Thousands of Iraqis protested Monday in Baghdad and other parts of the country after politicians missed an overnight deadline for naming a new prime minister.
Anti-government rallies have rocked the capital and the Shiite-majority south since October with people protesting against corruption, poor services and a lack of jobs.

FILE – Iraq’s President Barham Salih speaks to the media during a joint news conference with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Ankara, Turkey, Jan. 3, 2019.President Barham Salih and parliament have missed several deadlines to appoint a new prime minister following Adel Abdul Mahdi’s resignation last month. Mahdi and his government agreed to stay on in a caretaker role until a new prime minister is approved.
Mahdi’s resignation failed to satisfy anti-government protesters who have said it is not enough for a new prime minister to take over.  They are demanding changes to the entire political system imposed after the U.S. invasion in 2003, which they say is corrupt, inept and does little to help impoverished Iraqis despite the nation’s oil wealth.
Protesters on Sunday decried a potential pick for the new prime minister, former higher education minister Qusay al-Suhail, who is opposed by critics for his ties to Iran. Demonstrators categorically reject his candidacy along with any other potential contenders who have been part of the government since 2003.
At least 460 people have died and tens of thousands of others have been wounded since the demonstrations erupted in October in Baghdad and in Shiite-majority areas in southern Iraq.

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A fire at a warehouse in India’s capital on Monday killed nine people and injured three others, an official said.
The fire broke out early in the morning in New Delhi’s Kirari area. Its cause was not immediately known, an official with the Delhi Fire Service said. It took about three hours to contain the fire.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The injured were admitted to the nearby Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Hospital, the official said.
It was the second major fire in New Delhi this month. On Dec. 8, a fire believed to be caused by an electrical short circuit engulfed a building in the capital, killing at least 43 people.

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The leaders of China, Japan and South Korea are holding a trilateral summit in China this week amid feuds over trade, military maneuverings and historical animosities. Most striking has been a complex dispute between Seoul and Tokyo, while Beijing has recently sought to tone down its disagreements with its two neighbors.
Economic cooperation and the North Korean nuclear threat are the main issues binding the Northeast Asian troika. While no major breakthroughs are expected at the meetings, the opportunity for face-to-face discussions between the sometimes-mutual antagonists is alone considered significant. Below is a look at the current state of relations among the three.
Japan-South Korea
Tensions rooted in South Korean resentment over Japan’s 20th century colonial occupation spiked this year to a level unseen in decades as they traded blows over wartime history, trade and military-to-military cooperation.
The countries managed to strike a fragile truce in November after intervention by the United States, which was concerned about the growing rift between its two key Asian allies. Seoul then walked back a declaration to terminate a bilateral military intelligence-sharing agreement with Tokyo, an important symbol of their three-way security cooperation driven by the nuclear threat from North Korea and China’s growing regional clout.
Tokyo, in turn, agreed to resume discussions with Seoul on their dispute over Japan’s tightened controls on exports of key chemicals used by major South Korean companies to make computer chips and smartphone displays. Japan’s controls were widely seen as retaliation for South Korean court rulings that called for Japanese companies to offer reparations to aging South Korean plaintiffs for their World War II forced labor. Last Friday, Japan announced that it will ease export restrictions on one of the chemicals.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will hold a one-on-one meeting on Christmas Eve on the sidelines of the trilateral summit.
“Considering the recent difficulties in bilateral relations, holding the meeting itself has a large meaning,” Kim Hyun-chong, deputy chief of South Korea’s presidential National Security Office, said in a briefing in Seoul. “We hope that … the meeting will help keep the momentum of dialogue alive and provide an opportunity for improvement in South Korea-Japan relations.”
China-South Korea
South Korea’s relations with China, its biggest trading partner, have been strained over Seoul’s decision to host a U.S. anti-missile system that Beijing perceives as a security threat.
China says the real purpose of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system placed in southern South Korea is to peer deep into its territory, rather than to warn of North Korean missile launches.
China retaliated by restricting Chinese tour group visits to South Korea, boycotting South Korean television shows and other cultural products, and wrecking the Chinese business operations of major South Korean retailer Lotte, which provided the land for the missile system.
While Beijing’s fury appears to have subsided, there’s also uneasiness in Seoul over increasing Chinese and Russia air patrols over waters between South Korea and Japan. Experts say those are designed to test the strength of security cooperation between the U.S. allies.
South Korea has been eager to arrange a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping next year. Han Jung-woo, a spokesman for Moon, said the president plans to use his one-on-one meeting with Xi in China on Monday to “discuss ways to develop South Korea-China ties and facilitate bilateral exchanges and cooperation and also exchange deep views over the political situation of the Korean Peninsula.”
Japan-China
China’s relations with Japan had been more acrimonious than with any other foreign state, but have in recent years undergone a remarkable transformation, partly as a result of the U.S.-China tariff war.
Planning is underway for a state visit by Xi to Japan in the spring, made possible by the temporary shelving of contentious political issues and Beijing’s desire to exploit regional dissatisfaction with Washington over its trade policies.
“At this juncture, it is common sense for China to improve relations with its neighbors Japan and South Korea,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Beijing’s Renmin University.
However, some in Japan oppose Xi coming at a time when more than a dozen Japanese citizens have been arrested on spying allegations in China and Chinese naval and coast guard ships routinely violate Japanese waters around disputed East China Sea islands.
Japan also considers China’s growing maritime activity in regional seas and the upgrading of its military as a threat along with North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs. Tokyo has responded by upgrading its own defense capabilities and working with Chinese rival India, as well as with Southeast Asian countries and Australia.

