On March 4, police arrested 33 women and charged them with endangering national security, propaganda against the state and taking part in an illegal gathering. The women were demonstrating outside Iran’s Tehran Revolutionary Court to demand a fair trial for five prominent women’s rights activists arrested in June 2006 during a peaceful protest.
Iran
Womens rights activists in Iran have initiated a petition campaign, titled One Million Signatures Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws. The campaign a follow-up to a June 12 protest in Tehran last year that was brutally attacked by police aims to overturn anti-women laws, as well as provide education, involve women in organising for their rights, and promote collaboration between different groups. Signatures are being collected via door-to-door contact and dialogue with individual women, in public places and at events where women gather, through seminars and forums, and also through the internet. For more information visit <http://en.we4change.com>.
In an interview printed in the February 19 London Financial Times, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the UNs International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that Iran could be as little as six months away from being able to enrich uranium to fuel-grade level on an industrial scale.
Washington is growing increasingly frustrated that its European Union allies are refusing to toughen financial sanctions that were imposed on Iran by the UN Security Council last December to pressure Iran to abandon research into the production of enriched uranium.
The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of buying time for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a surge of US troops in Iraq, George W. Bush identified Iran as his real target. We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria, he said. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.
Washingtons plan for military action against Iran goes far beyond limited air strikes on its nuclear facilities and would effectively unleash a war against the country, a former US intelligence analyst told Reuters on January 21.
It seems like an overly cliched script with a plot so tired that even Hollywoods dross-marketing machine might think twice about touching it: a Mid-East nation led by an aggressive regime with a record of violating human rights whenever it feels like (which turns out to be often) threatens countries in the region with its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But, in a twist unlikely to make it into the next blockbuster, according to a January 7 article in Londons Sunday Times, its the Israeli military thats planning to use nuclear weapons, not the mad Arabs that are the more conventional WMD-toting movie villains.
In the January 16 New Yorker magazine, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the Pentagon has begun updating its plans for an invasion of Iran. Hersh reported that, "Strategists at the headquarters of the US Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military's war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran."
In an article for the November 27 New Yorker magazine released in advance on November 19, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that a highly classified assessment by the CIA had found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The US, Britain, Italy, France, Australia and Bahrain began two days of joint naval exercises in the Persian Gulf on October 31, including marine boardings of ships 32 kilometres from the Iranian coastline. Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters in Tehran: We are watching their movements very carefully. We do not consider this exercise appropriate. US moves go in the direction of more adventurism, not of stability and security.
In a clear warning to Afghanistan's Taliban leadership, Iran has staged the largest military exercises since the 1979 Islamic revolution along the border with Afghanistan. Seventy thousand of Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary
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