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Tehran, Iran, Oct. 21 – Girls as young as nine are running away from their homes and living on the streets in Iran, according to a classified 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 is an exceptionally high number of run-away girls near Iran’s holy cities of Qom and Mashad. Iran has one of the highest record 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 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.
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Tehran, Iran, Oct. 16 – Registration of candidates for the December 15 municipal elections started on Monday.A statement by the Interior Ministry said that candidates had until October 22 to register to stand in the elections.Polling was last conducted in February 2003. This year the elections will coincide with the Assembly of Experts (AE) elections.The enrolment period for the AE polls has already expired. A total of 495 religious figures registered to stand in the polls. The 86-member assembly is an exclusively clerical body entrusted with the task of selecting the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution. A few known candidates are :former President and current State Expediency Council Chairman Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Chairman of the Guardian Council Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, former chief nuclear negotiator with the West Hassan Rowhani, and radical Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi.
The leader of the resistance movement though called for a complete boycott of the religious dictatorship in the sham Assembly of Experts election on December 15.
The Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran on Oct. 11, stated: In an address to the people of Iran, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, called on the Iranian people to stay in their homes on December 15, boycotting the religious fascism in its entirety and bringing about a day of saying “no” to the mullahs’ illegitimate rule in order to show the world the Iranian people’s determination for freedom and hatred of the religious fascism. Mrs. Rajavi said: the Assembly of Experts election which is another theatre for the mullah’s factional feuding has nothing to do with the people of Iran and will be faced with an overwhelming boycott. The assembly which is comprised of criminal mullahs and does not even include a single woman is the most prominent display of the usurping of the Iranian people’s governance and the foremost representation of the mullahs’ gender apartheid.She added: While the elimination of the regime’s factions is indicative of its final phase, the ruling mullahs are deceitfully trying to portray their regime as stable and powerful by warmongering in Lebanon, increasing their terrorism in Iraq and erecting gallows inside Iran. However, Khamenei himself reiterates that any retreat at this juncture will carry with it an unending chain of pressures and further retreats. The regime’s president says that the slightest retreat is tantamount to loosing their existence.
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Reuters reported that tough U.N. sanctions on North Korea should help convince Iran to suspend its suspected nuclear weapons program, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said on Sunday. "I hope the lesson they learn is that if they continue to do nuclear weapons they will face the same kind of isolation and friction" that North Korea now faces, Ambassador John Bolton told CNN's Late Edition.Rather than face that isolation, Bolton said Iran has an opportunity to accept "an unparalleled offer" from five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany that provides for a range of incentives on trade, finance and peaceful nuclear energy development if Tehran abandons uranium enrichment.World powers agreed earlier this month to discuss sanctions to punish Tehran for failing to halt uranium enrichment but said they are still open to negotiations. Iran says its nuclear program is to produce electricity but the West fears Tehran is intent on buildings bombs.Iran has shrugged off the threat of sanctions. Analysts say the world's fourth largest oil exporter, which is enjoying an oil revenue windfall, may feel it can cope with the modest penalties likely to be imposed initially.The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose financial and weapons sanctions on North Korea for its claimed nuclear test in a resolution Pyongyang immediately rejected.
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Britain’s Foreign Office censured human rights violations by Iran’s theocratic regime in its 2006 annual human rights report.“The past 12 months have seen a continued deterioration in the human rights situation in Iran”, the Foreign Office said. “There have been repeated serious violations of freedom of expression and association. Officials who were implicated in internal repression in the 1980s and 1990s have been appointed as government ministers”, the report charged. “The future does not look positive. There appears to be a real reluctance on the part of the Iranian government to undertake the necessary human rights reforms. Talk of respect for human rights needs to be matched by a demonstrable commitment to improving the human rights situation”, it added. “The early part of 2006 has seen an alarming increase in the number of reported executions compared to the same period in 2005. In particular, we object to the Iranian authorities’ failure to respect even the most basic of minimum standards regarding the application of capital punishment. Many death sentences are carried out in public. “According to leading international human rights organisations, Iran was the only country to continue to execute children and juvenile offenders in 2005. The number of reported death sentences and executions of juvenile offenders in 2005 appears to have increased over preceding years”, it said. The Foreign Office maintained that Britain’s concerns about criminal punishment in Iran were not limited to the death penalty. “Draconian punishments, such as floggings, stonings and amputations, remain on the statute books”, it said.
