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Agence France Press reported: Iran on Wednesday Oct. 18th announced that 20.9 percent of young people aged between 15 and 24 are unemployed, state-run television reported. The figure, based on a survey conducted from June 21 to September 21, was down 0.8 percent compared to same period last year, the head of the Iranian statistics organization, Mohammad Madad, was quoted as saying. According to Iranian labor law it is illegal to employ people under 15 and those aged between 15 and 18 have to be physically tested and certified by Iran's social insurance organization. Youth unemployment is seen as one of the major economic problems in Iran, where the majority of the population is under 30.

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The deputy prosecutor of the province of Sistan and Balouchistan, eastern Iran, said that during the past several months, more than 10 people had been executed in the province. The official news agency ISNA quoted him on October 14 and wrote that he had called for more executions. He considered that security was “more important than daily bread”. Separately, in Javanroud, in the western province of Kermanshah, the mullahs’ judiciary flogged two people in public.

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According to the spokesman of the State Security Forces in the oil-rich Khuzestan Province, south-west Iran, from August 23 to September 23, 1,442 people were arrested “in the context of the struggle against drugs and handed over to the judiciary”. The local newspaper Asr Karoun which carried the news on October 12 also reported that Colonel Matin-Rad, commander of the State Security Forces of the town of Abadan, a major city in the oil-rich province, had stated that with the implementation of a security plan his forces had been able to neutralize a network of satellite dish smugglers. They discovered 100 receivers, 200 satellite dishes, 120 LNBs and 167 relays. He added that they had also confiscated 250 antennas during police searches in homes. Khuzestan Province, which has a large Arab population, was the scene of violent popular uprisings due to serious discriminations against the population by the government. The repression was brutal, and public executions and crackdowns have escalated because the regime considers the Resistance’s satellite television channel, which enjoys a large audience in Iran, to be a major threat.

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Girls as young as nine are running away from their homes and living on the streets in Iran, according to a classified and recent report issued by the Ministry of Education.The report was made public by several Persian-language news websites run by former government officials.It notes that there are an exceptionally high number of run-away girls near Iran’s holy cities of Qom and Mashad.Iran has one of the highest records of runaway girls and women in the world.The state-run news agency ILNA reported in July that there were some 300,000 run-away young women and girls in Iran and that 86 percent of girls who ran away from their homes for the first time, were raped. The majority of such victims are rejected by their families if they choose to return after having been raped.
Young, beautiful run-away girls are sold in the neighboring and some European countries as sex salves. Iranian regime is one of the founders of this huge and money making industry.

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Agents of Iran’s State Security Forces (SSF) have killed three rebels in the east of the country, state media reported.The three men, referred to as “trouble-makers” by the state-media reports, were killed during a ground and air raid on their hideout in Khorassan Jonoubi Province.Among the items discovered at the site were a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, numerous heavy hand-weapons and one battle grenade, the reports said.Three military helicopters took part in the offensive against the rebels.The men, one of whom was identified as Baluch Zohi, operated in the towns of Saravan and Iran-Shahr, according to the reports. Iranian authorities have stepped up executions in Iran’s restive eastern provinces.

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Three Iranian men have mysteriously died in custody in Iran.Two of the prisoners were being held at a temporary detention centre in Tehran. The third individual died as he was being released from a prison in the northern town of Tonekabon.The hard-line daily Qods quoted Mohammad Tourang, a senior police commander in Tehran, as claiming that one of the individuals being held at the detention centre said that he was sick and was taken to a toilet where he “committed suicide” by hanging himself using a plastic bag he had with him.Another individual identified only as Mehdi was brought to a detention centre for interrogation but also managed to “commit suicide”, the police commander claimed.In Tonekabon, a prisoner identified only as Kourosh fell ill immediately after being released from prison. He was pronounced dead by doctors in Abbass-Abad Hospital.

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The head of a prison in the north-western town of Ahar announced on Oct. 24, that the small penal complex had been overcrowded to several times its full capacity.Prison warden Mohammad Zeinali told the government-run news agency Fars that the Ahar Penal Complex had a capacity of 50 prisoners but was currently housing 235 inmates.Ahar is situated in Iran’s Azeri-dominated East Azerbaijan Province.Earlier this month, the chief of Iran’s prisons Ali Akbar Yessaghi told the state-run news agency ISNA that a prison in the south-western city of Abadan with a maximum capacity of 70 people was housing some 500 prisoners.Yessaghi also said that some 600,000 Iranians were imprisoned every year.

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Reporters Without Borders on Oct. 23rd condemned the arrests of six journalists in the past week and called for the release of all journalists detained in Iran. “Any excuse will do in Iran to prevent journalists from expressing themselves,” the press freedom organization said. “Closely monitored by both the state security services and the clergy, news media that do not defend the government’s vision of the Islamic revolution are shut down and their journalists are arrested without warrants and without reason.” Reporters Without Borders added: “They may be released after paying exorbitant fines but they can be sent back to prison at any time and are not able to work in any acceptable fashion.”

