Tonight we will look at the latest news of human rights violations in Iran where two cases of them have been referred to US Federal Courts of Justice.
They are related to the suicide of Siamak Pourzand, the Iranian journalist who had been jailed for many years on charges of espionage, and the case of Abbas Amir Entezam, former spokesman for the post-revolution government of Bazargan.
Our guest tonight to discuss these cases is Mr Ali Harischi, attorney at law, who is representing the Pourzand family in US courts.
We heard through Mrs Mehrangiz Kaar on this program that Mr Harischi has taken up the case of Siamak Pourzand on the grounds that he committed suicide as a result of the pressures that he was under in prison. We would like to know how this case could proceed in an American court of justice.
Mr Ali Harischi:
I have actually filed two cases of complaint for the late Mr Pourzand in US courts, one from Mrs Kaar and another from Banafsheh, his daughter.
There is an international convention on security and legal matters that justice systems of different countries cannot interfere in one another’s legal matters.
However, in United States a new bill has passed that rejects this immunity on the grounds that those countries who support international terrorism and are in the black list of the State Department are exempt from this convention and if they have been involved in an act of terrorism against a US citizen they can be brought to justice in US courts.
We have made use of this law as the case of my clients has been addressed in Iranian courts and the country is in the list of the State Department.
Already several notices and summons have been sent to the relevant sources in Iran through diplomatic channels but as Iran does not have an embassy in US we are still waiting to hear back from them and my guess is this will take a six months time before we could deal with the cases.
Jamshid Chalangi:
Could the Iranian regime use the same channel and claim that a member of its lobbies in US has been “tortured” here and sue the American government, as was the case of the Press TV’s reporter?
Mr Ali Harischi:
Each country has its own domestic laws and act on them accordingly. I doubt Iran has passed any such law to retaliate but I do not know much about their laws.
We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:
Tonight we will look at the Rouhani’s latest comments in Majles about Iran’s socio-economic problems. His comments once again reveal the deceitful and ignorant nature of a regime that has nothing to offer to our people exept lies.
I am so sorry to see that he appears in front of a parliament whose members are supposed to be there to protect the rights of our nation but sadly they arenothing more than a bunch of carefully selected people by the disgraceful Guardian Council and except a handful of them the rest look at their jobs as a money making position.
Now and after six years of boasting about doing this and doing that for the Iranian people Rouhani has said very clearly that he is nobody and all the regime’s domestic and foreign policies are dictated by Khamenei!!
As such, after an initial caving in to pressure to say that he is happy to negotiate with the US officials, Rouhani has declared “we have no plan at all to enter any negotiations with the Americans”.
Sheer charlatanism! This is the same man who only a week ago when his foreign minister turned up in France and engaged in secret negotiations with the G7leaders had said “I am ready to go anywhere in the world to meet with anyone if it helps to solve the problems of our people”.
But apparently Khamenei has told him off and he has now retreated from his earlier comments. In any case, Trump did not pay much attention to Rouhani’s “readiness” as he knows that Rouhani is nothing more than the servant of Khamenei’s whims.
The damages that Khamenei’s despotism has done to our country are numerous. Out of the 150 top mathematicians who graduated from Sharif University in 2011 only one of them has remained in Iran and the rest have immigrated (or better said fled) and obtained top jobs in major Western universities and research institutes.
More than 6000 top Iranian engineers alone have immigrated to Canada since the revolution!
The latest news says an Iranian woman has set herself on fire outside a court in Tehran after being tried on charges of resisting arrest by morality police for removing her mandatory hijab in public.
A spokesperson for the judiciary has said the woman “had been engaged in a physical confrontation with security forces in February after resisting arrest on charges of bad-hejabi and insulting them”.
I tell Mr Khamenei that he is responsible for this horrific news!
We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:
We continue the program with watching two video clips about the widespread corruption in the Iranian regime’s judiciary.
We then listen to the comments of Iran’s national judo champion Saeed Molayie who reveals how the regime’s sport officials have ordered him to abandon his fight against the Israeli champion in the Yokyo tournament as a cheap political propaganda.