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The head of coordination for organ transplants in Isfahan Province, central Iran, stated that in six months 1000 people in Isfahan had sold their kidneys in order to pay out their debts. In an interview with the state-run news agency Fars, Jafar Esfandiari acknowledged that sale of organs in Iran have become a common trade.
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National Council of Resistance in Iran said in a statement on Oct.13th that Some 200,000 Iranian workers have not received their salaries for months, the state-run news agency IRNA reported on October 11.
"Close to 200,000 workers from 500 factories, such as Poushineh-Baf, Naz-Nakh, and Semin-No, have not received their salaries for months and we have witnessed this issue brought up in Majlis frequently. … Some of these workers have not been paid for up to 50 months," said Alireza Mahjoub, a deputy of the regime's Majlis. He added, "Despite the fact that it has been seven months since the approval of regular amounts of 200,000 Tomans for senior citizens, the alimony recipients of the social security system have not yet been paid that amount."
The Iranian Resistance calls on all human rights organizations and labor organizations, in particular the International Labor Organization and international labor unions, to condemn the mullahs' regime and take urgent measures to defend the rights of Iranian workers. ******
Tehran, Iran, Oct. 18 – Road accidents in Iran are all too common. The real scale of the cataclysmic carnage is evident in a new report released by the country’s Medical-Law Organization which analyzed road deaths in Iran over the past five months of the Iranian calendar year. From mid April until August of this year, 12,509 people have been killed on Iranian highways and roads, the report said.The statistics showed that 10,209 of those killed were men and 2,500 were women. The report has found that most of the fatalities were of youths.Officials who prepared the report have estimated that the total number of road deaths in Iran at the end of the current year would be above 28,000.
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Tehran, Iran, Oct. 17 – Some 500 students in Tehran’s Amir-Kabir University held a protest on Monday against the takeover of universities by Islamist groups affiliated to the Revolutionary Guards. These include the paramilitary Bassij Daneshjui and Jihad Daneshgahi. They also demanded the release of a fellow student activist.“Political prisoners must be freed”, students chanted during the hour-long protest on campus.“The Bassij association [inside universities] must be shut down”, they chanted, as they criticized the atmosphere of repression on campus.
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Associated France Press reported: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believes Iran will be victorious in its nuclear row with the West because he is "in relation with God," the Iranian media reported Monday. His friends mock him when he assures them that Iran will win the bitter dispute over its nuclear enrichment programme, Ahmadinejad was quoted by the media as saying. "(But) we say that we will be victorious," he insisted. "One day somebody asked me whether I was in relation with somebody when I say that we will be victorious. I answered: 'Yes, I am in relation with God'," he said. His comments come as Tehran faces being slapped with sanctions by the UN Security Council over its failure to halt uranium enrichment, which the West fears could be diverted to making a nuclear bomb. "In foreign politics, one should not be frightened or fear these people," Ahmadinejad said, referring to Western leaders. The president has repeatedly said Iran will not halt its enrichment programme "even for a day." Tehran insists that it has a right to master nuclear technology for peaceful ends under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Uranium enrichment lies at the heart of Western concerns over Iran's nuclear programme. The process can be used to make the fuel for civil reactors but in highly extended form can also produce the fissile core of an atom bomb. After four rounds of talks aimed at securing an enrichment suspension, the European Union is poised to acknowledge Tuesday that they have failed and support a return to the UN Security Council to prepare sanctions, according to a draft document seen Monday by AFP.
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State media named on Wednesday a senior police official in the Iranian capital as Tehran’s new chief of police.Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Radan, the current deputy commander of the State Security Forces (SSF) in Tehran, will be promoted to the post of commander of the force, the government-run news agency Mehr reported.Radan will replace Brigadier General Morteza Talai, who is leaving his command of the SSF in Greater Tehran in order to stand for office in the December 15 municipal elections.Radan, a veteran Revolutionary Guards commander from the days of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, previously headed the SSF in the north-eastern province of Khorassan Razavi.
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