khalijefars News, Blogs, Art and Community

The Trump Tower Baku never opened. Trump partnered with an Azerbaijani family that U.S. officials called notoriously unethical.

The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

By Adam Davidson

Heydar Aliyev Prospekti, a broad avenue in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, connects the airport to the city. The road is meant to highlight Baku’s recent modernization, and it is lined with sleek new buildings. The Heydar Aliyev Center, an undulating wave of concrete and glass, was designed by Zaha Hadid. The state oil company is housed in a twisting glass tower, and the headquarters of the state water company looks like a giant water droplet. “It’s like Potemkin,” my translator told me. “It’s only the buildings right next to the road.” Behind the gleaming structures stand decaying Soviet-era apartment blocks, with clothes hanging out of windows and wallboards exposed by fallen brickwork. Read More »

By: Thomas Erdbrink FEB. 27, 2017

TEHRAN — For Iranians, Asghar Farhadi, whose movie “The Salesman” won the Academy Award for best foreign language film on Sunday, is more than just a filmmaker.

In a country where the state-controlled news media generally overlooks the stresses and strains of a normal middle-class existence, Mr. Farhadi — who refused to attend the Oscars ceremony to protest President Trump’s targeted travel ban — is one of the few to describe daily life. Read More »

by:STEVEN MELENDEZ 02.20.17

Apps for podcasting, tracking ovulation, and finding a lawyer extend a nonprofit’s mission of supporting democracy in Iran.

There are an estimated 40 million smartphone users in Iran. But ongoing government censorship, language barriers, and economic sanctions imposed on the country have made the app ecosystem that’s grown up elsewhere in the world unavailable to most Iranians. Read More »

by:Zalmay Khalilzad

Leaders and policymakers from Europe and around the world will meet at the fifty-third Munich Security Conference on February 17–19. All eyes will be on Vice President Mike Pence, who will lead the U.S. delegation, which will include Defense Secretary James Mattis, for clues on the Trump administration’s approach to foreign and security issues confronting the world. Read More »

By: Saeed Kamali Dehghan

Fifty years after Forough Farrokhzad’s death, Ebrahim Golestan talks about his affair with the giant of Persian literature

forty miles south of London, in a quiet West Sussex village, lives a 94-year-old Iranian intellectual who has for half a century kept silent about his former lover, a giant of modern Persian literature who was killed in a car accident aged just 32. Read More »

By:Ted Regencia

Washington and Tehran dial up war of words as risk of another military action in the Middle East rises.

On a spring morning in 2016, a retired four-star general, who was forced out of his job by then-President Barack Obama, spoke before defence and foreign policy experts gathered just blocks from the White House. Read More »

There is no doubt that the mighty Persian Empire and its religion had a profound influence on civilization and the world.

“Persia” is the Greek name of Pars, a province of modern day Iran. Meanwhile, the name Iran (==Land of the Aryans) is derived from the Aryan people, who first moved from Central Asia, and settled in what is now Iran, some 30,000 years ago. And here are some of the most important contributions of the people of Persia or Iran, to the world civilization: Read More »

By Karen DeYoung February 8 at 8:43 PM

Senior defense and intelligence officials have cautioned the White House that a proposal to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization could endanger U.S. troops in Iraq and the overall fight against the Islamic State, and would be an unprecedented use of a law that was not designed to sanction government institutions.

Defense and intelligence concerns have been expressed at the highest levels over the past several days, as the White House was preparing to roll out an executive order dealing with both Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Muslim Brotherhood, according to administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive matter. Read More »

The largest group from among the banned nationalities has built a durable community here.

By Jason Rezaian February 6, 2017

For Iranian Americans, estimated at somewhere near a million strong, President Trump’s order banning the entry of people from Iran and six other countries has a doomsday feel — one that is uncomfortably familiar. Since the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, through the “axis of evil” in 2002, they’ve reported feeling intensely unwelcome. That sensation began to break only last year, with President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. It was a moment of optimism that many felt was too good to be true. Now, so many of them tell me, perhaps that cynicism was vindicated. Read More »

By: Tamer Badawi

While the Rouhani administration tries to find the right balance of financial reforms, the banking sector challenges continue to hamper sustainable economic growth.

Amid concerns about more U.S. sanctions, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is striving to beef up public confidence before May’s presidential elections by highlighting economic achievements like decreased inflation. Yet despite signs of strong growth last year, the country’s ailing banking system is slow to recover. In the meantime, the limited availability of credit in turn is mitigating the effect GDP growth has had on job creation. In summer 2016, unemployment rose to 12.7 percent, up from 12.2 percent in the spring and 11 percent in 2015. Read More »