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 India’s main opposition party will stage a silent protest in the capital on Monday against a contentious new citizenship law, a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi defended the legislation at a rally in New Delhi and accused the opposition of pushing the country into a “fear psychosis.’’
The protest, led by Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi, comes at a time when tens and thousands of demonstrators have taken to India’s streets to call for the revocation of the law, which critics say is the latest effort by Modi’s government to marginalize the country’s 200 million Muslims.
The party’s former president, Rahul Gandhi, urged young people in New Delhi to join the protest at Raj Ghat, a memorial dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi.
“It’s not good enough just to feel Indian. At times like these it’s critical to show that you’re Indian & won’t allow to be destroyed by hatred,” Gandhi tweeted.
Twenty-three people have been killed nationwide since the citizenship law was passed in Parliament earlier this month in protests that represent the first major roadblock for Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda since his party’s landslide reelection last spring.
Most of the deaths have occurred in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where 20% of the state’s 200 million people are Muslim.
Authorities have so far taken a hard-line approach to quell the protests. They’ve evoked a British colonial-era law banning public gatherings, and internet access has been blocked at times in some states. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has asked broadcasters across the country to refrain from using content that could inflame further violence.
The communication shutdown has mostly affected New Delhi, the eastern state of West Bengal, the northern city of Aligarh and the entire northeastern state of Assam.
Undeterred, protesters have continued to rally throughout the country.
The new law allows Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities who are in India illegally to become citizens if they can show they were persecuted because of their religion in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It does not apply to Muslims.
Protests against the law come amid an ongoing crackdown in Muslim-majority Kashmir, the restive Himalayan region stripped of its semi-autonomous status and demoted from a state into a federal territory in August.
The demonstrations also follow a contentious process in Assam meant to weed out foreigners living in the country illegally. Nearly 2 million people, about half Hindu and half Muslim, were excluded from an official list of citizens – called the National Register of Citizens, or NRC – and have been asked to prove their citizenship or else be considered foreign.
India is building a detention center for some of the tens of thousands of people who the courts are expected to ultimately determine have entered illegally. Modi’s interior minister, Amit Shah, has pledged to roll out the process nationwide.
On Sunday, Modi denied the existence of a detention center, accusing the Congress party of spreading fear that Indian Muslims would be jailed there. He also contradicted Shah, saying that there had been no discussion yet of whether to execute a nationwide citizens registry.
The protests against the law began in Assam, the center of a decades-old movement against migrants, before spreading to predominantly Muslim universities and then nationwide.

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Egypt’s former military chief-of-staff Sami Anan was released from detention on Sunday almost two years after his arrest following his plans to compete in the 2018 presidential election, his office manager said on Twitter.
Anan, now at home according to the manager, was held in a military prison until he suffered a stroke in July 2018 and was then moved to a military hospital in Cairo’s Maadi suburb, where he remained until his release.
His health has improved, a source familiar with the matter said. The reason for his release is still unclear.
Anan, seen as Sisi’s main challenger in that election, was arrested and halted his presidential bid after the military accused him of running for office without permission, which it said was a breach of military law. Anan’s spokesman denied that he had broken any laws.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was re-elected for a second term in 2018, winning 97% of the vote with a turnout of 41%. The election featured only one other candidate, an ardent Sisi supporter, after opposition contenders halted their campaigns in January.

