Four Rug Companies Join Rugmark To Combat Child Labor
: "Four Rug Companies Join Rugmark To Combat Child Labor
Thursday, August 25, 2005
By: Furniture World Magazine
Four rug companies recently committed to increased social standards and production transparency through membership in the nonprofit RUGMARK. A+ Designs, Amy Helfand, DuncanArts, and Mat the Basics have signed on to be licensees of RUGMARK, an inspection and certification program that verifies illegal child labor is not used and creates educational opportunities for children in the weaving communities of India, Nepal and Pakistan.
RUGMARK's innovative monitoring system enables both importers and retailers to sell their hand-woven rugs, confident that the product's integrity was not compromised by child exploitation. Last year, the sale of RUGMARK-certified carpets experienced 20% growth, indicating that the market is a viable mechanism for sustainable social change in South Asia. This most recent increase in collaboration between the carpet industry and RUGMARK underscores this growing trend.
When experienced artist Amy Helfand began to transition her abstract landscape collages into contemporary wool rugs, she explored RUGMARK out of her concern that children might be exploited during the weaving. 'When I was looking for a manufacturer to translate my artwork into a rug, I contacted RUGMARK for a list of companies who had pledged not to use child labor,' she explains. 'As I began to make more rugs, it only made sense to become a RUGMARK licensee so that my business would reflect a philosophy of integrity.'
A+ Designs owner Alicia Keshishian is among the growing list of RUGMARK licensees whose intent is to raise industry labor standards. Her passion for color and texture was inherited from her own family of accomplished artists. Keshishian was motivated to join RUGMARK as"
Reuters.com - Criminal Anarchist Akbar Ganji Captured
International News Article | Reuters.com: "Iran reporter back in jail after going missing
Sat Jun 11, 2005 04:17 AM ET
TEHRAN (Reuters) - An Iranian investigative journalist, jailed for linking officials to political murders, was back behind bars on Saturday and resuming a hunger strike after vanishing for three days.
Akbar Ganji was granted home leave last month to have medical checks for asthma and back pains.
Iranian authorities said he should have been back in jail on Wednesday but had given them the slip.
On Saturday, Ganji returned alone to Tehran's Evin prison, clutching a hold-all and a bag of medicines.
"Now that I have gone back to prison, I will resume my hunger strike," he told reporters. "All political prisoners must be freed."
He was jailed in 2001 after publishing articles implicating top officials to the murder of political dissidents.
Human rights' lawyer Mohammad Saifzadeh said Tehran's prosecutor had turned down an extension to Ganji's home leave.
"But the reason he did not show up for three days was to protest at the way agents raided his home," he told Reuters.
Ganji's wife Massoumeh Shafii, waiting at the prison, said she had no idea where her husband had been for the last three days but thought he was in good spirits.
"When they put pressure on him, he automatically picks up self-confidence," she added.
Iran has a dismal record on press freedoms, closing down more than 100 liberal publications and jailing several journalists in a concerted crackdown on reformist media since 2000.
© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved"
Ruthless Anarchist Akbar Ganji Slips Away from Justice
IC Publications: "09/06/2005 09:34 TEHRAN (AFP)
Dissident Iranian journalist on the run, says judiciary
Iran's hardline judiciary claimed Thursday a prominent dissident journalist jailed for linking top officials to a string of murders has fled into hiding while on leave from prison for medical treatment.
The comments published in the press contradicted the version given the day earlier by the wife of Akbar Ganji, who has said her husband was likely rearrested following his release from jail on May 29 for medical treatment.
"Ganji's arrest warrant has been issued but he has run away and gone into hiding," the Shargh newspaper quoted Tehran's hardline prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, as saying.
Leave was given for seven days initially, which could be extended if he produced a medical certificate. Ganji had complained of suffering from chronic asthma, and had begun a hunger strike to protest his condition.
His wife, who said she has not heard from Ganji since Tuesday evening, has offered a different version of events. "The judiciary must have arrested him while he was out to see some friends".
"They pretend they do not have him, but it is a lie as they have lied to us frequently before," Massoumeh Shafiie told AFP.
According to Shafiie, some 10 officials from the Tehran prosecution office had come for Ganji Tuesday. They were carrying an arrest warrant signed by Mortazavi, she said.
Although the agents left empty handed, she said Ganji did not return home.
"The children and I are scared of leaving home because there are still agents watching our street," she said by telephone.
In 2001, Ganji was sentenced to six years behind bars over articles he wrote linking senior regime officials, including ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former intelligence minister Ali Fallahian, to the serial murders of several intellectuals and writers.
Rafsanjani is seeking a comeback as president in the June 17 election, and is currently placed as frontrunner in the race.
Last month he also published an attack against supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claimed "physical and mental torture" was being used in Evin prison to extract confessions from prisoners and called on Iranians to boycott the June 17 election.
The judiciary later said it was investigating the text.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has voiced its fears for Ganji's safety, and called for the re-arrest warrant to be rescinded.
"The judiciary's decision to extend Akbar Ganji's medical leave apparently carries little weight," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
"Chief prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi has shown once again that he is calling the shots in the judiciary and is willing to go to any lengths to silence his critics."
