastered the enrichment technology necessary to make a bomb and has enough centrifuges to make weaponised uranium.
"If they wanted to, they could detonate an atomic bomb in half a year's time," the story quoted a BND expert as saying. The BND did not return two calls from Reuters seeking comment on the report.
Some analysts say Iran may be close to having the required material for producing a bomb, but most say the weaponisation process would then take one to two years due to technical and political hurdles.
What political hurdles? And what technical hurdles? It's a uranium bomb -- you slam two subcritical masses together and kaboom.
"Weaponising" enrichment would not escape the notice of U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), unless it was done at a secret location.
Oh no, the IAEA could never miss nuclear weapons developments, shucks no ...
Until now there have been no indications of any such covert diversion, a point made by the IAEA's incoming director-general shortly after his election earlier this month. Current IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said it is his "gut feeling" that Iran is seeking at least the capability to build nuclear weapons, in order to protect itself from perceived regional and U.S. threats.
His gut tells him where the free food is, and that's about it ...
#3
"Weaponising" enrichment would not escape the notice of U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), unless it was done at a secret location.
#4
The only way the savage Islamic Iranian dictatorship can develop nuclear weapons is due to Putin's Kremlin supplying the nuclear fuel, the Russian nuclear technicians, complete with advanced Russian anti-aircraft installations, surrounding each and every nuclear weapons development site.
Since it's alarmingly evident Obama and his handlers won't lift a finger to oppose Iran's fanatical Shi'ite tyrants, (the same Iranian tyrants who export Iranian trained terrorists whose goal is to murder our troops in Iraq), then it's up to Israel's ruling conservatives, under Bibi's leadership, ready to action against Moscow's Persian proxies, prior to the unthinkable happening -- attempted national genocide directed against Israel from Tehran's controlling Shia thugs.
Posted by: Mark Espinola ||
07/15/2009 20:08 Comments ||
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Reports from southern Lebanon say there have been a number of explosions at a weapons depot belonging to the Hezbollah movement. The reports say the depot was housed in an abandoned building near the village of Khirbet Silim in the Dabsheh area. There were no reports of casualties.
Hezbollah denied any link with the blasts and attributed them to the detonation of unexploded ordnance.
Lebanese troops cordoned off the area and restricted access to the site.
No-one was injured in the explosions but they caused panic among local residents who reportedly mistook them for an Israeli air raid.
#3
A series of explosions on Tuesday in an abandoned building near Lebanons tense border with Israel was caused by a fire in a Hezbollah weapons depot, a Lebanese security official said.
The depot in the village of Khirbet Silim, about 10 miles north of the border, was housed in an abandoned building and was likely used during the 2006 war, added the official who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations.
Lebanese soldiers and firefighters sealed the area off after the explosions to keep journalists away.
The Lebanese army issued a statement saying only that the area was sealed after an explosion in an abandoned building and that a joint committee from the military and UN peacekeepers was investigating.
Andrea Tenenti, a spokesman for UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon, said UNIFIL was investigating the incident and had not yet determined the cause of the explosions.
According to Israeli security sources, the Hezbollah depot contained various of types of rockets, including Katyusha rockets, which the organization was hiding. The rockets are being stored for future use against Israel. The Israeli sources further claimed that the incident is testimony to the fact that Hezbollah continues to use Lebanese villages along the border to hide weapons among the civilian population, effectively turning them into human shields.
Reporting from Beirut Iran's leading opposition figure and his wife emerged Tuesday night to pay their respects to the family of a 19-year-old man slain during recent weeks of violence, according to witnesses and reports on news websites. Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his popular wife, Zahra Rahnavard, visited the family of Sohrab Aarabi in Tehran, paying tribute to the teenager whose death and whose mother's desperate weeks-long quest to find her son have emerged as a symbol of the protest movement against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Photographs posted on the Gooya website showed the couple swarmed by supporters as they approached the family's home in the city's north-central Apadana district.
Mousavi has been relatively quiet in recent days as authorities successfully put down protests that erupted when Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of their election faceoff last month. But Mousavi plans to forge a new reformist political front that would challenge the country's dominant conservatives, and will have most of the rights given to a political party, his top aide Ali-Reza Beheshti said Tuesday.
"Establishing the front is on the agenda of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and we will announce the relevant news in the near future," Beheshti, the son of a famous cleric, told the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency, or ILNA.
