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Iran’s favored candidate races to a hollow victory

Iran’s favored candidate races to a hollow victory

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s presidential election campaign has commenced in earnest, with seven Guardian Council-approved candidates vying to replace President Hassan Rouhani after his eight-year tenure. The 12-member Guardian Council, tasked with vetting and filtering candidates in elections, eliminated 585 other aspirants, many of them seen as moderate and pro-reform, narrowing the field to a handful of known conservatives. Chief among them is Ebrahim Raisi, the Islamic Republic’s Chief Justice known for his anti-Western views. He is widely viewed as the frontrunner in a field of candidates critics say has failed to capture the public’s imagination. Polling day is June 18. Distinguished pragmatist figures who...

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Water wars on the horizon in Iran

Water wars on the horizon in Iran

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: When facing down public dissent and unrest, Iranian authorities are known to downplay the magnitude of the various crises they confront. But officials are uncharacteristically sounding the alarm about a mounting water crisis, one which could trigger a full-blown conflict over access to the essential resource. According to Minister of Energy Reza Ardakanian, the coming summer in the Iranian calendar year will be the “driest in the recent five decades.” The minister said he was concerned about peaking demand for drinking water and cast doubt on the government’s ability to ensure an uninterrupted supply of water nationally. Iran is now confronting its most severe drought in half a...

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Systemic racism in the US assumes a variety of covert and overt forms: Faye V. Harrison

Systemic racism in the US assumes a variety of covert and overt forms: Faye V. Harrison

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: The tragic killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, by a former Minnesota police officer on May 25, was not the first instance of white cops resorting to undue force against Black citizens, but was certainly egregious enough that made the American people’s blood boil, sparking massive protests in the United States from coast to coast, prompting demonstrations in some 30 countries against racism and police brutality. The killing of George Floyd was exposed and went viral owing to the videos captured by bystanders who were witnessing the law enforcement officer Derek Chauvin applying a neck restraint on the unarmed man for nearly 9 minutes when he was put under arrest after Floyd was...

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Efforts are needed to make entry to Canada more welcoming and secure: Constance Backhouse

Efforts are needed to make entry to Canada more welcoming and secure: Constance Backhouse

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Without reservations, Canada is one of the most immigrant-friendly nations in the world. According to the 2016 census, 7.5 million people, representing 21.9 percent of the Canadian population, were immigrants. International migration accounts for more than 80 percent of population growth in the North American country as per the 2019 data. An exceptional mosaic of multicultural amalgamation, the federal government entrenched the value of cultural diversity in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1985, passed a Multiculturalism Act in 1988 and founded the Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship in 1991. The government recognizes the ethnic and aboriginal minorities’ right to preserve their...

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Key governments have rolled back their environmental commitments: Annalisa Savaresi

Key governments have rolled back their environmental commitments: Annalisa Savaresi

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Climate change is a complex threat to life on Earth, driving countless shifts worldwide, and it is only through collective action on the individual, national, regional and international levels that it can be addressed meaningfully. The provision of food, fiber, fuel and freshwater, without which human society and its economy cannot survive, is jeopardized by the rising global temperature and record levels of land and freshwater exploitation. The UN Secretary General António Guterres has termed climate change the “defining challenge of our time.” Some experts talk of climate change as a “threat multiplier” that even has the potential to increase the risk of political instability and terrorism. Climate...

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International pressure can raise awareness of the problem of Islamophobia: Heiner Bielefeldt

International pressure can raise awareness of the problem of Islamophobia: Heiner Bielefeldt

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: There are many indications leading us to believe that we are living in an age characterized by the face-off of religion and science. Even so, although science is making headway in eliminating many of the humanity’s challenges, faith hasn’t surrendered its preeminence, and The Guardian reported in 2018 that 84 percent of the global population identifies with a religious group, with Christianity being the largest faith group, followed by Islam, Hindus and Buddhists. Sixteen percent of the people in the world, at nearly 1.2 billion, said they have no religious affiliation. Freedom of religion is a fundamental human right safeguarding the diversity and conscience of human societies. The ability of the...

