British-Iranian labour rights activist’s sentencing coincides with deteriorating relations between western allies and Iran
The UK government has hit out at reports that a British-Iranian labour rights activist has been given a sentence of 10 years in Tehran for participating in an outlawed group.
A Foreign Office spokesperson said in a statement on Friday that London “strongly” condemned the sentence handed out to Mehran Raoof, a former teacher from north London.
Continue reading...Invoking climate change as the sole cause of terrible shortages lets those in authority off the hook
Iran’s water bankruptcy has been in the news lately, prompting deadly protests in Khuzestan province that also garnered the attention of global media. But this kind of problem is neither new or unique in the country. Drying rivers, vanishing lakes, shrinking wetlands, declining groundwater levels, land subsidence, sinkholes, desertification, soil erosion, dust storms, air, water and waste pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildfires are among the other familiar signs of Iran’s environmental devastation.
Khuzestan, in south-west Iran, is known globally for its rich oil and gas resources. But this wealthy province’s contribution to Iran’s development is not just its oil and gas revenue. Khuzestan is also water-rich compared with most of the country. So, its large rivers have been blocked by gigantic dams to store water for agriculture, industrial and domestic uses and hydroelectricity production. Considerable amounts of water have been also transferred from its rivers’ tributaries to dry regions in central Iran.
Continue reading...While Saied’s shutdown of parliament has outsiders worried, in Tunisia he has 87% support and civil society remains strong
Outside Tunisia, the president’s sacking of the prime minister and shutdown of parliament looked like a coup. Inside, however, activists and journalists are still struggling to define what is happening to their country – and what to do about it.
“The day after the president acted, we had a conversation in the newsroom about whether it was a coup,” said Thameur Mekki, the editor-in-chief of the influential media platform Nawaat. Other news outlets aired programmes debating the “coup” question, and activist groups started worrying. But then, said Mekki, the president, Kais Saied, personally called leading civil society groups and “gave assurances about their freedom to operate”.
Continue reading...Israeli military says jets struck rocket launch sites, in a marked escalation of hostilities
Israel escalated its response to rocket attacks this week by launching airstrikes on Lebanon, the Israeli military has said.
The military said in a statement that jets struck the launch sites from which rockets had been fired over the previous day, as well as an additional target used to attack Israel in the past. Several militant groups operate in Lebanon but none claimed responsibility.
Continue reading...UGTT union body urges president, Kais Saied, to form government, nearly two weeks after he sacked PM
Tunisia’s powerful UGTT trade union body has urged the country’s president, Kais Saied, to form a new government, nearly two weeks after he assumed executive power and sacked the prime minister.
Saied also suspended parliament for 30 days on 25 July, and has since dismissed four ministers and other top officials.
Continue reading...Islamist group escalates insurgency with assault on Green Zone in Afghan capital
A suicide-bomb and gun attack in Kabul’s Green Zone that targeted Afghanistan’s acting defence minister and killed eight people on Tuesday was claimed by the Taliban, as the hardline Islamist group continued to escalate violence across the country.
The suicide bombing, which targeted the house used by Bismillah Mohammadi, was one of the most significant in the Afghan capital in recent months. It came amid heavy fighting in the south and west of the country as the Taliban have sought to take three key cities.
Continue reading...A year on from the devastating explosion, people are struggling to sleep and PTSD is widespread – amid economic chaos
Rayan Khatoun has been dreading 4 August. She has been constantly on edge as the anniversary of the port explosion in Beirut approached.
The blast threw Khatoun into a wall as she came home from work and left her with a head injury, a fractured cheekbone and torn tendons. Since then, she has suffered from recurring nightmares, insomnia and anxiety attacks.
Continue reading...One year on from the huge explosion in the port of Beirut in Lebanon the devastation from the blast is still visible
At least 200 people were killed, and more than 6,000 injured in the Beirut blast that devastated the port area on 4 August 2020. The explosion is believed to have been caused by an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse.
Away from the broken grain silos, and their rotting contents, Lebanon remains paralysed and anguished. The investigation into the blast has flatlined, and its perpetrators are as far away from accountability as ever. The global aid pledged in the wake of the destruction remains forsaken by the country’s rulers, who prefer the narrow privileges that flowed to them from a crippled system to a global rescue plan that could save the country.
Continue reading...Armed group has left the Panama-registered Asphalt Princess, says British navy, after initial reports Iranian-backed forces had raided vessel
A group of armed men who boarded a tanker off the coast of the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf of Oman have left the targeted ship, the British navy has said without elaborating.
The notice on Wednesday came after the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) warned of a “potential hijack” under unclear circumstances underway the night before.
Continue reading...Lebanese capital remains a shell of a city as efforts to find who is to blame for tragedy have made little progress
When his workplace blew to pieces, dockworker Yusuf Shehadi was waiting to hear back from colleagues who had scrambled to help firefighters extinguish a blaze in the port of Beirut. The fire was bad and getting worse, they told him in their last conversation before a giant explosion killed them, and 210 others, a year ago today.
The catastrophic blast laid to ruin the place Shehadi had worked for a decade. And he immediately knew its cause. “I had taken the nitrate from the dock to the hangar six years earlier,” he said of the massive stockpile of military-grade fertiliser that he had helped move from a freighter to a nearby hangar in 2014.