Molayie has now refused to go back to Iran and has stayed in Germany where his family lives.
Two weeks ago the senior and trusted journalist who had accompanied Javad Zarif in his trip to Europe fled the press team and has asked for political asylum in Sweden.
He had previously published a list of its ministers who have dual nationality. What kind of national ministers they are when half of their interests lie with a foreign country?
During the time of the Shah any senior government official of foreign ministry found married to a foreign national would be jailed! But now under this regime these dual nationals have two wives!!
Israeli army and the Lebanese Hezbollah have exchanged artillery fires at their border areas.
Benjamin Natanyahu has claimed that Israel will continue to annex all those Palestinian lands that historically belong to then, as if he owns them!!
One needs remind him that his war with the Hezbollah of Lebanon does not give him any justification to confiscate more Palestinian lands.
On the other hand, we have the Jewish nation that the Nazis and Hitler murdered 6 million of them in the most horrific crimes against humanity.
Even today Jews in Iraq and Iran are subjected to so many restrictions and repression.
They are a nation with a country and have the right to exist and live in peace alongside the Palestinians in their own independent country.
That is to say if the likes of the Iranian regime and its proxies allow this objective to be realised.
In Paris through Macron, Zarif had requested from the Trump government to allow Iran sell 700-800,000 barrels of oil per day.
There was also the talk of Rouhani meeting with Trump at the UN but Khamenei has now interfered and sabotage all the behind the scene agreements between Zarif and Macron!
Today we will look at the latest news of Iran and the Middle East region.
In US today is the Labour Day and we all know that the international workers day actually began in America.
We will compare the plight of Iranian workers withthose of other countries of the world while a group of Iranian workers at the Haft Tapeh Sugar Refinery are still in jail for demanding their overdue salaries.
We will find out what has happened to the Iranian working class since the revolution as well as looking into the latest cases of human rights violations against the citizens of the country.
Journalist Mrs Noushin Jaffari is the latest victim for supporting the open letter of the 14 civil rights activists calling forKhamenei’s resignation.
Our guest tonight to discuss these issues with him is Mr Hamid Reza Amini (aka Ario Barzan), who has spent some time in the regime’s prison.
Hamid Reza Amini:
I had two accounts in Facebook and Telegram and was posting comments and news under my pseudonym Ario Barzan and used to work with Mr Shahram Homayoun’s satellite TV station.
I was arrested together with my seven months old child and we were kept in a detention centre for a week. Sadly when Mr Homayoun found out about my arrest he abandoned me.
I later joined the Green Movement and continued with my social media activities but as I already had a file with the security service I began working under another pseudonym but was once again arrested.
The Basij militias took me to their base but the protesters attacked the van and rescued me and two other people and set thepolice van on fire.
Later I began to work with the exiled union leader Mr Osanlou.
Jamshid Chalangi:
We must note that when a member of our political and opposition groups is jailed and later released these groups would be very careful about how they continue working with them again.
Hamid Reza Amini:
In those days the regime was not in a position to identify and arrest the activists so quickly.
BANGALORE, India — Countries that are home to one-fourth of Earth’s population face an increasingly urgent risk: The prospect of running out of water.
From India to Iran to Botswana, 17 countries around the world are currently under extremely high water stress, meaning they are using almost all the water they have, according to new World Resources Institute data published Tuesday.
Many are arid countries to begin with; some are squandering what water they have. Several are relying too heavily on groundwater, which instead they should be replenishing and saving for times of drought.
In those countries are several big, thirsty cities that have faced acute shortages recently, including São Paulo, Brazil; Chennai, India; and Cape Town, which in 2018 narrowly beat what it called Day Zero — the day when all its dams would be dry.
Water Stress Levels of Urban Areas with Population Bigger than 3 Million
More than a third of major urban areas with more than 3 million people are under high or extremely high water stress.
“We’re likely to see more of these Day Zeros in the future,” said Betsy Otto, who directs the global water program at the World Resources Institute. “The picture is alarming in many places around the world.”
Climate change heightens the risk. As rainfall becomes more erratic, the water supply becomes less reliable. At the same time, as the days grow hotter, more water evaporates from reservoirs just as demand for water increases.
