khalijefars News, Blogs, Art and Community

By Sarah Dean

British-Iranian citizen Narges Ashtari runs an orphanage in Odisha, India

Is accused of manslaughter after the disappearance of a child in 2014

Ms Ashtari says she’s been wrongly accused, fears she won’t get a fair trial

Says she has been denied permission to leave the country

Narges Ashtari (centre), 28, has issued a desperate plea for her old friends and colleagues in England to support her through her ordeal amid fears she could be jailed. Read More »

By: Martin Chulov,

Militias controlled by Tehran are poised to complete a land corridor that would give Iran huge power in the region

Not far from Mosul, a large military force is finalising plans for an advance that has been more than three decades in the making. The troops are Shia militiamen who have fought against the Islamic State, but they have not been given a direct role in the coming attack to free Iraq’s second city from its clutches. Read More »

by:Mohamad Kawas

Political elite in Lebanon does not seem very eager to end constitutional farce that has been blocking election of only Christian president in Arab world.

BEIRUT – The flurry of consultations by former prime minis­ter Saad Hariri towards ending Lebanon’s presi­dential vacuum signals a commitment to the independent political system. Meanwhile, other fragmented Lebanese forces are trying to come up with ways to by­pass the National Pact of 1943 and the Taif agreement of 1989, which together resulted in the current power structure. Read More »

Bloomberg

· Treasury guidance allows deals with firms not under sanctions

· Rules still restrict entry of transactions into U.S. system

The U.S. Treasury Department is loosening sanctions on Iran, relaxing rules on foreigners doing dollar-denominated transactions with businesses in the nation. Read More »

An innocent handshake between Germany’s female environment minister and Iran’s female vice president caused outrage on Iranian media and social networks, which mistook the short-haired German minister for a man, while in Germany, the shake caused uproar as the Iranian VP was involved in the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. Read More »

By THOMAS ERDBRINK

TEHRAN — Rushing for a plane to Tehran because of a family emergency, the Iranian-American businessman stuffed his mobile phone into his carry-on, forgetting to turn it off. Read More »

By Kambiz Foroohar

For a decade, the U.S. and other major powers squeezed Iran’s economy to force it to rein in its nuclear program. That’s over, at least for the moment. Now what? An unshackled Iran has plenty going for it. Read More »

The prosperity gap is on full display on Tehran’s main boulevard.

by: Marc Champion / Golnar Motevalli

Valiasr Street, the 12-mile boulevard that Shah Reza Pahlavi built in the 1930s to link his summer palaces in the north of Tehran to a new train station in the south, connects two increasingly polarized Iranian worlds. Read More »

By Majid Sadeghpour

The biggest massacre of political prisoners since World War II was carried out in Iran in 1988. The Iranian regime as a whole and many senior officials in power today were the perpetrators. The indiscriminate murder of 30,000 prisoners of conscience was ordered by the regime’s then-supreme leader Khomeini and carried out by members of “death commissions” set up around the county. Read More »

The Last Bookstore presents The Saffron Tales – an evening of stories celebrating Iran, her food and her people. Join author Yasmin Khan discussing her new cookbook, The Saffron Tales: Recipes from the Persian Kitchen, with special guest Bita Milanian. Read More »