Continue reading...Items smuggled out after 2003 invasion include 3,500-year-old Gilgamesh clay tablet
The United States is returning more than 17,000 ancient artefacts that were looted and smuggled out of Iraq after the 2003 US invasion, including a 3,500-year-old clay tablet that bears part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iraq has said.
Tens of thousands of antiquities disappeared from Iraq after the invasion that toppled its leader, Saddam Hussein. Many more were smuggled out or destroyed by Islamic State (Isis), which held a third of Iraq between 2014 and 2017 before it was defeated by Iraqi and international forces.
Continue reading...As two women are rescued in Syria after being kidnapped by Isis years earlier, Yazidis renew calls for international help to find the thousands still unaccounted for
For seven years, their families waited and hoped for news. In July, they finally received it. Two young women, kidnapped by Islamic State as teenagers, had been found alive in Syria.
Salma*, now 25, was located in Deir el-Zour province, in the east of the country. She had “suffered all kinds of injustice”, said the Yazidi House in the Al-Jazira region, an organisation that assisted with the rescue of both women.
Continue reading...Boris Johnson has said Iran must face up to the consequences of its 'outrageous' attack on an oil tanker in the Arabian Sea that killed two crew, including a British national. The Liberian-flagged Mercer Street, which is linked to an Israeli tycoon, was hit off the coast of Oman late on 29 July in what is thought to have been a swarm attack involving multiple drones
Continue reading...Judge proposes compromise to settle dispute over home ownership with Israeli settlers in Sheikh Jarrah
Palestinian residents of the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah facing forcible eviction from their homes have been offered a compromise deal with Jewish settlers by Israel’s supreme court, in an unexpected development in the high-profile case.
The session on Monday, which was supposed to reach a final decision on whether to accept an appeal from four Palestinian families over eviction orders in the decades-old legal battle, was instead met with a surprise entreaty from the judges for the two sides to accept a “practical solution”.
Continue reading...‘Incredible’ discoveries at submerged ancient city off coast of Egypt have lain untouched
Wicker baskets filled with fruit that have survived from the 4th century BC and hundreds of ancient ceramic artefacts and bronze treasures have been discovered in the submerged ruins of the near-legendary city of Thonis-Heracleion off the coast of Egypt.
They have lain untouched since the city disappeared beneath the waves in the second century BC, then sunk further in the eight century AD, following cataclysmic natural disasters, including an earthquake and tidal waves.
Continue reading...The increasingly draconian approach to irregular migration betrays the spirit of the 1951 refugee convention
Seventy years ago, the 1951 UN refugee convention established the rights of refugees to seek sanctuary, and the obligations of states to protect them. Increasingly, it seems that much of Europe is choosing to commemorate the anniversary by ripping up some of the convention’s core principles.
So far this year, close to 1,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean, more than four times the death toll for the same period in 2020. Many will have been economic migrants. Others will have been fleeing persecution. Increasingly, Europe does not care. All were “irregular”. And all must be discouraged and deterred through a strategy of cruelty.
Continue reading...Mural artist Hussein Sabbagh, 13, one of 27 children killed in government attacks in north-west Syria in two months
Amid the rubble of bombed homes in Binnish, a town in north-west Syria, a brightly painted mural stands out. The image shows an intact house, with love hearts streaming from the windows. Overhead, however, the dark silhouettes of birds are accompanied by helicopters, warplanes and missiles, and the garden’s red and yellow flowers look like flames.
Related: Syria: Assad shells former opposition stronghold Deraa
Continue reading...Foreign secretary backs Israeli PM’s claims Iran was behind drone strike that killed Briton and Romanian
The UK has said it is “highly likely” that Iran carried out an “unlawful and callous attack” on a ship in the Middle East, which left a Briton dead.
The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said the government believed the drone attack on the oil tanker off the coast of Oman was “deliberate, targeted, and a clear violation of international law by Iran”.
Continue reading...Verdict due in case that could lead to Palestinians being forcibly displaced to make way for Jewish settlers
Israel’s supreme court is due to make a decision on whether to evict Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, in a final hearing in the controversial case that helped spark communal violence inside Israel and a new war with Hamas earlier this year.
A verdict in the deeply contentious case, which could lead to the neighbourhood’s current residents being forcibly displaced to make way for Jewish settlers in a decades-old dispute, is expected on Monday morning.
Continue reading...Political liberty has been overturned – with majority support. That will delight authoritarians everywhere
Implicit in US and western support for pro-democracy movements and transitions around the world is an assumption that, given a free choice, a system of elected, representative government is what people will always naturally prefer. But what if this assumption is wrong? What if a majority believes democracy doesn’t work for them?
Emerging testimony from Tunisia, the latest country to face a crisis over how it is run, suggests many citizens welcomed the forceful suspension of a democratically elected parliament that had failed to address people’s problems and was widely reviled as a self-serving oligarchy.
Mohammed Ali, 33, from Ben Guerdane, seems to typify this view. “I think what happened is good. I think that’s what all the people want,” he told the Guardian after last week’s surprise move by Kais Saied, Tunisia’s president, to seize power and impose a state of emergency. Local politicians and western critics called it a coup.