Sunday, August 07, 2016

NEWS))))))

Canadian authorities have refused entry of more than 230 visas to residents of Iran, Nepal, Nigeria, Congo, Haiti and Morocco into Canada. They were invited to participate in an annual World Social Forum which will be held on Aug. 16 in Montreal. This is the first that this forum is held in a G7 country. The World Social Forum was formed in 2001 in opposition to the World Economic Forum and also began the process of globalization.


******
On the 28th anniversary of massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988, the Iranian regime on Tuesday Aug. 2nd 2016, in a mass execution hanged some 30 or more Kurdish political prisoners which outraged Iranians around the world including inside Iran. The exact numbers of the victims has not been released by the regime. Mrs. Maryam Rajavi the president-elect of the Iranian resistance called the mass executions of the Kurdish prisoners of the Gohardasht prison "an appalling crime against humanity" and called on all human rights bodies to condemned it. Zied Raad AlHossein UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the US state department, Germany, France and the European Union condemnd the massacre of political prisoners in Iran. Also Anthony Housefather a Canadian Federal MP wrote on his tweeter account on Tues: More mass executions were reported in Iran today. I condemn this act in the strongest term. Gross abuse of human rights by this regime.
Shahram Ahmadi was among the Sunni prisoners executed whose brother Bahram was also executed 5 years a go.
Since Aug. 2 a dozen prisoners have been hanged in different prisons in Iran. Under Hassan Rouhani the regime's president 2500 prisoners have been executed since he took office in 2013.

Yesterday Sat. Aug. 6, the Iranian-Canadians gathered in front of the Parliament Hill and across from Prime Minister's office, condemning the mass execution of  Kurdish political Sunni prisoners. They called on Canadian government and International community to condemn Aug. 2, mass executions of Kurdish prisoners and to prevent future executions in Iran. They also called for the freedom of all political prisoners in Iran. The gathering drew the attentions of Tourists and pedestrians.

The members of the Anglo-Iranian community and supporters of the National Council of Resistance
of Iran (NCRI) in the United Kingdom have decided to stage a sit-in protest on the anniversary of the massacre of 30,000 Iranian political prisoners in the summer of 1988. This protest will include 3 days of hunger strike in London outside Downing Street in solidarity with political prisoners and the victims of torture and execution inside Iran. The sit-in started on Aug. 6, and will continue until the 8 of Aug. 2016.


******
According to The Australian Times, August 4, a teenage boy has been hanged in Iran in the country’s first confirmed execution of a juvenile this year, prompting fears for the fate of 160 other young offenders on death row.
Hassan Afshar, 19, was executed at the prison in the city of Arak in central province on July 18, Amnesty International reported.

The execution went ahead even though he was only 17 at the time of the alleged crime and judicial officials had promised to review his case in September.
Iranian regime executed at least 75 juvenile offenders between 2005 and 2015, including 13 last year, according to Amnesty. Iran is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the use of the death penalty for children.

“Iran has proved that its sickening enthusiasm for putting juveniles to death, in contravention of international law, knows no bounds,” Magdalena Mughrabi, an interim deputy director at Amnesty, said. “They could not execute him quick enough.”

The Iranian authorities had scheduled the execution of another teenager for Thursday, August 4, 2016, but postponed the killing after public pressure. Alireza Tajiki was 15 years old when he was arrested. He was sentenced to death in 2013 after being tortured to confess and had been flogged, beaten and suspended by his arms and feet, Amnesty said.


******
An Iranian regime nuclear scientist detained since 2010 has been executed, according to his family.
Shahram Amiri's mother said the body of her son had been returned to their hometown with rope marks around his neck, showing that he had been hanged.
He was later buried. Amiri had been held at a secret location after returning from the US.
Some reports say he had in-depth knowledge of Iran's nuclear programme.
Amiri, who was born in 1977, went missing after taking a pilgrimage to Mecca in 2009. He surfaced in US a year later.
In a video he claimed he had escaped from US custody. He returned to Tehran in 2010 to a hero's welcome.


******
$400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of 4 Americans detained in Tehran, according to US and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward. According to Wall Street Journal, Aug. 3, the Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The US procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.
The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with the Iranian regime to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch.
The settlement coincided with the formal implementation that same weekend of the landmark nuclear agreement reached between Tehran, the US and other global powers the summer before.
“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” Barack Obama said at the White House on Jan. 17—without disclosing the $400 million cash payment. Senior US officials denied any link between the payment and the prisoner exchange. They say the way the various strands came together simultaneously was coincidental, not the result of any quid pro quo. But U.S. officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.
Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a fierce foe of the Iran nuclear deal, accused President Obama of paying“ a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for US hostages.”
“This break with longstanding U.S. policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures” of Americans, he said.
Since the cash shipment, the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard has arrested two more Iranian-Americans. Tehran has also detained dual-nationals from France, Canada and the U.K. in recent months. Members of Congress are seeking to pass legislation preventing the Obama administration from making any further cash payments to Iran. One of the bills requires for the White House to make public the details of its $1.7 billion transfer to Iran.
“President Obama’s…payment to Iran in January, which we now know will fund Iran’s military expansion, is an appalling example of executive branch governance,” said Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.), who co-wrote the bill. “Subsidizing Iran’s military is perhaps the worst use of taxpayer dollars ever by an American president.”

******
Syrian fighters broke through to besieged opposition-held areas in eastern Aleppo on Saturday in an assault on a major government military complex meant to end a month-long siege.
The offensive against the government's Ramousah military complex, which contains a number of military colleges, began on Friday. Two rebel groups said on Saturday they had broken the siege.
The Syrian people in the streets of a part of eastern Aleppo celebrated the siege being broken. According to political exports the break of siege in Aleppo was a blow to the Iranian regime's full scale efforts in Syria to keep Bashar Al Assad in power.

******
Teenage Munich killer Ali David Sonboly 'went on a weapons training holiday to Iran with his father' before murdering nine in gun rampage.
Daily Mail- Munich wrote: killer Ali David Sonboly went on a weapons training holiday to Iran with his father before embarking on his killing spree.
A fortnight after the 18-year-old lured young people to a McDonald's restaurant in Munich and killed nine of them before taking his own life it has emerged that the German-Iranian youth traveled with his father Masoud to Iran in December last year.
The news magazine Focus said that he underwent 'weapons training' while there which included firing guns.
 His father Masoud did not mention the Iranian trip, or gun firing while there, in an interview last weekend with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
At least 35 people were wounded during Sonboly's attack, which began at a McDonald's restaurant and ended with him turning his 9mm Glock pistol on himself.
Investigators have ruled out any link with ISIS jihadists, although he appeared to have planned the assault with chilling precision for a year.
Many of his victims in the bloodbath were of foreign origin and there are investigations into whether he deliberately targeted them.