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Iranian regime has injected uranium UF6 gas into a second batch of nuclear centrifuges, the state-run news agency ISNA quoted an unnamed official as announcing on Friday Oct. 27th. “Iran’s second cascade was installed two weeks ago. The injection of gas was carried out this week”, the official was quoted as saying.“Currently, we have obtained the product of the second cascade”, the official said.The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency told the New York Times on Monday that Tehran had set up a second cascade of 164 centrifuges, the devices that spin at high speed and turn ordinary uranium into a fuel usable for nuclear power plants — or, at higher enrichment levels, nuclear weapons.The United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1696 on July 31 demanding that Tehran suspend all its uranium enrichment activities by August 31 or face the threat of sanctions. Tehran missed that deadline.The council is currently deliberating a tougher resolution which would impose sanctions against Tehran.

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Iran's Foreign Ministry summoned on Wednesday the ambassadors of Belgium and Finland to protest a visit to Brussels by the head by the main Iranian opposition coalition, state-run news agencies reported.Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), arrived at the Belgian Senate in Brussels on Tuesday under heavy police escort where she was greeted by Senate President Anne-Marie Lizin along with Liberal Senator Patrik Vankrunkelsven and Socialist Senator Pierre Galand.The government-owned news agency Mehr quoted Ibrahim Rahim-Pour, the director-general of Western European Affairs at the Foreign Ministry, as condemning the decision by the Belgian Senate to welcome Rajavi.The official news agency IRNA reported that Rahim-Pour expressed Tehran’s “strong condemnation” of the visit to the EU envoys. The state-run news agency ILNA quoted Rahim-Pour as describing the affair as an “unfriendly gesture by Belgium”.Finland currently holds the EU's rotating Presidency. Both envoys had previously been summoned by the Foreign Ministry on Sunday over the affair.The NCRI, a broad coalition of groups and personalities, seeks to oust Iran’s clerics from power with the aim of establishing a “democratic, secular and coalition government in Iran”. Among its member groups is the People’s Mojahedin (PMOI) which was listed as a terrorist organization by the European Union in mid-2002, in what the EU’s then-Spanish leadership called “a goodwill gesture to Tehran”.Belgium’s Foreign Ministry announced on Tuesday that Rajavi was representing the NCRI during her visit rather than any single group in the coalition. The NCRI is not on the EU’s blacklist, it said.“Last week, the EU belatedly announced that negotiations with the regime [over Tehran’s nuclear program] had been fruitless. ... Despite the failure of the policy of appeasement, the EU still lacks a principled and decisive policy against the mullahs’ regime”, Rajavi told Belgian Senators on Tuesday.She urged the EU to remove the terror tag from the PMOI and impose comprehensive diplomatic and trade sanctions and an oil embargo on Tehran.In April, the Belgian Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution urging the EU to re-examine the terror label placed on the PMOI. A similar resolution urging the government to re-evaluate the PMOI’s terror listing was unanimously adopted by the Belgian Senate in December 2005.

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Associated France Press reported: prosecutors formally charged Iran and the Shiite militia Hezbollah Wednesday in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish charities office in Argentina, which killed 85 people and injured 300. "We deem it proven that the decision to carry out an attack July 18, 1994 on the AMIA (Argentine Jewish Mutual Association, a Jewish charities association headquarters in Buenos Aires) was made by the highest authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran which directed Hezbollah to carry out the attack," Argentine chief prosecutor Alberto Nisman said. Prosecutors called for the arrest of top Iranian authorities at the time, including then-president Ali Rafsanjani. In Beirut, a Hezbollah source said she had not yet heard that the Shiite militia had been formally charged but that it came as no surprise. No one has been tried for the crime in more than a decade since Argentina's worst-ever terror attack. On September 2, 2004, an Argentine court acquitted 21 former police officers and a trafficker of stolen cars who were charged with aiding the attackers. The same court then ordered former top government officials investigated for botching the 10-year case. The court found that key evidence against the men had been "irregularly" obtained, and ordered an investigation of Judge Juan Jose Galeano, who presided over the case for nine years, as well as two prosecutors. Galeano was accused of having paid 400,000 dollars to a key witness to testify against four police officers accused of having provided logistical support in the plot. The court also sought an investigation of former Argentine president Carlos Menem's interior minister, Carlos Corach, and Hugo Anzorregui, former head of the state intelligence service. Argentina, with more than 300,000 Jews, has South America's largest Jewish community.

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In an interview with the satellite channel al-Jazeera, a member of the Iraqi Parliament from the National Dialogue Party stated that death squads in Iraq are in direct contact with the Iranian regime. Mohammad Daini said that there was a serious situation where by the paramilitary militias in a certain number of regions in Iraq are dedicated to the massacre of innocent people. These forces are linked to political movements which play a significant role in the Iraqi government. The paramilitary militias are in contact with death squads, and these death squads are themselves in contact with the Iranian regime. Mohammad Daini added: One million Iraqis have been killed, 300,000 Iraqis have been reported missing, 72,000 Iraqis are in jail and 6 million citizens have left the country. The war organized by the paramilitary militias is at its height.