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While the international attention on China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang has focused mainly on ethnic and religious issues, Beijing’s economic development plans in the strategic region also play a key role in shaping the conflict, some experts and observers say.
Home to more than 11 million Turkic-speaking Uighurs, Xinjiang covers an area of 1.66 million square kilometers that accounts for one-sixth of China’s land mass. Its oil, natural gas and coal reserves make up more than 20% of China’s energy reserves, turning the region into a national powerhouse.
The government in Beijing since 2017 has launched a major campaign of mass surveillance and the detention of over one million Uighurs and other Turkic minorities in the so-called “re-education” camps.   
Darren Byler, a Seattle-based anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the Uighurs, charged that Chinese government’s economic development programs in Xinjiang to access natural resources have allowed a huge influx of majority Han migrants to the region. This has triggered more conflict with Uighurs who fear a demographic change in their land.

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The programs, such as the Open up the Northwest Campaign in the 1990s, and the larger scale Open up the West Campaign in the 2000s, allowed Han corporate farmers to claim Uighur land and expand industrial scale agriculture in the Uighur-majority region, Byler told VOA.
“In general, Uighurs were excluded from the most lucrative jobs in these new industries by state-authorized job discrimination. Uighurs saw the cost of living begin to rise because of the new forms of wealth in the region. Many had a difficult time entering the new market economy. This is at the heart of the conflict between Uighurs and the Chinese state,” said Byler.
Xinjiang over the last 70 years has experienced a rapid demographic shift. The proportion of Han in the region has risen from nearly 9% in 1945 to about 40% today while the Uighur population has decreased from over 75% to only about 45%.
Some experts say the geopolitical position of Xinjiang as China’s bridge to central and south Asia is yet another motive behind Beijing’s ambition to control the region and prevent any room for possible dissent.

FILE – A man walks by a government billboard promoting Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, outside a subway station in Beijing, China, Aug. 28, 2018.Belt and Road Initiative
Xinjiang in the northeast borders Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The region is at the heart of the $1 trillion infrastructure development and investments scheme, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), that was introduced in 2013 by China’s President Xi Jinping to connect China with over 150 countries throughout Asia, Europe, Africa and Americas.
According to Sean Roberts, a professor of international development at George Washington University, Uighur’s attachment to their traditional lands and ways of life is seen by China’s Communist Party (CCP) as a risk to the successful implementation of the BRI.
“The intention to make Xinjiang a central part of BRI created a new urgency in the CCP to prevent further Uighur dissent in the region. In many ways, what we are seeing today is an attempt to entirely eliminate any possible Uighur dissent to the transformation of their homeland that the BRI will inevitably facilitate,” Roberts told VOA.
Xinjiang for decades has witnessed violent conflict centered around Uighurs’ aspiration for independence and China’s efforts to crush it. In 1955, Beijing recognized Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region but the move failed to bring a lasting stability.

FILE – Workers walk by the perimeter fence of what is officially known as a vocational skills education center in Dabancheng, Xinjiang, China, Sept. 4, 2018.‘Three evils’
Chinese authorities, who have rejected international accusations of human rights abuses in the region, say their measures are necessary to combat the “three evils” of “ethnic separatism, religious extremism, and violent terrorism.”
They say the alleged mass detention camps are nothing but a “vocational training” program aimed at teaching the people new skills and manners.
Shohrat Zakir, Xinjiang’s governor, in a press conference earlier this month said all the people in the camps have been released after “graduating.” He claimed the Chinese government courses helped the people to improve the quality of their lives and find stable jobs.
However, some watchdog organizations say they are finding new evidence suggesting that people held in the camps are exposed to forced labor.
Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China Studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told VOA that China’s claims about the graduated detainees does not mean a change in its policy towards Uighurs but rather “a second phase, and a long-term plan to deepen social control through various forms of coercive labor.”
“I am not at all sure that they have in fact all ‘graduated’, but ‘graduating’ means that they might now go from their cell to a factory instead of a classroom,” Zenz said.

