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A female Iranian dissident imprisoned by her nation’s Islamist rulers since 2016 has been handed a second conviction for engaging in peaceful acts of anti-government protest while in jail.Speaking to VOA Persian by phone from Tehran last Thursday, the father of jailed activist Atena Daemi said a Revolutionary Court in the Iranian capital notified his daughter’s lawyer Mostafa Nili of the conviction the previous day.Hossein Daemi said the court presided over by Judge Amouzadeh convicted his daughter of two charges of spreading anti-government propaganda and disrupting prison order. He said the court sentenced her to one-year prison terms for each charge plus a punishment of 74 lashes. Iranian state-approved news site Didarnews.ir confirmed the sentence in a July 2 report citing Nili, the defendant’s lawyer.It was not clear if Atena Daemi would have to serve the one-year prison terms consecutively or simultaneously, or whether she would challenge the ruling in the higher Iranian appeals court.Daemi’s father said the charges stemmed from her involvement in a peaceful protest inside Evin prison last December, when she and several other female inmates staged a sit-in to mourn Iranians killed in a government crackdown on nationwide anti-government demonstrations the month before. He said he learned about the sit-in through a handwritten message that his daughter sent from prison to ask her family to spread the word about the female inmates’ protest.Hossein Daemi said another prominent dissident who joined the sit-in was Iranian journalist Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned since 2015 and serving a 10-year sentence for human rights advocacy.The father of Atena Daemi said her conviction for “disturbing prison order” related to the peaceful sit-in, while the conviction for “spreading propaganda” related to the handwritten note she had sent. He said she had been found guilty in a trial that lasted only five minutes.“There is no justice in Iran when a pre-determined sentence is issued in such a brief trial,” Hossein Daemi said.In a report published Tuesday, New York-based group Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) cited Atena Daemi’s mother, Masoumeh Nemeti, as saying the trial took place on June 27. Nemeti said her daughter appeared in the court but was not able to present a defense.Hossein Daemi previously had told VOA that his daughter had been scheduled to be released from Evin prison on parole on Saturday, following her 2016 imprisonment for a five-year term for alleged national security offenses related to her peaceful human rights activism. Her penalized activities included meeting the families of Iranian political prisoners, using Facebook to criticize the government and condemning its mass executions of political prisoners in 1988.CHRI cited Nemeti as saying in a Monday interview that her daughter was being kept in detention beyond July 4 to serve a new sentence of two years and one month for being involved in earlier acts of peaceful protest inside prison.An Iranian appeals court had confirmed Atena Daemi’s new 25-month sentence last September after a lower court convicted her of disseminating anti-government propaganda and insulting Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The charges arose from her writing an open letter from prison condemning the government’s executions of several political prisoners in September 2018 and her singing a revolutionary anthem to honor those prisoners.Female Iranian Activist in Jail Since 2016 Faces New Charges, Prolonged ImprisonmentNew charges could add to her seven-year prison term for peaceful activismLast month, Hossein Daemi told VOA that his daughter faced the prospect of even more prison time for her alleged involvement in a third peaceful protest at Evin. He said the prison’s prosecutor informed her on June 7 that she had been charged with “disturbing order” by chanting anti-government slogans on the night of February 11, the anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. His daughter denied that charge, he added.“She should be released because she has not committed any crime,” the dissident’s father told VOA in his latest interview. “All this pressure is being put on her just to bring her to her knees. But she still is determined and strongly insists on her beliefs.”This article originated in VOA’s Persian Service. Click here for the original Persian version of the story.  
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As the United States approaches 3 million total coronavirus cases, the nation’s top infectious disease expert warned Americans on Tuesday not to fall into a “false complacency” about the nation’s falling death rate from the coronavirus pandemic.Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the remarks during a question-and-answer session with U.S. Senator Doug Jones on Facebook.“It’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death,” Fauci said. “There’s so many other things that are very dangerous and bad about this virus, don’t get yourself into false complacency.The U.S. has recorded 131,457 deaths from COVID-19 as of Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University. President Donald Trump boasted late Tuesday night on Twitter that the “Death Rate from Coronavirus is down tenfold!”Death Rate from Coronavirus is down tenfold!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2020But Fauci warned earlier this week that the United States is “still knee-deep in the first wave” of the pandemic.Fauci’s latest warning on the state of coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. came on the same day the Trump administration formally notified the United Nations it is withdrawing from the World Health Organization, despite the surging number of COVID-19 cases in the country.Trump has accused the WHO of having a pro-China bias in its handling of the coronavirus outbreak and has demanded the agency impose reforms.  Trump froze U.S. funding for the WHO in April and a month later announced his intentions to drop out.It will be a full year before the U.S. officially exits the WHO under the organization’s rules. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said he will rejoin world health body if he is elected in November.Meanwhile, the WHO acknowledged on Tuesday that airborne transmission plays a role in the spread of the coronavirus and planned to release a new set of recommendations about how to avoid infection.A group of 239 scientists from 32 countries released an open letter on Monday calling on the agency to review its guidance on how the disease passes between people.The scientists say the coronavirus is airborne, meaning virus particles can hover in the air in indoor spaces and infect people when the particles are inhaled.The WHO has said the virus is spread through larger respiratory droplets from an infected person’s coughs and sneezes but which drop out of the air quickly because of their size. 
