Hundreds of Iranians took part on Tuesday in a demonstration in Tehran to mark labour day, accusing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government of failing to improve their working conditions. The workers converged on a stadium in central Tehran in the officially sanctioned demonstration to mark May Day but were dispersed by anti-riot police when the march moved out into the street, witnesses said.
A Halliburton executive, facing withering criticism from Democratic lawmakers during a Senate hearing on Monday about the company’s business dealings in Iran, insisted that the firm had not broken any laws. The official, Sherry Williams, a Halliburton vice president and corporate secretary, said the company had consulted several law firms in 1995 after sanctions were imposed on Iran. Officials of the company, which recently announced it was moving its chief executive from Houston to Dubai and establishing a corporate headquarters there, determined that it was legal for independent foreign subsidiaries of United States companies to do business there, she said.
The Bush administration’s $75 million program to promote democracy in Iran has undermined the kind of organizations and activists it was designed to help, with U.S. aid becoming a top issue in a broader crackdown on leading democracy advocates over the past year, according to a wide range of Iranian activists and human rights groups. Since Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice unveiled the program more than a year ago, a wide array of activists - teachers, women’s rights campaigners, labor organizers, students, journalists and intellectuals - have faced interrogations, detentions, imprisonment and passport confiscation over suspected links to the new U.S. funding, activists and human rights groups say.
