Heard This Week - 03/13/2008

March 13 -- Radio Farda's "Elections Under the Magnifying Glass" series this week was devoted to "Elections and the Media" [text in Persian / article in English], "The Socio-Economic Background of Voters" [text in Persian], "Elections and Women" [text in Persian] and "Elections and Youth" [text in Persian]. In addition, this week's "Fresh Glance" program provided Iranian youth a forum to discuss the upcoming parliamentary elections [text in Persian / article in English]

March 11 -- Iranian novelist Abbas Maroufi told Radio Farda [text in Persian] that an announcement by the head of Iran's public library system that all "negative books" will be removed from libraries throughout the country marks a return to efforts made in the early 1980's to carry out "book cleansing": "Evidently, the regime can never deprive people from reading books...these very books will be reread on the Internet by people", he said.

March 8 -- Radio Farda aired special coverage of International Women's Day, broadcasting messages from Iranian women (and men) prominent in the realms of the arts [text in Persian], business [audio in Persian], sports [text in Persian] and human rights defense [text in Persian].

March 10 -- Radio Farda covered the announcement by the hard-line Justice-Seeking Student Movement of $1 million in bounties for the assassination of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Mossad spy agency director Meir Dagan, and military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin by interviewing Tehran University political science professor Sadegh Zibakalam [text in Persian / in English], who said such student groups should be banned.

March 6 -- Radio Farda interviewed David Cockroft, the head of the International Transport Workers' Federation who said [audio in Persian / text in English] "We are doing everything we can to persuade... the entire regime within Iran, [that] their problems in the world are big enough already without concentrating on depriving democratic trade unions of the rights to present their members."

March 7 -- In recent months, Iranian authorities have cracked down hard on Iranians who violate the dress code, which requires women to wear the head scarf and prohibits men from wearing short-sleeve shirts or ties. RFE/RL and Radio Farda report that many women and men are protesting such restrictions by dressing as stylishly as they can.

March 6 -- Radio Farda's coverage of the end of one week of protests at southern Iran's Shiraz University by students demanding the university president's resignation, greater freedom for student activities, and better living conditions in dormitories.