A Journalist Whipped for Incorrect News Reporting

The newspaper Hamdeli reported that "Hosseini Mohammadi, a journalist for Najafabad News, was sentenced to 40 lashes on June 15 of this year for incorrectly reporting the number of motorcycles confiscated by the police." The report stated that he published a news piece about the confiscation of 35 motorcycles belonging to students of a vocational school in the city, and later included a response from the relevant authority in his news outlet, which stated that the number of vehicles was actually 8. However, it was reported that the whipping sentence was carried out on January 5. According to the newspaper, Abolfazl Abutorabi, the representative of this city in the Islamic Consultative Assembly, confirmed the whipping of Hosseini Mohammadi but expressed "regret" over the execution of the sentence. He mentioned that extensive negotiations had taken place with the managers of the complaining authority at both the county and provincial levels, and it was expected that, considering the journalist's written commitment, the execution of the sentence would be prevented. Unfortunately, in the early hours of January 5, this individual was arrested and punished. Abutorabi, who has judicial experience, stated: "Regardless of the competence of the court that issued the sentence, it seems that the complainant could have shown more tolerance or at least used alternative punishments." He added that although "according to the law, the judge is completely independent and issues the sentence based on the evidence in the case, given my own experiences, it could have been considered to impose other penalties due to the youth of the accused, lack of a criminal record, absence of malicious intent, timely submission of the complainant's response, and the not-so-significant difference between the published news and the issued response." The newspaper also covered electoral speculations regarding potential candidates from the principlist faction in the upcoming presidential elections. The mayor of Tehran commented on rumors about his candidacy, stating, "We have a duty to work, and the position is not important." Another potential candidate, Saeed Jalili, mentioned that "in certain periods, elections are of significant political importance in the country, and what solidifies the continuity of the system is that the movement must always be forward." Mahsa Jazini, in a report for Shargh newspaper, emphasized that "two potential principlist candidates are accustomed to giving ambiguous answers" and noted that their political actions indicate they are preparing for electoral competition, but when asked direct questions, they provide evasive answers. The newspaper also reminded that "the artillery of Saeed Jalili and Baqer Qalibaf has recently been aimed at the presidency, but this does not prevent the internal artillery in the principlist faction from remaining silent." It mentioned that "Jalili's allusion to astronomical properties last week is a sign that the two electoral rivals of 2013 are set to remain electoral rivals in 2021." The newspaper reported that "Qalibaf has made it clear to the principlists that he will only enter the electoral competition if he is the sole option of this faction; this means he is not willing to engage in another intra-group competition." However, "the question that can be raised is whether the clearer electoral actions of Baqer Qalibaf mean that he has secured the necessary guarantees from the principlist faction? Does this mean that Saeed Jalili and his supporters have backed down in favor of him?" The newspaper Etemad featured a headline about a "two-party model proposal" and mentioned that "Mohsen Mir-Damadi has proposed the formation of two broad fronts of reformists and principlists." Hamdeli, in a report titled "The Brave Loser with a Big Lie," discussed the unveiling of tactics by extremist opponents of the government for the 2021 elections, stating that "former supporters of Ahmadinejad, who have now turned against him and criticize many of his actions over the past eight years, have adopted an interesting approach in countering Rouhani by likening the performance of the current president to that of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." The newspaper noted that "this is why the strange proximity of Babak Zanjani to Ahmadinejad and his allies can suddenly be turned into financial relations between this oil defendant and the president and men of the eleventh government. They take Ahmadinejad's unrealistic statistics and replace the name of the current president with Ahmadinejad and attribute it to the current government. They even try to depict the current dollar as more expensive than during Ahmadinejad's era. They also attempt to compare some of the president's close associates to Rahimi, Mashai, and Baghaei, so that now that Ahmadinejad has fallen out of favor and has even been discouraged from entering the elections, they can reconstruct him in the image of the current president and then attack this self-constructed image with all their might." The newspaper Ebtekar wrote about the "slogans of the 2021 elections," stating that "in the eleventh presidential election, economic issues, lifting sanctions, and the nuclear issue, which had become a factor for threatening Iran by the West, were the focus of candidates' slogans." However, it noted that "despite the fact that the economic situation in the country still needs improvement, it has somewhat distanced itself from the turmoil of 2013 and is experiencing a calmer time." Marzieh Jalili wrote in this newspaper that "it is no longer possible to heat up electoral slogans using keywords like lifting sanctions or the nuclear issue, as these two topics, most of which have been realized through the implementation of the JCPOA, require continuity and implementation of programs through other channels to achieve further goals pursued after the JCPOA." The newspaper Ebtekar also mentioned that in the upcoming presidential election, "people expect candidates to announce their candidacies with well-researched and coherent programs aimed at reducing unemployment, one of the most important current problems in the country, and to devise measures to improve people's livelihoods." Meanwhile, the newspaper