NCRI - The following is a press release by the Amnesty International today expressing concern over deteriorating human rights violations in Iran:

Six months after Iran's new president came to power human rights violations remain widespread and the new government has failed to take any action to address the situation, Amnesty International revealed in a report published today.

NCRI - According to the Lebanese Daily Star, Walid Jumblatt, member of the Lebanese parliament revealed a joint plot by the Iranian regime and Syria to alter the Lebanese map in order to take advantage of the situation. Jumbalat spoke to visitors to his mountain refuge of Mukhtara on Sunday.

Jumbalat stressed that the Shebaa Farms is not Lebanese but in fact Syrian and that Syria had altered the maps pushing the borderline to show that Shebaa Farms is Lebanese and this way the resistance against the Israeli occupation of a supposedly Lebanese territory would be justified.

Agence France Presse - French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy branded Iran's nuclear programme for the first time Thursday as a "clandestine, military" project.
 
"It's very simple: no civilian nuclear programme can explain Iran's nuclear programme," he told France 2 television in an interview, two days after Tehran confirmed it was resuming sensitive uranium enrichment work.

NCRI - Uranium enrichment resumed in Iran according to an official of the religious dictatorship ruling that country.

Javad Vaidi from Supreme National Security Council of the clerical regime said on Tuesday: "The work has resumed (at the Natanz enrichment facility)."

The move came despite warnings from France, Russia and the United Nations not to take action that might escalate the tense dispute with the West over fears it is seeking nuclear bomb. Germany and China have also expressed concern.

NCRI - Death sentences for two teenagers were approved by the State Supreme Court on Monday according to state-run news agency IRNA.

The head of Tehran's punitive court, Naser Saraj, was quoted telling reporters that the two were both 18 years of age and their death sentences were approved for alleged sexual assault. They were identified only as "E. N." and "E. K."

The same news agency also reported on Tuesday that two men are going to be hanged in Shiraz, provincial capital of Fars, central Iran, on Wednesday. Death sentences for "Ayat Kh." and "Mehdi A." were endorsed by the State Supreme Court, said the Revolutionary Prosecutor of Fars province.

NCRI - Death decree on Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses, by Khomeini will remain in force forever according to an announcement by the clerical regime's so called "Martyrs Foundation" today.

The announcement was made on the anniversary of the 1989 fatwa (death decree) issued by the founder of the religious dictatorship in Iran.

"Imam Khomeini's fatwa on the apostate Salman Rushdie will remain in force for eternity," said the Martyrs Foundation, which has offered 2.8 millon dollar bounty for Rushdie's head.

Agence France Presse - Iran has started putting uranium feedstock gas into centrifuges, the first step in manufacturing what can be either nuclear reactor fuel or material for an atom bomb, diplomats told AFP Monday.

"Iran has put gas into centrifuges at its pilot enrichment plant in Natanz," a diplomat in Vienna said.

By Con Coughlin in Washington

The Sunday Telegraph - When it comes to dealing with the threat posed by Iran's nuclear programme, the Bush administration is prepared to take a far more measured - some would say mature - approach to coalition-building than was obvious during the build-up to the Iraq war.

By Nick Cohen

The Observer - For three weeks, there have been demonstrations across the planet about a great injustice done to Muslims. After baton-wielding cops inflicted dozens of injuries, the fear of death is in the air. George W Bush's State Department has warned of 'systematic oppression', while secularists and fundamentalists have revealed their mutually incompatible values. Since you ask, I am not talking about the global menace of Scandinavian cartoonists that has so terrified our fearless free press, but mass arrests in Iran.