Gaza Rockets, Israel’s Response: Five rockets in 48 hours have been launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel, one of them taking the life of a Thai worker. In response, Israeli Air Forces carried out two air strikes on two tunnels which wounded 14 Palestinians, two seriously.
Latest on Israel-Palestine Negotiations: On Friday, the Quartet (Russia, the United States, the UN and the European Union) called on Israel and the Palestinians to renew peace negotiations to achieve a two-state solution within 24 months. The statement said:
2225 GMT: Rafsanjani Watch. This could be interesting — Hossein Marashi, cousin of Hashemi Rafsanjani’s wife and a Vice Secretary-General of the Kargozaran Party. has been arrested.
2220 GMT: Edward Yeranian of the Voice of America offers an analysis, “Iranian Government Releases Prisoners for Persian New Year”, with contributions from EA staff.
2215 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Women’s rights activist Somaiyeh Farid was arrested on Wednesday. Farid was at Evin Prison enquiring about her husband, Hojat (Siavash) Montazeri, who was arrested on 5 March.
1615 GMT: The Iraqi electoral commission is reporting that voter turnout is well above 50 percent in all but one of 11 provinces declared so far.
Strikingly, the turnout in Diyala, a former centre of Sunni insurgency, was more than 90 percent. That’s a sharp contrast from the 2005 national elections, which were boycotted by the main Sunni parties.
1600 GMT: Iraqi security forces have announced a 10 p.m. (1900 GMT) curfew in Baghdad to allow safe transport of ballot boxes to election commission headquarters.
2135 GMT: Rumour of Day. Kalameh alleges that prisoners held in cellblock 209 of Evin Prison have been commanded to fill in forms about their views on election fraud and whether the protest leaders are connected to foreign countries.
2100 GMT: Dr Mohammad Maleki, the former head of Tehran University, has reportedly been released after 191 days in detention. Maleki, 76, suffers from prostate cancer.
2055 GMT: United4Iran has a profile of Jahanbakhsh Khanjani, former advisor to Iran’s Minister of Interior in the Khatami Presidency, who was released on 24 February after spending more than eight months in prison. According to another released prisoner, Khanjani was under pressure to confess and was constantly moved from general confinement to solidarity confinement.
2115 GMT: We’ve posted video, originally shown on BBC Persian, of the attack on Tehran University halls of resident on 15 June, three days after the Presidential election.
2100 GMT: Sanctions Follow-up. Earlier today (1555 GMT) I got a bit wound up about an editorial in The Wall Street Journal pushing — I thought dishonestly — for sanctions. Matt Duss follows up by taking apart the editorial’s claim “prominent Iranian dissidents [have] moved from adamant opposition to severe sanctions to hesitant acceptance of the idea”.
2050 GMT: Back to “Dirt and Dust”. Ruhollah Hosseinian, the head of Islamic Revolution party in the Iranian Parliament (Majlis) and a fervent supporter of President Ahmadinejad, has choice words for the opposition in an interview with Khabar Online: “The opponents received a firm response from the people….Before February 11, I have said that on its way, the raging flood of people on the anniversary of Islamic revolution victory will remove any dirt and dust.”
“”Dirt and dust” was Ahmadinejad’s infamous description of his opponents in his “victory” speech the day after the 12 June Presidential election.
2120 GMT: Author, translator and journalist Omid Mehregan has been released from detention.
2100 GMT: So all our watching on many fronts is overtaken by the “Iran Might Be Getting A Bomb” story. Little coming out of Iran tonight; in contrast, every “Western” news outlet is screaming about the draft International Atomic Energy report on Iran’s nuclear programme. (Funny how each, like CNN, is implying that it “obtained” an exclusive copy.)
1830 GMT: Political Prisoner News. “Green media” pull together reports that we carried last night: 50 detainees were released, including Shahabeddin Tabatabei, member of the Islamic Iran Participation Front and head of youth in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mohammad Khatami, Parisa Kakaei of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters, student activist Maziar Samiee, and Khosrow Ghashghai of the Freedom Movement of Iran.
1955 GMT: The lawyer for 21-year-old Amir Reza Arefi says his client has been sentenced to death for “mohareb” (war against God). Arefi was arrested in April 2009, before the June election.
1945 GMT: Keeping Rafsanjani in His Box. An EA correspondent puts together an important story: with the 7th general assembly of the Assembly of Experts due next week, probably on Tuesday and Wednesday, new attacks have been launched upon Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Assembly.
A statement from a number of clerics at Qom declares that, due to the performance of Hashemi Rafsanjani in the past few months, he is not suitable to continue in his post. And Fars News, criticising Rafsanjani’s son Mehdi Hashemi for not returning to Iran after five months abroad, asserts that his settling in London is “strange and suspicious”.
1715 GMT: The Karroubi Wave. It appears that the Karroubi family — not just Mehdi Karroubi, but the family — are ready to propel the next wave of opposition to the Government and regime. In addition to Fatemeh Karroubi’s interview (1600 GMT), Mehdi Karroubi’s son Hossein has spoken out to Radio Zamaneh.
It has been eerie to watch the first few days of Operation Moshtarak, the US-Afghanistan-ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) military offensive against the Taliban in Helmand Province. It is not just the observation of the battle from thousands of miles away; it is that this encounter has been scripted.
The offensive was signalled weeks ago in declaration from US military and political headquarters, reporters were suitably embedded, and the ritual proclamations were issued. BBC radio even turned over several minutes of prime-time programming to the speech, in full, of a British commander to his troops on the eve of battle. (Ever since William Shakespeare put words in the mouth of Henry V at Agincourt in 1415 — “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” — this has been required in presentation of English/British wars.) Yet all the scripting could not set down the final-act resolution of this question:
This morning an Afghan official is declaring that 12 Taliban were killed on Sunday. That makes it a score draw with number of dead civilians, as 12 perished in an American rocket strike. In total, about 40 Taliban are reported dead since the start of the offensive. That’s 40 bad guys in what was supposed to be a showdown battle for the Taliban “stronghold” of Marja and in what The Washington Post, voicing the words of a US Lieutenant-Colonel, is calling “last-ditch efforts” by the enemy.
Gaza Rockets, Israel’s Response: Five rockets in 48 hours have been launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel, one of them taking the life of a Thai worker. In response, Israeli Air Forces carried out two air strikes on two tunnels which wounded 14 Palestinians, two seriously.
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