Water-stressed places are sometimes cursed by two extremes. São Paulo was ravaged by floods a year after its taps nearly ran dry. Chennai suffered fatal floods four years ago, and now its reservoirs are almost empty.
Groundwater is going fast
Mexico’s capital, Mexico City, is drawing groundwater so fast that the city is literally sinking. Dhaka, Bangladesh, relies so heavily on its groundwater for both its residents and its water-guzzling garment factories that it now draws water from aquifers hundreds of feet deep. Chennai’s thirsty residents, accustomed to relying on groundwater for years, are now finding there’s none left. Across India and Pakistan, farmers are draining aquifers to grow water-intensive crops like cotton and rice.
More stress in the forecast
Today, among cities with more than 3 million people, World Resources Institute researchers concluded that 33 of them, with a combined population of over 255 million, face extremely high water stress, with repercussions for public health and social unrest.
By 2030, the number of cities in the extremely high stress category is expected to rise to 45 and include nearly 470 million people.
World Water Stress Projection
Extremely high High Medium to high Low to medium Low No data
How to fix the problem?
The stakes are high for water-stressed places. When a city or a country is using nearly all the water available, a bad drought can be catastrophic.
After a three-year drought, Cape Town in 2018 was forced to take extraordinary measures to ration what little it had left in its reservoirs. That acute crisis only magnified a chronic challenge. Cape Town’s 4 million residents are competing with farmers for limited water resources.
Likewise, Los Angeles. Its most recent drought ended this year. But its water supply isn’t keeping pace with its galloping demand and its penchant for private backyard swimming pools doesn’t help.
For Bangalore, a couple of years of paltry rains revealed how badly the city has managed its water. The many lakes that once dotted the city and its surrounding areas have either been built-over or filled with the city’s waste. They can no longer be the rainwater storage tanks they once were. And so the city must venture further and further away to draw water for its 8.4 million residents, and much of it is wasted along the way.
A lot can be done to improve water management, though.
First, city officials can plug leaks in the water distribution system. Wastewater can be recycled. Rain can be harvested and saved for lean times: lakes and wetlands can be cleaned up and old wells can be restored. And, farmers can switch from water-intensive crops, like rice, and instead grow less-thirsty crops like millet.
“Water is a local problem and it needs local solutions,” said Priyanka Jamwal, a fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment in Bangalore.
Current and former spies are floored by President Donald Trump’sfervent defense of Russia at this year’s G7 summit in Biarritz, France.
“It’s hard to see the bar anymore since it’s been pushed so far down the last few years, but President Trump’s behavior over the weekend was a new low,” one FBI agent who works in counterintelligence told Insider.
At the summit, Trump aggressively lobbied for Russia to be readmitted into the G7, refused to hold it accountable for violating international law, blamed former President Barack Obama for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and expressed sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
One former senior Justice Department official, who worked closely with the former special counsel Robert Mueller when he was the FBI director, told Insider Trump’s behavior was “directly out of the Putin playbook. We have a Russian asset sitting in the Oval Office.”
A former CIA operative told Insider the evidence is “overwhelming” that Trump is a Russian agent, but another CIA and NSA veteran said it was more likely Trump was currying favor with Putin for future business deals.
Meanwhile, a recently retired FBI special agent told Insider that Trump’s freewheeling and often unfounded statements make it more likely that he’s a “useful idiot” for the Russians. But “it would not surprise me in the least if the Russians had at least one asset in Trump’s inner circle.”
“It’s hard to see the bar anymore since it’s been pushed so far down the last few years, but President Trump’s behavior over the weekend was a new low.”
That was the assessment an FBI agent who works in counterintelligence gave Insider of President Donald Trump’s performance at this year’s G7 summit in Biarritz, France. The agent requested anonymity because they feared that speaking publicly on the matter would jeopardize their job.
Trump’s attendance at the G7 summit was peppered with controversy, but none was more notable than his fervent defense of Russia’s military and cyber aggression around the world, and its violation of international law in Ukraine.