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In his third run for the White House, Joe Biden has finally won a presidential primary in his home state.Biden, the last man standing from a Democratic field that once numbered more than 24 candidates, won Delaware’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday, beating Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.Sanders and Warren both suspended their campaigns months ago, but their names remained on Tuesday’s ballot because they did not officially withdraw as candidates in Delaware by the March 6 deadline. Warren suspended her campaign just one day before the deadline, while Sanders didn’t stop campaigning until April.Pete Buttigieg and Tom Steyer also had filed for Delaware’s primary but withdrew their names in early March.Biden also won New Jersey’s mostly mail-in Democratic presidential primary.Biden faced Sanders on the ballot Tuesday, even though Biden has accumulated enough delegates to become the party’s presumptive nominee.New Jersey’s already-late primary got pushed a month later because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy mandated that the election take place mostly by mail-in ballots.New Jersey’s 14 electoral votes have gone to Democrats in every presidential election since 1988.Tuesday’s victories give Biden another notch in his Democratic delegate belt, although the former vice president became his party’s presumptive nominee months ago after Sanders dropped out of the race.Biden first ran for president in 1987 but dropped out before the first contests of the 1988 primary campaign amid reports of plagiarism in political speeches and while he was in law school at Syracuse University. Jesse Jackson went on to win Delaware’s Democratic caucus.Biden also sought the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination but dropped out of the race after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucus with only 1 percent of the vote. He nevertheless remained on the Democratic primary ballot in Delaware and garnered almost 3 percent of the vote, well behind future boss Barack Obama and runner-up Hillary Clinton.Meanwhile Tuesday, President Donald Trump won Delaware’s GOP presidential primary over Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente, a California businessman and perennial gadfly candidate.The primary elections were open only to registered Democrats and Republicans.Tuesday’s election was the first in Delaware to feature universal absentee voting, with absentee ballots having been sent to every registered Democrat and Republican in the state. Under Democratic Gov. John Carney’s emergency coronavirus declarations, any voter could choose “sick or temporarily or permanently physically disabled” and be eligible to vote absentee.Because of the coronavirus, Delaware election officials also limited the number of polling places for Tuesday’s primary. Kent County, with more than 94,000 eligible voters, had only 12 locations where people could cast ballots in person. Sussex County, with more than 133,000 registered Democrats and Republicans, had 24. New Castle County had 46 polling locations available for more than 315,000 voters. In the 2016 presidential primary, Delaware voters cast ballots at 313 precincts. 
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Many sports events, including horse racing, have been canceled or postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. One of them was the annual Gold Cup steeplechase in The Plains, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. But instead of scrapping the entire event, the organizers decided to hold the race without spectators. As we hear from VOA’s Deborah Block, this year’s Gold Cup was offered virtually to anyone who wanted to watch it.  
Produced By: Deborah Block
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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted Tuesday, “If you’re traveling to New York from the following states you must self-quarantine for 14 days:” and it was followed by a list of 19 U.S. states. New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut already put out a joint travel advisory requiring people from 17 states to self-quarantine when entering the so-called tri-state area.The tweet Tuesday confirmed the addition of Delaware, Kansas, and Oklahoma to the list.Under this new quarantine order, individuals entering New York from any of the specified states are required to self-isolate for two weeks. Although the death toll is rising in the United States as a whole, New York reported only 10 COVID-19 deaths Tuesday.”As states around the country experience increasing community spread, New York is taking action to ensure the continued safety of our phased reopening,” Cuomo said. “Our entire response to this pandemic has been by the numbers, and we’ve set metrics for community spread just as we set metrics for everything.”The new self-quarantine rules already had included states such as Florida, Texas, and California, all of which have seen drastic increases in COVID-19 cases.Much of the United States has seen a surge in cases, as efforts to stem the rise fail.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hypothesized the death rate could be as high as 160,000 by the end of July.Many states were forced to halt their respective reopenings, shutting down plans to allow the public back into restaurants, bars, and other establishments. 