Hundreds of thousands of Mousavi's green-clad supporters took to the streets last month in displays of civil disobedience, asserting that the June 12 election was rigged. Mousavi could build on the momentum created by the so-called green wave to create a formidable force.
Reformists have tried for years to break through Iran's legal and political restrictions and fend off ideological challenges and accusations of complicity with the West to obtain and exercise power. The Islamic Iran Participation Front, a reformist political grouping, has been operating for years without gaining influence. Unlike a party, a front cannot call political rallies.
But Mousavi's new organization could gain political muscle with the help of Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful cleric who is a pillar of Mousavi's support. Rafsanjani said he would endorse Mousavi's plan for a "united moderation front," according to Mohammad Hashemi, his brother. "He had even formulated the charter to a certain extent, but this front did not materialize for certain reasons," he told ILNA.
At least one prominent conservative, Habibollah Asgaroladi, head of the decades-old Islamic Coalition Party, endorsed the creation of a Mousavi-led political group. "Establishing a party to voice one's ideas and political perceptions is a wise move," he said, according to the website of the state-owned Press TV channel.
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Tehran, Iran, Jul. 14 - An Iranian journalist who wrote an editorial criticising the actions of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) on Monday was killed in the north-eastern city of Mashhad.
Mehrdad Heydari worked for the state-run daily Khorrasan. One source described his death as "suspicious".
Tehran, Iran, Jul. 15 Irans State Security Forces (SSF) are once again confiscating satellite dishes in the capital Tehran. SSF agents were spotted raiding houses in Amir Abad and Seyed Khandan districts in Tehran on Saturday, rounding up satellite dishes and equipment. Further patrols have continued in recent days.
The SSF said in May it had confiscated 84,000 satellite dishes during the Persian calendar year that ended March 20. SSF agents routinely go up rooftops in Tehran and other major cities removing satellite dishes which are banned in Islamic Iran.
The Islamic Republic banned satellite dishes in 1995. The crackdown on satellite dishes was prompted by broadcasts from Iranian opposition groups whose television programs reportedly have a large audience in Iran.
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#1
That'll help win over the middle class and keep them from joining the protests /sarc
#3
At the end of his murderous regime, Saddam did the same thing in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. This is a sign that this illegitimate fascist Shia entitiy is in a state of fear, fear of it's own people.
... So strong is the women's movement that a web site linked to Iran's intelligence ministry has begun referring to "woman commandos" in describing post-election protests, according to Haleh Esfandiari, who added that there are reports that Zahra Rahnavard, Mir Hossein Mousavi's well-known activist wife, is the leading voice behind the scenes urging Mousavi not to accede to pressure to halt his campaign against the election results. (So well known is Zahra Rahnavard that, when Mousavi became prime minister in the 1980s it was said in Iran that "Rahnavard's husband was named prime minister.")
The panel answered a lot of questions about the role of women in Iran today -- and left some questions hanging.
Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, who quit her term in parliament in 2004 to protest against the Guardian Council's peremptory banning of hundreds of political candidates -- including not less than 80 members of parliament! -- in that year's election, described women in Iran as being on the "front lines" of the Green Movement and the election battles. Often, she said, they protected men from being beaten in the streets, and they formed ad hoc groups such as Mothers in Mourning or Peace Mothers to demonstrate at places like Evin Prison, where many protestors are being held.
Most interesting was the panel's emphasis on the fact that the women's movement in Iran didn't arise out of nowhere to prominence in the Green Movement but was, in fact, a long time in the works. Tohidi said women in Iran had been engaged in many years of quiet educational and organizational work, especially over the past fifteen years, and today the women's movement in Iran is the "strongest in the Middle East." Some of them, she said, were Islamists who have been formulating a more progressive and liberal version of "Islamic feminism" while others are secular women who've moved far beyond Iran's culture of revolutionary Islam. The two currents came together in 1997 in the massive vote that elected President Khatami, and since then they've brought strong pressure to bear on subsequent candidates. Jaleh Lackner-Gohari added that during the 1980s and 1990s, many women went into higher education and the professions precsiely because they were barred from politics and, she joked, "had nothing better to do." Quietly, they built networks, professional organizations, and channels for communications -- including, lately, blogs. ...
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Tehran, Iran, Jul. 14 - An Iranian journalist who wrote an editorial criticising the actions of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) on Monday was killed in the north-eastern city of Mashhad.