Trump repeatedly refused to hold Russia accountable for annexing Crimea in 2014, blamed former President Barack Obama for Russia’s move to annex it, expressed sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and castigated other G7 members for not giving the country a seat at the table.
Since being booted from the G8 after annexing Crimea, Russia’s done little to make up for its actions. In fact, by many accounts, it’s stepped up its aggression.
In addition to continuing to encroach on Ukraine, the Russian government interfered in the 2016 US election and was behind the attempted assassination of a former Russian spy in the UK. US officials also warn that as the 2020 election looms, the Russians are stepping up their cyberactivities against the US and have repeatedly tried to attack US power grids.
“What in God’s name made Trump think it would be a good idea to ask to bring Russia back to the table?” the FBI agent told Insider. “How does this serve US national-security interests?”
Trump’s advocacy for Russia is renewing concerns among intelligence veterans that Trump may be a Russian “asset” who can be manipulated or influenced to serve Russian interests, although some also speculate that Trump could just be currying favor for future business deals.
A former senior Justice Department official, who worked closely with the former special counsel Robert Mueller when he was FBI director, didn’t mince words when reacting to Trump’s performance at the G7 summit: “We have a Russian asset sitting in the Oval Office.”
“There is no fathomable explanation for why the president said these things,” the former official said. “Letting Russia off the hook for bullying smaller countries and then blaming Obama for it? It’s directly out of the Putin playbook.”
While arguing for Russia to be invited back into the G7, Trump said the country would be helpful in addressing hot-button issues like Iran, Syria, and North Korea and that the alliance was better off with Russia “inside rather than outside.”
But Russia is a staunch ally of Syria’s Assad regime, and it’s also cozied up to Iran in recent years. US military and intelligence officials view Russia as one of the US’s foremost rivals and believe it generally stands in opposition to American interests.
Glenn Carle, a former CIA covert operative and frequent Trump critic, told Insider there’s been “no question” in his mind for years that the president is behaving like “a spy for the Russians.”
“The evidence is so overwhelming that in my 35 years in intelligence, I have never seen anything so certain,” Carle said, adding that he’s spoken with several intelligence veterans about the matter in the four years since Trump first launched his presidential campaign, many of whom believe Trump’s actions are a threat to national security.
Read more: Russia came out the winner of this year’s G7 summit despite being kicked out, and Trump looked like ‘Putin’s puppet’
“Intelligence assets become convinced to be spies for multiple reasons,” Carle, who specialized in getting foreign spies to become turncoats when he was at the CIA, said in an earlier interview with Insider. “It might start with kompromat or financial hooks, and the asset may be convinced he is acting as a patriot until he becomes accustomed to his role.”
“Trump clearly responds favorably to praise,” he said. “And over the years, the handling officer — Putin, in this case — realizes what the asset wants, and that’s what they provide. Trump wants to be told he’s the greatest, so that’s what you tell him, over and over again, until he comes to believe that is the motivation for his actions.”
Frank Montoya Jr., a recently retired FBI special agent, told Insider it’s “hard not to think the Russians have an asset in the White House.”
But he added that Trump’s freewheeling and often false statements imply he’s “not playing with a full deck on any matter of state these days. Still, those same delusions are what give me pause when conclusions are reached about the likelihood he is a Russian asset.”
“Useful idiot is more like it,” Montoya said. But he added that given the abundance of meetings and contacts between Trump associates and Russians before, during, and after the election, “it would not surprise me in the least if the Russians had at least one asset in Trump’s inner circle.”
Robert Deitz, a former top lawyer at the CIA and the National Security Agency, agreed that Trump was catering to Putin’s interests, but he disagreed on why.
“I think what’s going on right now is an Occam’s razor scenario,” he told Insider, referring to the philosophical theory that the simplest explanation for an event is often the correct one.
“Trump wants to do deals with Russia when he leaves the presidency,” Deitz said. “We already know he was interested in building a Trump Tower in Moscow before and during the election. The best way of doing a deal with Putin is to be nice to him, so I think what Trump is doing is currying favor.”
He emphasized, however, that regardless of Trump’s motives for being subservient to Putin, “it’s still harmful” to US interests.
