The representative of Irans supreme leader in the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) said it was necessary to induce wide changes in Irans neighbors to prepare the world for the return of Imam Mehdi, the twelfth imam in the twelver Shiite faith.
According to al-Arabiya, the cleric, Ayatollah Ali Saaeedi did not specify the nature of these changes but he named Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Lebanon as the countries where changes must be made.
Hassan "Stinky" Firouzabadi
Chief of Staff
Tehran, Iran
Dear Irving,
What's the deal? Why haven't you destroyed the world yet? Everything is set up according to plan, and we've been sitting on pins and needles waiting for you to show up already.
All you need to do is take out a few aircraft carrier groups and stop the Joos from launching enough missiles to incinerate Africa, and we can handle the rest.
[Dawn] Three people on board were killed when an army training helicopter crashed on Sunday west of Tehran, a local official told state television.
'Three people on board the helicopter died,' governor of Shahriar, Mohammad Ali Erfan Manesh, said.
'It was a training helicopter that belonged to the air force of the Islamic republic of Iran,' he said without giving the cause of the accident.
The crash was previously reported to have occurred in the Tehran satellite residential area of Andisheh but Erfan Manesh said it actually took place near a village called Zarnan.
This is Iran's third fatal air accident in the past week.
An Iranian police chopper crashed on Monday in the southern province of Kerman, killing three and leaving three other people aboard injured.
Two people died on Saturday when a training plane crashed due to a technical glitch.
Iran, which has been under years of US sanctions hampering its ability to buy American aircrafts and spare parts, has suffered a number of aviation disasters over the past decade.
The country's civil and military fleet is made up of ancient aircraft in very poor condition due to their age and lack of maintenance.
In July, an Iranian airliner en route to Armenia caught fire in mid-air and plunged into farmland, killing all 168 people on board in the country's worst air disaster in years.
Also last month, an Iranian airliner overshot the runway in the city of Mashhad and slammed into a perimeter wall, killing 17 people.
[Mail and Globe] The West must be held to account for stoking Iran's post-election unrest, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday, as the third mass trial got under way of demonstrators accused of trying to overthrow clerical rule.
The June 12 vote has plunged Iran into its biggest internal crisis since the 1979 Islamic revolution, exposing deepening divisions within its ruling elite and also further straining relations with Western governments.
Iran accuses the United States, and Britain in particular, of inciting post-election protests in an attempt to topple the clerical establishment. They deny the charge.
Ahmadinejad, sworn in on August 5 for a second four-year term, said the West should be held accountable.
"This time you clearly interfered in Iran's domestic affairs and you thought you would be able to harm the Islamic nation," the official Irna news agency quoted him as saying on Sunday.
"You should be held accountable for your actions, but we know very well the fuss you created in the world is not a sign of your authority but rather it is a sign of your weakness and downfall," Ahmadinejad said.
Tehran and the West are already at odds over Tehran's nuclear work, which Washington fears is aimed at making bombs but which Iran, the world's fifth biggest oil-producer, says is for peaceful electricity generation.
At Sunday's trial, no prominent moderate politicians were among the 28 accused named by Fars news agency. Iranian media showed pictures of some of them sitting in a courtroom wearing light-coloured prison clothes.
Iran earlier this month held two trials for more than 100 moderates, including senior politicians, for various charges including acting against national security which is punishable by death under Iran's Islamic law
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08/17/2009 00:00 ||
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TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Iran has released a French academic from prison, though it's not clear when Clotilde Reiss can return home, French President Nicolas Sarkozy's office announced Sunday.
So she's not really out of prison ...
Reiss, 24, is the second French woman facing charges as part of mass trials in Iran who was released on bond.
French authorities are now demanding that Iran drop all charges against Reiss and Nazak Afshar -- an employee of the French embassy in Tehran who was released August 8, the statement from Sarkozy's office said. They were arrested in connection with protests after the June 12 presidential election.
Reiss will stay at the French embassy in Tehran while she awaits her return to France, the statement said. She has spoken with her father and is good health and spirits, it said.
Iranian media reported Reiss admitted to crimes in court Saturday in connection with protests after the presidential election, and asked for clemency. "I shouldn't have participated in the illegal demonstration and shouldn't have sent the pictures, I am regretful," the semi-official Fars news agency has quoted her as saying. "I apologize to the Iranian people and court and I hope the people and the court forgive me."
Human rights groups and Iran's opposition leaders have accused the government of forcing people to make such confessions.
Iranian authorities arrested about 4,000 people amid protests against the controversial election, judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi has said, according to the Iran Labor News Agency. He said 3,700 were released in the first week. But 100 defendants, including Afshar, Reiss, and an Iranian employee of the British embassy, appeared this month in Tehran's Revolutionary Court at a mass show trial on charges related to recent post-election violence.
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[Al Arabiya Latest] Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday he would propose at least three women ministers in his new cabinet following June's disputed election, an unprecedented move in the conservative Islamic state.
It would be the first time a woman would hold such a ministerial position in Iran since its 1979 Islamic revolution. One woman minister under the shah's government, Farrokhroo Parsa, was executed after the revolution in 1980.
Ahmadinejad has until Aug. 19 to present a cabinet to parliament for approval but may get a rough ride from the conservatives who dominate the assembly, as well as from his moderate foes who dispute his election victory.
"With the 10th presidential election, we have entered a new era ... conditions changed completely and the government (make-up) will see major changes," Ahmadinejad told state television.
He named two of his proposed female ministers and said at least one more would be added to the list.
The ones he named were Fatemeh Ajorlou, now a member of parliament, as social welfare minister and Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi as health minister.
"At least one more will be added," Ahmadinejad said.
He also said Heydar Moslehi, now an adviser to Ahmadinejad on clerical affairs, would be nominated as new intelligence minister.
Iranian media last month reported that Ahmadinejad had sacked Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei.
Economy Minister Shamseddin Hosseini would retain the post.
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
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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
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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.