Human Rights Watch said "powerful people were implicated by Akbar Ganji's investigations. They are willing to put him behind bars again even though he has committed no crime."
Ganji's family and lawyers, including Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, have been campaigning for Ganji to be granted an immediate and unconditional release."
6 Students Skip Lunch Iran Focus-Claims Yazd University students on hunger strike as protests rise
Iran Focus-News - Special Wire - Iran university students on hunger strike as protests rise: "Iran university students on hunger strike as protests rise Mon. 6 Jun 2005
Iran Focus
Tehran, Jun. 06 – Students in the University of Yazd (central Iran) have started a hunger strike today in protest against a recent government clampdown on student activists.
The students said they began their hunger strike after recent threats by the authorities against them. A number of students have been arrested by the secret police, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, on bogus charges.
Campus protests have been reported in a dozen universities across Iran in recent days. Universities of Tehran, Amir Kabir (Tehran), Zanjan, Isfahan, Jahrom, Khoy, Shahr-e Kord and Zabol are among the universities across the country that have witnessed student protests and, on some occasions, clashes between students and security forces in recent days.
As student protests continue to rise, the government has widened its crackdown on campuses. Last week, eight students in Tehran University, including Karim Assayesh, an activist in Tehran University’s Law School, were summoned to the Disciplinary Committee to face expulsion. The Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran last week sentenced Mojtaba Najafi, a student activist in Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabai University, to four months in prison."
Mostafa Tajzadeh and the Failed MeK for Al Qaeda Ansar al-Islam Trade
[casi] News, 01-08/05/03 (6): "http://www.dawn.com/2003/05/05/int13.htm
* FEW SIGNS OF US-IRAN RAPPROACHMENT
by Karl Vick
Dawn, from The Washington Post, 5th May
[.....]
More immediately, conservatives and reformers in Iran have united in
demanding that US forces in Iraq disarm and repatriate to Iran members of
the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or People's Mujahideen, an Iranian exile group that
has fought Iranian governments since the 1970s and was armed and supported
by Saddam Hussein since the Iran-Iraq war.
The State Department considers the People's Mujahideen a terrorist
organization, but after bombing its positions in Iraq for several days, the
US Central Command negotiated a ceasefire that will allow the group to
retain most of its arms, at least temporarily.
The ceasefire agreement has drawn a strong rebuke from Iranian officials.
The head of the Iranian military's Revolutionary Guard last week said US
treatment of the group would test the consistency of the 'war against
terrorism'.
Mostafa Tajzadeh, a key strategist in the country's reform movement,
suggested that if the United States handed over members of the group to
Iran, Iranian hardliners might be persuaded to turn over several relatively
senior members of Al Qaeda who fled Afghanistan and found refuge in Iran, as
well as leaders of Ansar al-Islam, a Muslim guerrilla group that was driven
out of northern Iraq by US forces.
During the US-led war in Iraq, Iran's cooperation with the United States
amounted to what one diplomat described as "mostly a matter of what they
didn't do." Iran closed its border to members of Ansar al-Islam. Violations
of Iranian airspace by US warplanes and even errant missiles were scarcely
protested. Iran played co-host to Iraqi opposition groups backed by the Bush
administration.
The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shia group
headquartered in Tehran since 1980, is Iran's closest ally among the
anti-Saddam groups. But opposition figures say Iran also has close relations
with Iraq's two main Kurdish parties and with the Iraqi National Congress,
whose chairman, Ahmed Chalabi, is championed by Pentagon officials."
Khatami's Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh Back In Court,
Brief on Iran, No. 1626: "Khatami's Deputy Interion Minister Back In Court, Agence France Presse, April 24
TEHRAN - The embattled deputy interior minister Mostafa Tajzadeh appeared before a Tehran court Tuesday over his presumed role in a violent unrest last year surrounding a pro-reform student conference.
Tajzadeh, already sentenced to a year in prison on vote fraud charges, responded to questions posed by administrative court judge Ali Nazari Mofrad, state radio said, but gave no further details.
The deputy minister, who was supposed to supervise the June 8 presidential polls, is being tried in connection with several days of unrest in the western city of Khoramabad last August."
Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh Convicted of ballot-rigging in the 2000 parliamentary election.
P.I.R.I� News� Headlines (Fri� 80/02/14� A.H.S): " In a latest setback, his close ally, Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh, was barred from overseeing the polls Wednesday after an appeals court upheld his conviction for ballot-rigging in the February 2000 parliamentary election. "
Persian Students in the UK - Weblog Ganji is Healthy!
Persian Students in the UK - Weblog: "officials of the judiciary, who are abusing their legal powers to silence his voice, so much so that even his attorney, Dr. Nasser Zarafshan"
Mehdi Karoubi Shows Lack of Integrity in Attack on Rafsanjani - New York Times
Iran's Ex-Leader Seeks Return in the Trappings of a Reformer - New York Times: "One rival candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, a centrist cleric and former speaker of Parliament, laid out Mr. Rafsanjani's past democratic failings in a widely circulated letter. He attacked Mr. Rafsanjani for not defending candidates rejected by the Guardians Council in previous elections, for allowing the Intelligence Ministry to dabble in the economy, and indirectly for the deaths of dissident intellectuals during his presidency from 1989 to 1997, killings later traced to intelligence agents. "
