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TEHRAN Iran on Tuesday launched a production line for locally designed helicopters for both military and civilian purposes, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported.
It said Defense Minister Vice-Admiral Ali Shamkhani opened the military plant, which would produce Shabaviz (Owl) 75 and Shabaviz 2061 helicopters.
Iran Cuts Currency Allocations to Industry by 80 Percent, Reuters, May 4
TEHRAN Iran, hit by low oil income, cut state hard currency allocations to industries by 80 percent in the year to March, a senior official said in remarks published on Tuesday.
Deputy Industry Minister Hossein Naji said the Central Bank has reduced foreign exchange allocations, the daily Abrar-e Eqtesadi reported.
Producers had to wait up to 100 days to buy hard currency needed for imports of raw materials and spare parts, he said.
Naji said industrial investment dropped by 40 percent in the period, calling it an "alarm bell," the newspaper added.
He said often-changing government regulations
discouraged investors and exporters.
Unprecedented Number of Drug Addicts in Iran, Reuter, May 5
TEHRAN There could be 19 million drug addicts in Iran among a projected population of 119 million in about two decades if a rise in drug use continues, an Iranian expert said in remarks published on Wednesday.
He said there were 1.2 million addicts and 800,000 occasional drug users among Iran's current population of 60 million.
[According to numerous reports, the
network of drug trafficking and distribution in Iran is made up of the
Revolutionary Guards and the regime's operatives. The government uses the
pretext of fighting drug trafficking to arrest and publicly execute political
dissidents.]
Ordeal of an Iranian Woman, Toronto Star, May 2
There is another war. A war without NATO, without bombs, without peacekeepers, but with millions of victims. The war against women is waged in dozens of tyrannical countries where men with military or religious authority can seize, whip, imprison, rape, torture and kill women with complete impunity - indeed, with the applause and approval of other men."
"Mina" arrived at Pearson airport four years ago, a severely traumatized young woman, and immediately made some dire mistakes. She was dressed as beautifully as possible (on the advice of the smuggler who had arranged her flight) and, sweet-faced and dignified, did not look or behave like the victim she really was. And she didn't reveal to airport interrogators the full, humiliating horror she had suffered in Iran.
Mina had been gently raised in a small town by a cultivated, non-religious family. As a young teenager, she was twice seized and whipped by squads of fanatic Islamic enforcers - once for playing mixed badminton and once for having a wallet picture of Michael Jackson. As a young adult, she studied and taught piano.
Fatefully, she and her family dismissed the lovestruck marriage proposals by a distant relative who was a member of the Hezbollah and an Islamic fundamentalist.
In her mid-20s, Mina was arrested again. Thrown into an isolation cell, tied to a chair, beaten and kicked, she was stunned to see the same distant relative, a colonel, now in authority in the prison.
He threatened her with execution, and told her that her only hope was to marry him. It was not, of course, a marriage in the Canadian sense. A mullah was called into the colonel's office, muttered a prayer and gave religious legitimacy to the "temporary concubinage." This particularly loathsome form of rape, designed to soothe the hypocritical conscience of the perpetrator, is known to be common in today's Iran.
The colonel raped Mina repeatedly, vaginally and anally, and locked her in his home when her two-month imprisonment was ended. Realizing with despair that she was pregnant, Mina escaped and underwent a secret, illegal abortion that left her in shock and bleeding heavily. She was taken to hospital by her mother, where she was treated after she lied about her "accidental miscarriage" and soldier "husband." Then she fled Iran".