“When Trump goes to bed each night, what do you think his last thoughts are: the welfare of the United States, or the size of his bank account?” Deitz added.
Trump’s defense of Putin at the G7 summit didn’t go unnoticed in Russia.
According to The Washington Post, one show on the state-run Rossiya-1 network played a celebratory soundtrack as it showed six video clips of Trump demanding that Putin be given a seat at the table.
The Russian media analyst Julia Davis said that Kremlin-controlled media reacted to Trump’s G7 performance with laughter and mockery.
One anchor rejoiced that “Trump is dancing to Putin’s tune,” while others were amused by the “maniacal persistence” with which Trump was lobbying for Russia.
This isn’t the first time the president has been accused of working to advance Russia’s interests ahead of the US’s.
Perhaps the sharpest example of this was when Trump and Putin held a bilateral summit in Helsinki last year. After the meeting, Trump stunned the US national-security apparatus and foreign allies when he sided with Russia over the US intelligence community, blamed “both sides” for the deterioration of US-Russia relations, and praised Putin as being “extremely strong and powerful.”
In 2017, Trump refused to accept the US intelligence-community finding that Moscow meddled in the 2016 race to propel Trump to the presidency.
That May, he fired FBI director James Comey, who was overseeing the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s election interference and cited “this Russia thing” as the reason. Two days after firing Comey, Trump shared classified intelligence with two Russian officials in the Oval Office and told them firing Comey had taken “great pressure” off of him.
Shortly after, the FBI began investigating whether Trump was a Russian agent.
Tonight we will look at the problems that the Iranian people are facing both on domestic and international stages.
The Friday prayers imams of the regime have been commenting about the situation in the country and the possibility of a Trump-Rouhani meeting, while at thesame time repeating their call for the destruction of Israel.
Former mayor of Tehran who had been released from prison is back behind bars as many civil rights activists cannot afford the bail to leave detentions that should not have taken place in the first place.
Our guests tonight to discuss these issues are Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh and Mehran Barati.
Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:
The issue of Diyah and paying a bail have been introduced into Iran’s so-called justice system by this regime and paying them can even lead to the release of a murderer from prison.
This system regards the rights of women as half of those of men. However, the struggle of our women for their human and civil rights act as a dagger in the heart of the despotic regime.
Only corrupt people who have stolen millions of dollars of our people’s wealth can afford these astronomical bails and the workers who have been jailed for protesting against injustice in the country must remain behind bars because they have no money to pay for their bails.
The damage to former mayor of Tehran Najafi has been done as he was going to nominate himself in presidential election. He had happily accepted the murder of his wife and her family took the Diyah money and pardoned him.
So long as this regime is in power we will see the travesty of justice in our country in similar cases.
Jamshid Chalangi:
And yet the European countries that claim to be holding human rights values so dearly welcome the foreign minister of this regime so warmly as though the Iranian regime is the champion of human rights.
Mehran Barati:
European governments have never condemned the abuse of human rights in Iran. It is mainly the MPs in their parliament or the humanrights bodies that do so.
European governments have always been very careful to maintain their relations with the regime in Iran for economic reasons and leave the question of its human rights violations to others, unless their relationship have faced a difficulty.
We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:
We continue the program with talking to our special guest Mr Alireza Sasanian.
But before that, I need to tell you to be careful about what you say on this program because some people have accused us that you are an agent of the Iranian regime!!
Alireza Sasanian:
We need to be a human before we believe in any religion. I do believe in the existence of heaven and hell.
I had told you before that in Iran’s national broadcasting organisation, IRIB, many people have more than one name and family name.
These are pseudonyms but I never used it to extract money from any other source of employment.
The fact is that within every institute or organ of the regime you would find honest and patriotic people working alongside corrupt people and traitors. This includes the IRIB, the Revolutionary Guards, the security forces and the ministry of intelligence.
Dr Alireza Nourizadeh:
How would you judge the previous heads of the IRIB, people like Haj Ezzat or Asgari?
Alireza Sasanian;
The truth is that the best general manager that the organisation had was Mr Sarfaraz.
