What Ordinary Iranians Say About Direct Talks With US

Rouhollah Latifi, spokesperson for the Customs Administration office, said Friday that 570 items confiscated included old coins and books.

The shipment was found in a truck loaded with second-hand home furniture in transit to Canada at the Bazargan border crossing, West Azarbaijan province, the spokesman said. The coins were worth several billion rials, Latifi added.

Within the haul were 18 bronze pieces dating from the first millennium BC, antique daggers, seven glass chandeliers, 322 silver coins, a one-dollar coin minted in 1845, some Qajar-era (1795-1925) plates, and a handwritten gold-gilded Qur'an.

Under Iranian law, such artifacts are deemed part of "national heritage" and illegal to export unless expressly authorized by the relevant authorities. Smuggling antiques can lead to years of imprisonment and fine equal to twice the value of the smuggled items.

Iranian items legitimately for sale in western auction houses or by dealers – including carpets, manuscripts, painting, ceramics, and woodcrafts – can fetch from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands, or more. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum bought the 16th-century ‘Ardabil carpet’ in 1893 for £2,000.

The drone apparently returned to Lebanon but it is not clear how long it lingered in Israeli airspace (video).

Iran-backed Hezbollah, which fought a month-long war against Israel on the Lebanon border in 2006, said Friday's flight was a 40-minute reconnaissance mission. Earlier this week, it said it had started producing its own drones in Lebanon.

Hours later and roughly 100 km to the north, a thundering roar was heard in the Lebanese capital Beirut caused by Israeli planes passing in the lowest overflight in years, according to many videos recorded by residents.

On Wednesday, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech that his group has the ability to convert rockets into precision missiles with the help of "experts from the Islamic Republic."

Israel's military said Hezbollah's radio-controlled drone had set off air raid sirens in the Galilee region of northern Israel warning residents to take cover.

"Aerial defense systems identified and tracked the threat along with helicopters and fighter jets that were dispatched," it said, adding that its Iron Dome defense system had tried to intercept the drone but it made it back.

On Thursday, Israel said it had downed a drone that belonged to Hezbollah after it crossed into Israeli air space.

With reporting by Reuters

Some observers have expressed concern that the disappointing performance of Iran's 11th parliament (Majles) since the 1979 revolution might lead to another record voter low turnout in 2024. The parliament's performance already led to an extremely low turnout in the 2020 by-election.

Nearly under every social media post about the parliament, users point out that lawmakers have broken their promise of making the voting process in the parliament transparent. In early November, the parliament rejected a bill that called for open voting and a renewed push in February was supported by only 66 of the 290 lawmakers. However, the Majles might approve the bill towards the end of its term only to leave it as an annoying legacy for the next Majles.

While the current Majles started its work with criticism of the Rouhani administration's economic performance, it has not yet approved any bill meant to bring about improvement in Iran's ailing economy. Majles speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said in a rare admission in October, “We could not accomplish anything,” and added, “We were not able to work correctly.”

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Meanwhile, in July 2021, Khabar Online, a leading news website in Tehran characterized the current Majles as a "minority parliament" that should avoid provocative legislation opposed by most Iranians. The website noted that the ultra-conservative parliament has already annoyed a major part of the population by considering a bill to limit citizens’ access to the Internet and opposing a long-awaited salary increase for the country's low-paid teachers who have been taking to the streets in recent months.

Khabar Online also said that 38 lawmakers at the Majles had won between 2 to 10 percent of the votes in their constituencies, when they got elected in February 2020. Two members won around 2 percent of the votes in their districts, while at least 3 lawmakers in this group chair various parliamentary committees despite their less than 10 percent voter base.

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While at times the Majles joined other critics to lash out at the Raisi administration for nepotism and giving big jobs to small men with no merits, it turned out in November that some of the insiders who got the big jobs were the relatives of lawmakers.

The parliament has also been harshly criticized for not objecting to the appointment of IRGC generals as state officials or allowing them to run for President.

The Majles has also been criticized by the press for not being able to carry out its supervisory role. A group of lawmakers tabled motions during the past months to impeach several ministers including the ministers of labor, industry and health for breaking laws and shortcomings in their performance, but each time, the Majles Presidium refused to officially acknowledge the call for impeachment.

Based on what the Majles has done or failed to do during the past two years, some Iranian media outlets, including the moderate Rouydad24, have said that many of the current lawmakers might find it hard to convince Iranian voters to vote for them in 2024 when the turnout is likely to be even lower than in 2020.

The parliament’s record of coordination with the government has also been criticized. While most commentators in Iran believed that a hardliner Majles would work well with the ultraconservative government of Ebrahim Raisi, the first signs of a rift between the two emerged in late February as the parliament disagreed with key parts of the government's budget bill.

The students also issued a statement calling on the Iranian authorities to take measures against the new law by the Indian government.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which runs the governments in Karnataka as well as control the national government, has for decades campaigned for the application of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC), which some minorities believe would be tantamount to the imposition of Hindu laws.

The Iranian students who participated in the state-sponsored rally described the new hijab restrictions as discriminatory against Muslims and called it a violation of the basic human right to freedom of clothing. However, it is decades that the Islamic Republic has imposed its compulsory hijab rules and anyone who dares to protest will face persecution or heavy-handed jail terms.

Choosing which clothes to wear is an important part of expression as confirmed under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

More than four decades after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, there is still much resistance to the prescribed standards of hijab promoted by the state, which many women refuse to accept even at the cost of being arrested, fined or even lashed.

Amir-Abdollahian is set to join many world leaders who have converged for the three-day event annual security gathering, known as "Davos for defense", which kicks off on Friday at the luxurious Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich.

The weekend conference will be dominated by the Ukraine crisis, but the event serves as a platform for other global issues.

Roundtables on Saturday, the main day of events, will also address the fate of the Vienna talks to revive Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers and the fragile security situation in the Sahel.

Both issues have flared up this week with reports about the finalization of a new US-Iranian deal and the French withdrawal of troops from Mali after almost a decade fighting Islamist insurgents.

Over the weekend there will also be high-profile panels on cryptocurrency, climate change and the pandemic.

The chairman of the conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, has told reporters that he could not recall a time when there were "so many overlapping crises".

This is the first no-show by a Russian delegation in years, highlighting how much East-West relations have deteriorated.

The official agenda of the Iranian foreign minister is not announced but much of the action is likely to take place on the sidelines of the main stage.