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U.S. President Donald Trump has formally started the withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization, making good on threats over the U.N. body’s response to the coronavirus, officials said Tuesday. The United States is the largest financial contributor to the WHO – which leads the fight on global maladies from polio to measles to mental health – but it has increasingly been in Trump’s crosshairs as the coronavirus takes a heavy toll. After threatening to suspend the $400 million in annual U.S. contributions and then announcing a withdrawal, Trump has formally informed U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that he has started the U.S. pullout, a State Department spokesperson said. The withdrawal is effective in one year – July 6, 2021 – and Joe Biden, Trump’s presumptive Democratic opponent, is virtually certain to stop it and stay in the WHO if he defeats Trump in the November election. Stephane Dujarric, the spokesman for Guterres, confirmed that the United States gave its notice. Under conditions set when the United States entered the World Health Organization in 1948, Washington has to give a one-year notice to pull out – and meet its remaining assessed financial obligations, Dujarric said. “To call Trump’s response to COVID chaotic and incoherent doesn’t do it justice,” said Senator Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, who said that Congress was notified. “This won’t protect American lives or interests – it leaves Americans sick & America alone,” he said. Trump has accused the World Health Organization of bias toward China, saying it ignored early signs of human-to-human transmission of the deadly virus. While many public health advocates share some criticism of the WHO, they question what other powers the world body had other than to work with China, where COVID-19 was first detected late last year. Critics say Trump is seeking to deflect criticism from his own handling of the pandemic in the United States, which has suffered by far the highest death toll of any nation.  
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As part of a new report on targeted killings using drones, a U.N. human rights investigator says a January U.S. strike that killed top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was an “arbitrary killing,” and that Iran’s retaliatory missile attack was not justified. “No evidence has been provided that General Soleimani specifically was planning an imminent attack against U.S. interests, particularly in Iraq, for which immediate action was necessary and would have been justified,” said Agnes Callamard, special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, in her report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. The strike took place as Soleimani’s convoy was leaving the airport in Baghdad, and it also killed a senior Iraqi military official and four members of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. The United States said in a report to the U.N. Security Council that its forces carried out the strike in self-defense “in response to an escalating series of armed attacks in recent months” by Iran. But Callamard said the U.S. explanation “fails to describe even one ongoing attack” and that U.S. officials were “remarkably vague and inconsequential as far as a possible imminent threat is concerned.” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said days after the strike that Soleimani had planned a “broad, large-scale attack against American interests, and those attacks were imminent.” Callamard said because the attack was carried out without Iraq’s consent, it amounted to a violation of the country’s sovereignty. “What is most telling is the failure of the U.S. to even address the rights of Iraq and explain, and provide evidence for, its use of force against the country and its citizens,” she wrote.  “Until such an explanation is made, the conclusion must be that the strike is an act of aggression against Iraq, and the killing of its citizens and of non-citizens on its territory was unlawful and arbitrary under international law.” Callamard is due to go before the Human Rights Council to present her findings on Thursday.  The United States withdrew from the council in 2018. Iran responded to Soleimani’s killing by launching missiles at two Iraqi bases housing U.S. service members.  That attack injured more than 100 U.S. military personnel. As with the U.S. strike, Callamard cited Iran’s filing to the Security Council in which it claimed to have acted in self-defense. She said Iran “made no reference to an imminent or ongoing armed attack by the U.S.” and that the strike against Soleimani “did not justify Iran’s subsequent actions.” Callamard expressed concerns more broadly about the use of drones possessed by dozens of countries and that “the vast majority of targeted killings by drones are subjected to little public scrutiny at either national or international levels.” She said “mistakes are inevitable” in identifying and accurately striking intended targets, and that even when missiles hit their target, “the evidence shows that frequently many more people die.”  Callamard writes that those casualties may amount to violations of international humanitarian law. She calls for the United Nations and member countries to develop strong standards for transparency, oversight and accountability, to use arms control measures to control the proliferation of drones around the world, and to investigate allegations of unlawful deaths in drone strikes. Callamard also suggested the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights produce a yearly report that tracks drone strikes and casualties for members to debate at the Human Rights Council. 
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