Most relocated to camps at the entrance to cities, and have no access to electricity or running water. The residents complain that there are no schools, either, in the camps, and that many of the children have to work to sustain their families.

Those who remain in the villages sell their belongings for food and require aid from the UN and the Syrian government. The World Food Program (WFP) has begun distributing food to more than 200,000 people who stayed on the farms, and the Red Cross is funding delivery of water to them. “We don’t want to provide assistance to these people where they are now, and create a dependency syndrome,” stated Muhannad Hani, WFP country manager, regarding the refugees who reached the camps. “Those people are farmers.” “We’re working in partnership with the government to make sure that those people return to that place and resume what they’ve been doing for decades and centuries.”

[Note: The Divine Authority uses natural law - Genesis 12:3]

Government volcanologist Surono, stated Mount Sinabung in North Sumatra province started rumbling a few days ago and the minor morning eruption had mostly stopped. He stated Mount Sinabung last erupted in 1600, so observers don’t know the volcano’s eruption pattern and are monitoring it closely for more activity. The government has distributed 7,000 masks to refugees and set up public kitchens so people can cook food, stated Priyadi Kardono, spokesman for the National Disaster Management Agency.

It sent sand and ash up to a mile (1.5 kilometres) high but lava only moved near its crater. It caused no major damage and only dust covered plants and trees. Evacuations on the volcano’s slopes started Friday at the first signs of activity. Up to 10,000 people who fled are staying in government buildings, houses of worship and other evacuation centres in two nearby towns.

The present-day elite Persian community in Beverly Hills, got its start in the early Seventies, when four brothers of the Mahboubi clan who had grown rich at home from their virtual monopoly on chewing gum moved to Los Angeles and sank their money into real estate on Rodeo Drive. One of the brothers, Dar Mahboubi, backed haberdasher Bijan during the Eighties, and younger Mahboubis continue to manage the family’s considerable property holdings. Another group of brothers, the Yadegars, also arrived in Beverly Hills before the revolution and began snapping up real estate. Today so many Persians own stakes in Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle, the prime streets between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards, that the area is known to some as “Tehrangeles.” (Another Persian shopping district in Westwood has also earned that moniker.)

The area’s attractions were obvious: Beverly Hills was synonymous with wealth and status, plus it delivered a beautiful climate, safe residential neighborhoods and a well-established Jewish community. But perhaps the key asset was the then top-notch school system. Sam Nazarian’s sister-in-law, former psychology professor Angella Nazarian, recalls that her father bought a house here in the early Seventies so her brother could attend Beverly Hills High School. “My father had no plans of coming to the U.S.,” she says over a lunch of tuna tartare in Westwood. “It was more ‘This way my son can go to a really good school.’”

Later in the decade, as Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers denounced the freedoms that had enabled Jewish prosperity, some in Tehran began to worry, says prominent hostess Mahroo Moghavem, whose husband was a successful appliance distributor at that time. “We thought investment in other countries would be good,” she says during a brunch with friends at her home in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. “We were happy, but we thought that one day the Shah would pass away and what would happen then?”

As armed students took to the streets of Tehran in late 1978, the Moghavems whisked their children off to Los Angeles for a vacation. Events unfolding on television made clear that they would not be returning home. The Moghavems were among the lucky ones, however. Thanks to their investments outside of Iran, they were able to buy a house in Beverly Hills from billionaire John Kluge and then sink money into a development project parceling the estate of silent-screen star Harold Lloyd into a 16-home subdivision.

These days Nazarian hardly needs an introduction in Hollywood and Beverly Hills: At 33, he has built an empire that includes trendy nightclubs, an archipelago of restaurants and the flashy SLS Hotel, with further hotels planned for Miami and Las Vegas. His circle, however, extends well beyond the celebutantes courted by his businesses. Nazarian and his family, who like many Iranian Jews left Tehran during the 1979 revolution, are leaders of a powerful Persian Jewish elite in Beverly Hills. One hint of the community’s influence in Los Angeles is a framed commendation on Nazarian’s sitting room wall from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “I was one of his first supporters,” explains Nazarian. “We’re very, very close.”
The interior decor of Sam Nazarian’s $18.9 million mansion high above the Sunset Strip might be described as nightlife moderne. Glossy stone floors and glass walls are set off by glam touches like a Roy Lichtenstein print—This Must Be the Place, cheekily hung in the bathroom and a black crystal chandelier. But what’s inside the Nazarian house is secondary to the view: the city of Los Angeles spread like a vast Persian carpet laid at Nazarian’s feet. It is, in more ways than one, a view from the top.