However, if it was up to me, I would rename the IRIB as the “retired people’s home for terrorists”!
When Sarfaraz was appointed, he fired 800 of these types of people who were on the payroll.
When Dr Najafi became the Mayor of Tehran he too focused of purging those corrupt cronies of his predecessor Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf.
Some of my friends warned him not to do so as Ghalibaf will come after him and we have seen how this happened. He has had to confess to the murder of his second wife which has all been a staged killing to implicate him in it.
We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:
We continue the program with talking to our special guest of every Thursday, Dr. Mohsen Sazegara, for his views about news of Iran and the Middle East.
Last week we had the annual summit of the heads of states from the G7 countries and Zarif suddenly turned up in France and Macron said there is a possibility of Trump meeting with Rouhani.
But both sides put forward some conditions for the meeting to take place and later backtracked from the idea as a whole. What is your take on this? Was it just mediation by Macron or the whole thing was a misunderstanding?
Mohsen Sazegara:
I followed the news in Washington and Tehran and asked a few of my close friends who knew something about this.
It is Iran that is pressing France for the mediation and in his meeting with Macron Zarif had requested that Iran be allowed to have the exemption from the oil sanctions to sell 700,000 barrel of oil per day and at the same time as a gesture of goodwill France offers a 1.5 billion Euro credit to Iran as a back up for the INSTEXT project.
In return Iran would agree to stop any further retreats from the nuclear deal.
Macron had discussed these arrangements with Trump privately and he had agreed to them. In Tehran Rouhani had said that he is willing to meet anyone if it helps the national interests of the Iranians. Surely he had been in touch with Zarif all along.
Some people think that Khamenei opposes Rouhani on this matter but that is not true. He is just a timid dictator who sits back and waits to see if the policy fails he can then say that it was not his idea.
However Trump had disagreed with lifting of the oil sanctions and made it conditional to regime changing some of its policies before hand. As such Tehran had become angry and soon Rouhani reacted by saying he is not prepared to take part in a photo opportunity with Trump to boost his position in US politics.
Then Pompeo and Bolton repeated Trump’s position and Pompeo once again said Iran could only come to a negotiating table after accepting and implementing his 12 conditions. So at the end, it was much ado about nothing!
The Iranian regime believes US is after the same policy for it that it has towards North Korea and Trump is only trying to have a winning card for his 2020 re-election by forcing Tehran to come to a negotiating table.
We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:
Tonight our special guest Dr Payam Fazel who also serves with the Doctors Without Borders will talk to us about the story of the turbulent life of his family.
Dr Fazel has previously appeared on our program on many occasions and is a very active member of the medical organization thattakes him to countries as distant as in African and North Korea. We want tofind out why he has so passionately dedicated his life to helping others.
Dr Fazel’s late mother, Shahla Harriri, was an educated woman who loved her children so much and worked with her husband who was a doctor. Then the revolution arrived in Iran and she became associatedwith a political opposition group and was later arrested and despite repenting she was executed.
Dr Payam Fazel:
I can say the revolution cut through the life of our family. Some years before it happened my father had become interested in Dr Ali Shariati’s books and ideas. He came from a religious family and I remember together with my mother they used to read the books at our bedside and thismade us all a very religious family.
Ali Shariati presented a different image of Islam, which was more of its Alawi sect. People who shared a cell with him in prison were saying that he did not even do prayers and instead always did meditation.
Unlike Shariati’s intellectual ideas, Khomeini was a true strategist despite his langue of the peasants. Behind the scene he controlled everything to make sure his revolution would succeed. He never talked about women’s rights and even promised that his regime would be more democratic than that of France. He always kept his image of a spiritual leader.
My mother became a follower of the Mujaheddin Khalq organization and on one occasion the pressure groups broke her nose during a protest demonstration and she appeared with bloody face next to Massoud Rajavi on the front page of the Mujaheddin’s newspaper.
My father on the other hand kept his life style of drinking his whiskey and began a relationship with his secretary, which truly broke my mother’s heart. He even distanced himself from my mother’s political activities and wrote a letter to the regime and denounced her.
khalijefars News, Blogs, Art and Community
