NEW YORK, New York (IranWire) – Stepping out on stage barefoot and dressed in a loose-fitted dashdasheh from his native Bushehr, Saeid Shanbehzadeh wrapped his arms around a velvet ney-anban, an Iranian bagpipe, and started to blow. The instrument wailed its high-pitched sounds throughout Harlem’s world-famous Apollo Theater as the 1,000-plus audience gazed on, enraptured in the moment. Within minutes, …

NEW YORK, New York (IranWire) – In the early 1980s, Wilfredo “Bio” Feliciano, Hector “Nicer” Nazario, and Sotero “BG 183” Ortiz were considered street vandals. They used wire cutters to cut chain link fences, snuck into train yards, and painted the sides of subway cars in the middle of the night, displaying their artwork on trains throughout New York City. …

NEW YORK, New York (IranWire) – In 1961, a young immigrant by the name of Hussein Ahdieh arrived in New York Harbor aboard the RMS Queen Mary, an ocean liner carrying over 1,000 other passengers. He arrived in America after having left the small impoverished town of Nayriz in the south of Iran. He left his home country because his …

NEW YORK, New York (IranWire) – Milza Diana, 66, wakes up every morning in her two-bedroom flat in the heart of São Paulo, Brazil, slides open the window, and looks out across Roosevelt Square at a gigantic mural of a curious young school girl reaching up into a whirlwind of books floating above her. Her feet are encircled by venomous …

NEW YORK, New York (IranWire) – Taking her normal route to a lunch spot on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Central Harlem on a hot summer day, Randi, 45, looked across the street and saw something she would describe as amazing. It had just sprouted up in the last 24 hours. Crossing the street, she shouted with excitement, “We need more …

NEW YORK, New York (IranWire) – Among the bustle of afternoon traffic outside Public School #7 (PS7) in East Harlem, street artist Alexandre Keto from Sao Paulo, Brazil sat with his feet dangling from the railing where he was perched, having just triumphantly finished a mural on the school’s facade. The painting stands over two stories high and features a …

NEW YORK, New York (IranWire) – “Growing up as a Baha’i in Iran I always had that fear that anything can happen in a second,” says Nasim Biglari, a 29-year-old Baha’i from Tehran, Iran. “And that fear remained in me even when I was taking the entrance examination for universities.” Biglari describes how Baha’is were granted permission to take the …

WASHINGTON — ISIS is not a guerrilla organization that popped up out of nowhere, figured out how to hold onto territory, and take on the Iraqi and Syrian armies all by themselves, says Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank in Washington. ISIS is powerful, she argues, because …

WASHINGTON  (Mint) — All the news coming out of Greece is bad, says Giannis Nitodas, who left his home in Chios, Greece, amid the mounting pressures of austerity measures that continue to crush the Greek economy. “I was paid €900 [$990] per month,” Nitodas told MintPress News from his home in Toronto, Ontario. “But we didn’t know what would happen …

WASHINGTON (Mint) — Hundreds of predominantly black families in Washington, D.C., are preparing to be forced from their homes to make way for massive redevelopment projects in the nation’s capital city. Scattered throughout Washington are four neighborhoods – Barry Farm, Lincoln Heights/Richardson Dwellings, Northwest One, and Park Morton – that have been targeted by the District government for their concentration of …