Not so many years ago, Nazarian, whose family arrived in the U.S. when he was three, was taunted at Beverly Hills High School with insults such as “camel jockey.” “It wasn’t a very welcoming group of people,” he recalls of his schoolmates. Nazarian’s courtly 78-year-old father, Younes, who today sits alongside his youngest son at a table laden with crystal bowls of dates, berries, cucumbers and other refreshments—a typical display of Persian hospitality—was a successful tool-and-dye manufacturer in Iran. But in fleeing his country’s political turmoil, he had to leave most of his assets behind, arriving at a run-down hotel in Santa Monica with, as Younes recalls, “four suitcases and four children.” (The Nazarians are now part owners of the hotel.)

Younes and his brother, Parviz, relied on contacts with other Persian Jewish immigrants, “Our best asset in this country was our few friends,” he notes and established a factory building machine parts for such clients as the Department of Defense. Several years later, the brothers were brought into a fledgling telecom company, Qualcomm, and their millions ballooned into billions. Now Younes, like his son, is leaving footprints all over Los Angeles: He is chairman of his son’s business, SBE, and he serves on boards at the Rand Center for Middle East Policy and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in addition to being a major donor to the University of Southern California. This philanthropic spirit makes Younes something of a pioneer, notes Sam, since the older generation by and large has not adopted the American ethic and tax strategy of giving money to nonprofits.

A different all-American motto, however, has been fully embraced by the Nazarians and many other Persian families who have earned fortunes here: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Parviz became famous in his community and notorious in Beverly Hills for building a mansion that exemplifies an architectural style known in these parts as Persian Palace. From the street, the Nazarian pile looks like a particularly frothy wedding cake propped up by a forest of fluted columns. The interior, according to visitors, is an extravaganza of polished marble, sweeping staircases and gilt rococo furniture, a nominally French style favored by Iran’s late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. (A famous story recalls Bill Clinton’s visit to the Nazarian home for a fundraiser: He supposedly remarked, “This makes me realize I really do live in government housing.”)

In addition, Persians didn’t understand that American-style membership in a prestigious synagogue like Sinai Temple meant paying annual dues and getting involved with fundraising. “The other members looked at them as freeloaders coming and taking but never contributing,” he explains.

Delshad proved to be a major force in bridging these antipathies when, after 12 years of campaigning, he was elected in 1999 as Sinai’s first Sephardic president. He insists that tensions have since eased and notes that Persians today account for approximately 25 percent of membership. (They constitute 20 percent of the overall population of Beverly Hills.)

In 2003 Delshad took a leave from the technology company he started in 1978 to run for the Beverly Hills City Council. Ironically, he recalls, some of the toughest votes to get were Persian: Iranian Jews had no experience voting under the Shah and were wary of joining any bureaucratic roster, even the Beverly Hills voting rolls. Delshad nonetheless prevailed and in 2007 was elected mayor, despite a major kerfuffle over municipal election ballots printed in English, Spanish and, for the first time, sinuous Farsi script. “I had nothing to do with that,” Delshad insists. (Federal law does require that non-English-speaking voting blocs be provided with ballots in their own language.) “But the way they did it was to put the Persian bigger than the English,” he says. “It looked like a Farsi restaurant menu. Hundreds of people called the city to object.”

The outcry over the ballot which made the front page of The Wall Street Journal was an eruption of tensions that had been simmering for decades. A complaint sounded by Beverly Hills old-timers was that the Persians could be clannish, self-segregating and indifferent to the established norms of the community they were entering. There is some truth to that charge, acknowledges Angella Nazarian. Thanks to their wealth and numbers, Persians didn’t need to adapt. Instead, they developed a self-sufficient Farsi-speaking enclave, complete with grocery stores, restaurants and even taxi services. And rather than courting the local social establishment, rich Persians stuck to their own social world, which revolved around lavish 1,000-person bar mitzvahs and weddings. “My mother really doesn’t need to speak English, although she does,” says Nazarian. “Cultural preservation is one part of the experience of being displaced, and as with any immigrant community, we naturally want to associate with one another. Middle Eastern countries also tend to be very tribal.”

