Iran Focus

London, 3 Jan – One of Iran’s top Shiite clerics has said that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is aware that Iranians are turning to secularism and evading religious teachings.

Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, widely considered the spiritual father of Iran’s hardliner conservatives, seemed pessimistic about the future of the Iranian Rulers in an interview with the hard-line weekly “9 Day”, in late December. His comments contradicted Khamenei’s insistence that Iranians, especially the young people, have been embracing Islamic teachings more in recent times.

Iran Focus

London, 2 Jan-  A senior Iranian official has accused street peddlers in Tehran of being associated with the mafia and threatened to use force against them during a December 30 interview with the state-run ILNA news agency.

Hamid Reza Tahsili, the executive director for Organizing Jobs in Tehran, said: “I believe some of the street peddlers are mafias that should not exist. Some of them have been hired by some people and have taken over our streets and unfortunately, they have rented out all the streets. We will definitely deal with force with these people because we have identified them.”

Iran Focus

London, 31 Dec – In Tehran on Saturday hundreds of university students joined together in outrage about a bus crash that killed and injured dozens of their peers on December 25th.

IRNA, the official news agency of the Islamic Republic of Iran says that “hundreds of students” are protesting and their numbers are growing. Family members of the students who were killed in the crash are also on campus this weekend. Photos and videos show a large crowd.

Iran Focus

London, 28 Dec – Children’s rights continue to suffer in Iran. Forced by the country’s increasing poverty, they must abandon school and enter the labor market to help feed their families. The numbers of those deprived of their basic rights escalate, and the children are used as pawns for the political interests of Iran’s factions.

Unofficial statistics place the number of child laborers in Iran at around 7 million. They toil under dire working conditions in small workshops that have no surveillance, as they were exempted from Iran’s Labor Laws in the 90’s.