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Vulnerable communities bear the brunt of the climate change impacts: Ole W. Pedersen

Vulnerable communities bear the brunt of the climate change impacts: Ole W. Pedersen

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: The world is reeling from an unprecedented, lethal pandemic and governments are scrambling to come up with a remedy in the form of a vaccine that can tamp down the torrent of deaths and infection it is causing. It is intrinsic that the scourge of COVID-19 and the global economic recession associated with it represent the leitmotif of daily conversations, soaking up the attention of media and the public. At this critical time, it might be that such pressing global challenges as global warming are overlooked. But let’s face it: our summers and winters are getting warmer; with the rise of sea levels at rates not chronicled in some 3,000 years, cities as colossal as Jakarta might be submerged altogether; the...

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The European Union’s treatment of minorities is inept and inconsistent: Raymond Taras

The European Union’s treatment of minorities is inept and inconsistent: Raymond Taras

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Although France has recouped some composure after the maelstrom ignited by the murder of Samuel Paty, a popular middle school teacher who had shown cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in his class on freedom of thought, the republic is still finding itself in the middle of an uncomfortable debate about the compatibility of secular values and Islam. The comments of President Emmanuel Macron who defended the reprinting of the controversial cartoons by the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, and his tongue-lashing of Islamic “separatism” and “radical Islam” sent shockwaves across the Muslim world and infuriated leaders and the general public in Islamic countries where huge crowds turned up for street protests and a...

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More American Jews are critical of Israeli policies today: Rachad Antonius

More American Jews are critical of Israeli policies today: Rachad Antonius

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: The novel agreements on the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the governments of United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan have unveiled evolving paradigms in the geopolitical landscape of Middle East and North Africa. The accords expose how pan-Arab, pan-Islamic ambitions are being discarded by the regional states in favor of economic, technological and military incentives that initiating relations with the Jewish state might bring about. The majority of Palestinians feel they are abandoned following the signing of the Abraham Accords, brokered by the outgoing Trump administration. A September poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has found an overwhelming...

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Major greenhouse gas emitters should address climate change: Jonathan Verschuuren

Major greenhouse gas emitters should address climate change: Jonathan Verschuuren

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Facts about climate change are frightening enough to prod conscientious citizens of the 21st century into taking swift action to avert the tragedy which now looms large over their lives and survival. According to NASA data, the average global temperatures in 2019 were warmer than the entire 20th century average. Eleven percent of the world’s population, namely 800 million people, is highly vulnerable to climate change impacts. Global warming and extreme weather conditions are responsible for as many as 150,000 deaths annually. And despite the abundance of figures and studies pointing to the acuteness of the situation, there are leaders who irresponsibly call climate change a hoax and deny climate science...

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Climate change is no longer a future threat but a present challenge: Bridget Lewis

Climate change is no longer a future threat but a present challenge: Bridget Lewis

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: It was in 1965 when scientists on the US President’s Science Advisory Committee broached the idea of a “greenhouse effect” that was sparking concerns about the rising temperature of the Earth, and no more than a decade later, the distinguished geoscientist Wallace Broecker coined the term “global warming”, which took a while to enter the mainstream debate but carved a fundamentally new path for research and excavation into how anthropogenic activities accelerate the heating of the planet and endanger the lives of humans and other species. The international community’s fight to tackle climate change as a concern of universal proportions started more than three decades ago, when the...

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There is little awareness of the history of racism in Canada: Yasmin Jiwani

There is little awareness of the history of racism in Canada: Yasmin Jiwani

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Canada’s reputation as a cultural mosaic that enables the mingling of people from different backgrounds and pedigrees and empowers them to actualize their potentials has been a popular attraction for the dreamers aspiring to live more dignified lives in a country that values their capabilities and offers them opportunities for growth. The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, in power since 2015, has been endeavoring to depict Canada as a welcoming nation that is receptive to skilled labor force and international students planning to transform their future in a multicultural, inspiring environment, and happy to shelter refugees fleeing persecution, war and insecurity at home. But contrary to the conventional...

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