Satellite pictures released this week confirmed that the Iranian government was rebuilding a nuclear facility in Nantaz, after it was destroyed by an unexplained fire in July.
The images appear to confirm Tehran’s announcement that it intends to build state of the art centrifuges. The official statement on Iran’s nuclear program, which the regime has historically been tightlipped about, has been commented on by experts, who said it signaled Tehran’s willingness to negotiate with Washington after the U.S. presidential election.
Facebook said hackers in Iran were behind a disinformation campaign targeting the Middle East in 2019, including Israel and Saudi Arabia. The allegations come after an online campaign targeting Democrat voters ahead of the U.S. presidential elections next month was attributed to Iranian hackers.
The U.S. Treasury Department issued another round of sanctions on the Islamic Republic’s oil and petrochemical sectors, which included penalties against Iran’s Ministry of Petroleum, China, Singapore, and several companies, including two based in Britain.
At the same time, the U.S. Justice Department filed two lawsuits asking for the seizure of Iranian oil and weapons, which the U.S. National Security Division said were part of a scheme by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps to secretly ship weapons to Yemen and fuel to Venezuela.
A senior member of Iran’s medical association called out the Iranian government’s official Covid figures on Wednesday, after Iranian doctors urged Iran’s political leaders to do more to stop the spread of the virus in the country.
Hossein Gheshlaghi, who works at Iran’s Supreme Medical Council said, ‘buried data’ from medical staff and ground level reporting showed the number of Covid deaths in Iran were much higher than the government was admitting. Gheshlaghi also said the real figures were likely to be four or five times higher than the numbers issued by the government.
And Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was told to ‘pack her bags for prison’ by Iran’s judiciary, ahead of a new trial set to take place on Monday. The mother-of-one has been under house arrest in Tehran since March due to the Coronavirus pandemic, after being imprisoned in 2016 on espionage charges, which she denies.
Nazanin’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, said the sudden announcement to summon her to court was directly linked to a British court’s decision to delay a hearing over an outstanding 400 million pound debt between Iran and the UK, which arose before the 1979 revolution.
Responding to the new trial, the UK Foreign Office said the hearing was an unwarranted, unjustified and unacceptable decision, which was causing enormous distress to Nazanin and her family.