FILE – Ethnic Uighur women leave a center where they attend what is billed as political education lessons, in Kashgar, Xinjiang, China, Sept. 6, 2018.Push to low-wage jobs
According to James Millward, a Xinjiang researcher and professor of history at Georgetown University, mounting evidence on the coerced labor shows Uighurs are being pushed out of the private economy to low-wage factories such as cotton and making clothes. The move, he said, will likely serve the needs of Han businesses from eastern China.
“The forced labor is probably a way to recoup some of the billions of yuan that have been spent on building the camps, hiring security personnel, and the great cost to the local economy of interning a large percentage of the local population, an especially acute problem in southern Xinjiang,” Millward added.
 

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Israel says it will allow Christians from Hamas-ruled Gaza to visit the West Bank and the holy city of Bethlehem and Gaza during Christmas.
“Entry permits for Jerusalem and for the West Bank will be issued in accordance with security assessments and without regard to age,” the Israeli military liaison to the Palestinians announced Sunday.
It had been unclear how many Christians from Gaza, if any, would be permitted to enter Israel during the holiday.
Gaza’s Christian community is tiny, about 1,000 among a population of 2 million. Most are Greek Orthodox.
Israel considers Hamas a terrorist group and has fought two wars against Gaza in the last 10 years.
Hamas militants continue to fire rockets into Israel.
 

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Croatia’s conservative president trailed her leftist rival in Sunday’s election, but garnered enough votes to force a runoff early next year.
With nearly 98% of the votes counted, former prime minister and leader of the Social Democrats Zoran Milanovic was leading with nearly 30% of the vote, followed by President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic with about 27%.
Milanovic and Kitarovic will face each other on January 5.
Croatia’s presidency is largely ceremonial but retaining the presidency is important to Kitarovic’s ruling Croatian Democratic Union party because the country is set to take over the European Union’s rotating presidency in February.
In that capacity, the Croatian leader will oversee Britain’s exit from the bloc and the post-Brexit trade talks that will determine the union’s future.
 

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Polls have closed in Croatia Sunday evening after a presidential election in which no candidate is expected to win an outright majority.
Political analysts predict there will be a run-off election in two weeks, though exit polls show leftist former prime minister Zoran Milanovic with a slight lead.
Milanovic is challenging incumbent president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, a conservative as well as right-wing singer Miroslav Skoro.  Milanovic had 29.58% of the vote followed by 26.38 for Grabar-Kitarovic, and 24.1% for Skoro, according to one exit poll broadcast on Croatian national television.
Croatia’s presidency is largely ceremonial. Incumbent Grabar-Kitarovic has portrayed herself as the people’s president but has been criticized by opponents for flirting with the far-right. Milanovic has promised to turn Croatia into a “normal” country, while Skoro has campaigned on an anti-establishment platform.
The pre-Christmas election comes just days before Croatia begins its first six-month term at the helm of the European Union’s rotating presidency, starting on January 1.
Croatia, with over 3.8 million eligible voters, is still one of the poorest countries in the EU more than two decades after the devastating Balkan war between 1991 and 1995.
 

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Congress is in recess after the House of Representatives voted to approve two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, stemming from a phone call in July with Ukraine’s president in which Trump urged an investigation of a political rival. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leaders in the House must now decide when or whether to send the articles to the Republican-controlled Senate for trial. But some top senators have already said they do not intend to act as impartial jurors. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has more.
 

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Dramatic changes jolted the Arab world in 2019 after veteran Arab leaders in Algeria and Sudan were forced to step down amid widespread popular protests. Similar protests later erupted in Iraq and Lebanon, forcing forced prime ministers to step down and threatening to erode their strong ties to Iran. Meanwhile, in Libya and Yemen, turmoil continued unabated.
 
Observers are calling the 2019 movements the second wave of the Arab Spring which began in 2011, ousting rulers in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and igniting civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya.  
The new phase of the Arab Spring began in December 2018 with protests against veteran Sudanese leader Omar al Bashir, culminating with his ouster in June by Sudan’s military.

FILE – People gather as they celebrate the first anniversary of mass protests that led to the ouster of former president and longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir, in Khartoum, Sudan, Dec. 19, 2019.In April, protests forced ailing Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down, foiling plans to have him run for a fifth term.
Protests in Algeria and Sudan were carried live on Arab TV causing a ripple effect elsewhere and stoking the fervor of a large youth population.
Efforts to spark a revolution in Egypt against President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi fizzled out quickly, however, despite efforts by a little-known businessman to accuse him of corruption.

