The News Journal

 An Australian-British academic who was locked up in Iran's notorious Evin prison on trumped up espionage charges has revealed Tehran is continuing to spy on her as she attempts to rebuild her life in Australia. After 804 days in the Iranian jail, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s release should have marked the end of her trauma. But when she returned to her homeland in a prisoner swap in November 2020, the harassment and the hacking continued. Despite fruitless and relentless questioning behind bars, elements of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain convinced that Dr Moore-Gilbert is a “dangerous Zionist spy”. She was sentenced to 10 years in jail — the standard punishment for dual-citizen prisoners convicted on fabricated security charges — and spent months in solitary confinement. Now, as an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime and champion of the prisoners she left behind, Dr Moore-Gilbert believes Iran’s intelligence services are continuing to track her activities more than...

 The families of four European Union citizens held in Iranian prisons have called on the German and Austrian governments to punish Tehran over its hostage-taking policy. The families of the dual citizens — Germans Nahid Taghavi and Jamshid Sharmahd and Austrians Massud Mossaheb and Kamran Ghaderi — called on the two foreign ministers to show that human rights were not just “empty phrases” and demand their release. They questioned whether the two governments were doing enough to confront Iran over what they described as its “hostage-taking” policy — targeting foreign citizens to use as pawns in a broader diplomatic dispute with European governments. “Are all measures being taken to free our loved ones?” the families of the four asked, in an open letter to foreign ministers Annalena Baerbock of Germany and Alexander Schallenberg of Austria. “When, if not now, would it be time to publicly name our loved ones; to stand behind them, your citizens, and to demand their release with all ve...

 Iran is considering joining Russia's financial messaging system to bypass the Swift interbank system, after a number of Russian banks were cut off from the international payment messaging platform as part of western sanctions imposed on Moscow due to its military offensive in Ukraine. Russia's Financial Message Transfer System (SPFS) was created in response to the risks of a possible disconnection of Russian banks from Swift, and talks are now underway to integrate Iran into the system, Moscow state-run news agency RIA Novosti reported on Thursday. In early March, the EU confirmed that it was excluding seven Russian banks from the Swift system. Iran was blocked from Swift in 2012 as part of measures aimed at containing its nuclear programme. "We are making efforts in this direction (connecting Iranian banks to the SPFS) [for] the future," Kazem Jalali, ambassador of Iran to Russia, was quoted by the agency as saying. On February 26, the US, along with the European Co...