Aug. 13 – Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, unveiled his preferred cabinet this week and shared the list with Iran’s parliament for approval.
The conservative and male-only cabinet includes Hossein Amir-Abdollahian as the nomination for foreign minister, Esmail Khatib as intelligence minister, Ahmad Vahidi as interior minister and Javad Owji as oil minister.
Several of the men in Raisi’s proposed cabinet have been sanctioned by the United States, including Mr. Vahidi, who is a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. Vahidi is believed to have been involved in the bombing of a Jewish community in Buenos Aires in 1994 which killed 85 people, and is wanted by Interpol in connection with the murders.
Analysts at the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), said the Iranian government’s drone warfare program posed an increasing threat in the Middle East, following an attack on a ship off the coast of Oman which was blamed on Iran.
A rise in ships being hijacked, detained and struck by drones has been attributed to Iran by military experts, who said the threat posed to shipping in the Persian Gulf by Iran was substantial.
And the trial of Hamid Noury, a man believed to be a deputy prosecutor in Iran’s prison system during the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988, got underway in Sweden.
During a hearing for the trial, Swedish prosecutors read out the names of the political prisoners who were hanged in 1988, and described the torture and executions of the victims.