FILE – People are seen gathered for a mass anti-government protest in the center of the Algerian capital Algiers, Dec. 17, 2019.Tunisia also saw change, with voters electing a new leader after ailing President Baji Caid Essebsi died in July. Tunisians chose an outsider after support for high profile candidates waned. 
Khattar Abou Diab, who teaches at the University of Paris, told VOA that efforts to refashion the Middle East began under former U.S. President George W. Bush, before hitting a snag in 2011 when Islamists tried to hijack Arab Spring revolutions.
But, he said, protest movements in 2019 are more nationalistic and less ideological.

FILE – An Iraqi female demonstrator waves an Iraqi flag during ongoing anti-government protests, in Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 1, 2019.Pan-Arab protests spread to Iraq and Lebanon in October, as public ire focused on meddling by regional power-broker Iran and brutal behavior by pro-Iranian Shi’ite militias.
Dr. Paul Sullivan, a professor at the U.S. National Defense University, says “it is hard to tell where protests will lead (because they) are organic and fluid (and) even the leadership of them is (often) unclear.”
Even Iranians, frustrated by the pain of U.S. economic sanctions, took to the streets in November, but the regime quickly regained control.
 

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Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets Sunday ahead of a midnight deadline to name an interim prime minister.
Anti-government rallies have rocked Baghdad and the Shi’ite-majority South since October, protesting against corruption, poor services, and a lack of jobs. Protesters have called for an end to the political system imposed after the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s resigned Friday. President Barham Salih and parliament have since missed several deadlines to appoint a new prime minister. Mahdi and his government had agreed to stay on in a caretaker role until a new prime minister is approved.
But Mahdi’s resignation failed to satisfy anti-government protesters who have said it is not enough for a new prime minister to take over — they are demanding changes to the entire political system, which they call corrupt, inept, and say it does little to help impoverished Iraqis despite the nation’s oil wealth.
Protesters on Sunday decried the likely pick for the new interim prime minister, former higher education minister Qusay al-Suhail, who is opposed by critics for his ties to Iran. Demonstrators categorically reject his candidacy along with any other potential contenders who have been part of the government since 2003.
At least 460 people have died and tens of thousands of others have been wounded since the demonstrations erupted in October in Baghdad and in Shi’ite-majority areas in southern Iraq.
 

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Among the protesters rallying in India against a controversial new citizenship law that critics call anti-Muslim are thousands of female students and conservative Muslim women who seldom appear in public places.  The law has excluded Muslims from six religious groups who will get expedited citizenship if they fled persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. At a university in the Indian capital which has been at the forefront of protests, Anjana Pasricha talks to women to find out why they have emerged on the streets.

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Boeing Co’s Starliner astronaut spacecraft landed in the New Mexico desert on Sunday, the company said, after faulty software forced officials to cut short an unmanned mission aimed at taking it to the International Space Station.
The landing at 7:58 a.m. ET (1258 GMT) in the White Sands desert capped a turbulent 48 hours for Boeing’s botched milestone test of an astronaut capsule that is designed to help NASA regain its human spaceflight capabilities.
“We hit the bull’s-eye,” a Boeing spokesman said on a livestream of the landing.
The landing will yield the mission’s most valuable test data after failing to meet its core objective of docking to the space station.
After Starliner’s touchdown, teams of engineers in trucks raced to inspect the vehicle, whose six airbags cushioned its impact on the desert surface as planned, a live video feed showed.
The spacecraft was in an apparently stable condition after landing, according to images posted by officials from the U.S. space agency NASA.
The CST-100 Starliner’s debut launch to orbit was a milestone test for Boeing. The company is vying with SpaceX, the privately held rocket company of billionaire high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, to revive NASA’s human spaceflight capabilities.  SpaceX carried out a successful unmanned flight of its Crew Dragon capsule to the space station in March.
The Starliner capsule was successfully launched from Florida on Friday, but an automated timer error prevented it from attaining the right orbit to meet and dock with the space station. That failure came as Boeing sought an engineering and public relations victory in a year that has seen corporate crisis over
the grounding of its 737 MAX jetliner following two fatal crashes of the aircraft. The company’s shares dropped 1.6% on Friday.
Parachute challenge
Ahead of Sunday’s landing, Starliner’s three main parachutes deployed just over one mile (1,600 metres) from the Earth’s surface after enduring intense heat from the violent reentry through the atmosphere, plummeting at 25 times the speed of sound.
The parachute deployment, one of the most challenging procedures under the program to develop a commercial manned space capsule, earned Boeing a fresh win after a previous mishap where one parachute failed to deploy during a November test of Starliner’s abort thrusters.
That test tossed the capsule miles into the sky to demonstrate its ability to land a crew safely back on the ground in the event of a launch failure.
For the current mission, Boeing and NASA officials said they still do not understand why software caused the craft to miss the orbit required.
Sunday’s landing marked the first time a U.S. orbital space capsule designed for humans landed on land.
All past U.S. capsules, including SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, splashed down in the ocean. Russia’s Soyuz capsules and China’s past crew capsules made land landings.
 