Javan, close to the Revolutionary Guards, reported in a piece titled "Feminizing the Elections with Feminism Tools" about the potential candidacy of women in the upcoming presidential elections, describing it as "an electoral tactic to provoke women's sentiments aimed at undermining the Guardian Council." Mohammad Ismaili in Javan newspaper wrote that "for several weeks now, media outlets affiliated with the Western-oriented faction and prominent figures of this spectrum have been pursuing the topic of the potential candidacy of women in the presidential elections, and this time the excuse of affiliates of this faction to attack the powers of the Guardian Council and artificially defend women in Islamic society is the presence of Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi as the spokesperson for the Popular Front of Islamic Revolution Forces." The newspaper stated that "after the Popular Front of Islamic Revolution Forces announced its existence, a wave emerged among personalities and media affiliated with the Western-oriented faction, suggesting that the possibility of an alliance of the revolutionary faction around Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi's candidacy is very high, and through such distorted news, they aim to pressure the Guardian Council, although at the threshold of every election, one of the repetitive tools of the reformist faction is to undermine the powers of the Guardian Council, including its supervisory oversight. However, what makes this recent case different is that the Western-oriented faction is now trying to attack the powers of this legal and revolutionary institution using distorted news from the revolutionary forces." The newspaper Javan also reported on "the Western perspective of government promoters on violence against women," stating that "the Women's Affairs Department of the presidency is preparing material for international organizations." This newspaper wrote that "these days, a governmental movement is trying to advance globalization goals, especially in social areas, and in this path, it does not spare the fields of women, children, and education. Empowering women, recognizing prostitution, and combating violence against women are key phrases of this movement linked to foreign intellectual and financial resources. The expansion of activities in cyberspace and movements in social gatherings have drawn the attention of experts and analysts to this issue more than ever." The newspaper Jahan Sanat reported the death of a woman who was previously denied a liver transplant by the officials of Khomeini Hospital in Tehran due to the suspicion of "non-Iranian nationality" and the lack of a birth certificate and national ID. Fatemeh Beikpour, referring to a previous report by Jahan Sanat about the prevention of this 53-year-old woman's liver transplant due to the suspicion of "non-Iranian nationality," wrote that "so easily, the life of a person who was alive just two days ago and could have been saved was lost, and these hospital officials have threatened the patient's family due to the media coverage of the issue and implicitly placed the responsibility for the patient's death on them." One of the specialist doctors regarding the situation that occurred for this patient and the actions of Khomeini Hospital in Tehran that led to her death told Jahan Sanat that "the law prohibiting organ transplants to foreign nationals was enacted to combat and prevent the trafficking of organs abroad. However, the liver is neither an organ that can be trafficked nor is there any issue with performing a transplant for someone in an emergency and life-threatening condition. Especially when some of the patient's documents indicate that despite having lived in Iran for several years, she is Iranian and not Afghan, and for this reason, her operation was delayed for a long time, and ultimately due to the suspicion of being Afghan, the organ transplant was performed on another patient, and since she did not have a relative who could donate an organ to her, no operation was carried out, and the patient, given her poor and critical condition, was lost." The newspaper Vaghaye Ettefaghieh reported in a piece titled "Merchant Physicians in Coma" that "after years of discussion and suspension of the plan to prohibit public sector physicians from working in the private sector, the parliament finally approved the proposal in the sixth development plan to prohibit employed physicians in the public sector from working privately." According to this law, the most important groups in the public health services, namely "faculty members of medical universities and most physicians working in public sectors, cannot work in private hospitals, clinics, and especially in their own offices." Vaghaye Ettefaghieh noted that "the importance of this resolution is due to the fact that a large part of physicians' income currently depends on three main factors," stating that the sources of physicians' income are currently derived from three sources: "first, bonuses that hardworking physicians receive from public hospitals, second, their share and fees in private hospitals, and third, private practice." The newspaper Aftab Yazd dedicated its front page to Abbas Araghchi, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Iran and a member of the nuclear negotiation team, with the headline "Behind the Scenes of an Absence," stating that "some speculations suggest that Araghchi has had a disagreement with Mohammad Javad Zarif, and his absence is not related to the extension of the ISA law in the United States." The newspaper wrote that "since November 15, two months have passed, but during these two months, Abbas Araghchi has not mentioned anything about the JCPOA, and after the extension of ISA sanctions, he quietly attended the monitoring committee for the implementation of the JCPOA on December 8 and did not attend the well-known session on December 14 in the National Security Commission of the Parliament." The newspaper Shahrvand reported that "the Minister of Communications and Information Technology responded to the traditional guilds' opposition to new businesses," stating that Mahmoud Vaezi announced in response to taxi drivers' protests against online taxis: "We cannot force people to return to 20 years ago."