 

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The lawyer of an Iranian-British woman convicted on spying charges in Iran has asked that she be released after serving half of her sentence, a request that was immediately rejected by the Tehran prosecutors’ office, the state IRNA news agency reported Sunday.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was sentenced to five years for allegedly planning the “soft toppling” of Iran’s government while traveling with her young daughter in Iran at the time. She was was arrested in April 2016. Her sentence has been widely criticized and her family has denied all the allegations against her.
The report by IRNA quoted her lawyer, Mahmoud Behzadi Rad, as saying that he had submitted a request for what Iran’s judiciary calls “conditional release” — when a convict has served half his or her sentence, the person can apply for such a release and the courts have the power to grant it for “good behavior.”
“According to the law, she is entitled to apply for a conditional release,” the lawyer said.
IRNA did not say why the request was denied. Behzadi Rad said he had applied for a conditional release for another of his clients, prominent Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi who is serving a 10-year sentence. Behzadi Rad is her lawyer, too. The request for her release was also denied, he said.
The lawyer also said that Zaghari-Ratcliffe has had several psychiatric evaluations recently while in prison but did not elaborate on her condition or the state of her health.
In England, Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, Richard Ratcliffe, has been leading a campaign to try to win his wife’s release from prison. British officials are also calling for her release.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe went on a 15-day hunger strike in June, to call attention to her plight. In July, she was moved to the mental health ward of Imam Khomeini hospital under the control of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
The Free Nazanin Campaign said in a statement at the time that it does not know what treatment she is receiving or how long she is expected to remain in the hospital.
Iran has also detained at least one other Iranian-British national, anthropologist Kameel Ahmady, who has been accused of spying and of links to foreign intelligence agencies.
Iran does not recognize dual nationality for its citizens.
 

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Russian Prime Minister Sergei Lavrov has struck a defiant tone, saying the Nord Stream 2 and Turk Stream gas pipeline projects will be launched despite U.S. sanctions.
Quoted by the Interfax news agency on December 22, Lavrov said that Russia planned to respond to the new measures.
U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bill on December 22 that included legislation imposing sanctions on firms laying pipe for Nord Stream 2, which seeks to double gas capacity along the northern Nord Stream pipeline route to Germany.
More sanctions against Russia for its alleged interference in democratic processes abroad as well as its “malign” actions in Syria and aggression against Ukraine — known as the “sanctions bill from hell” — has been approved by a U.S. Senate committee but has not been put to a vote in Congress.
In other remarks, Lavrov said Russia was prepared to include the heavy Sarmat missile and the Avangard hypersonic missile if the New START arms treaty with the United States is extended.
Russia is also ready to demonstrate the Sarmat missile to the United States, Interfax cited Lavrov as saying on a talk show on Russian state television.

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi Sunday defended a new citizenship law critics claim discriminates against Muslims at a rally in New Delhi as protests over the law continue.
More than 20 people across the country have died in clashes with police since parliament passed the discriminatory law earlier this month. The new law allows for Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities who are in India illegally to become citizens, if they can prove they were persecuted because of their religion in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.  The new law, however, does not apply to Muslims.
“People who are trying to spread lies and fear, look at my work. If you see any trace of divisiveness in my work, show it to the world,” Modi told the demonstration.  He said the opposition Congress party was trying to “push not only New Delhi but other parts of the country into a fear psychosis.”
Critics of the new law say it violates India’s secular constitution and seeks to marginalize India’s 200 million Muslims.
 

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