Today many younger members of the Persian community favor a less ornate style and in this as well as in many more-important matters—they represent a generational pivot between the Persian Jewish community’s past in Tehran and its future in Los Angeles. Thirty-six-year-old Natasha Baradaran, an L.A.-born and -bred interior designer whose husband, Bob, is the only Persian partner at white-shoe law firm Greenberg Glusker, is a prime example. “Especially for women, the revolution was the best thing that could have happened,” says Natasha, who earned a master’s degree in international relations at Columbia University before choosing a more creative career path. “It was hard for a lot of people who lost everything. But their kids—we learned that the sky is the limit.” Less insular and more civic-minded than their elders, these young parents, professionals and entrepreneurs represent some of America’s wealthiest and most educated immigrant offspring. The time has clearly come—as politicians, savvy businesspeople and charity fundraisers have realized to meet the neighbors in Beverly Hills.

In his office above Wilshire Boulevard, architect Hamid Gabbay, 66, traces the dazzling success of the Persian community in Beverly Hills back to Tehran before the revolution. The Sixties and Seventies saw a full-tilt economic expansion, fueled by the Shah’s dream of westernization and financed by vast oil reserves. “The real-estate boom was incredible,” explains Gabbay, who founded an architecture firm with his brother in Tehran. “We got to design a city projects I can’t even dream of now.”

The country’s Jewish minority thrived, at least in Tehran’s educated quarters, thanks to the Shah’s official policy of religious tolerance and cultural openness. But radical Muslim clerics gained strength during the late Seventies, and in January 1979 they overthrew the ailing monarch. Gabbay left in November 1978, landing a job with an L.A. firm that he had been interviewing to work for him just four months earlier. “I went to the firm,” he recalls, “and said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hire you. But would you hire me?’”

Even before the revolution, a few Iranian Jews had already decamped to California. Jimmy Delshad, who made local history in 2007 by becoming the first Iranian-American mayor of Beverly Hills, left modest origins in Shiraz in 1959 and attended California State University at Northridge with his brothers. “I don’t think there were more than 10 or 12 [Persian] families we knew in Los Angeles,” he says.

The present-day elite Persian community in Beverly Hills, though, really got its start in the early Seventies, when four brothers of the Mahboubi clan, who had grown rich at home from their virtual monopoly on chewing gum moved to Los Angeles and sank their money into real estate on Rodeo Drive.

One of the brothers, Dar Mahboubi, backed haberdasher Bijan during the Eighties, and younger Mahboubis continue to manage the family’s considerable property holdings. Another group of brothers, the Yadegars, also arrived in Beverly Hills before the revolution and began snapping up real estate. Today so many Persians own stakes in Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle, the prime streets between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards, that the area is known to some as “Tehrangeles.” (Another Persian shopping district in Westwood has also earned that moniker.)

The area’s attractions were obvious: Beverly Hills was synonymous with wealth and status, plus it delivered a beautiful climate, safe residential neighborhoods and a well-established Jewish community. But perhaps the key asset was the then top-notch school system. Sam Nazarian’s sister-in-law, former psychology professor Angella Nazarian, recalls that her father bought a house here in the early Seventies so her brother could attend Beverly Hills High School. “My father had no plans of coming to the U.S.,” she says over a lunch of tuna tartare in Westwood. “It was more ‘This way my son can go to a really good school.’”

Later in the decade, as Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers denounced the freedoms that had enabled Jewish prosperity, some in Tehran began to worry, says prominent hostess Mahroo Moghavem, whose husband was a successful appliance distributor at that time. “We thought investment in other countries would be good,” she says during a brunch with friends at her home in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. “We were happy, but we thought that one day the Shah would pass away and what would happen then?”

As armed students took to the streets of Tehran in late 1978, the Moghavems whisked their children off to Los Angeles for a vacation. Events unfolding on television made clear that they would not be returning home. The Moghavems were among the lucky ones, however. Thanks to their investments outside of Iran, they were able to buy a house in Beverly Hills from billionaire John Kluge and then sink money into a development project parceling the estate of silent-screen star Harold Lloyd into a 16-home subdivision.

Generational shift, slow though it may be, has pushed the Persian community toward the American mainstream or at least the Beverly Hills version of it. Still, the community clings tightly to its core values of respect for family, faith, education and success, and some age-old customs remain. Friday-night Shabbat dinners are sacrosanct, and the meal can easily include 60 people. (Persians often cite such gatherings as a reason they need large houses.) Likewise, a majority in the younger generation choose to marry fellow Persians, much to their parents’ relief. “They don’t have to marry Persian,” says Jasmine Yadegar, in a tone suggesting that she hopes her two twentysomething daughters—both of whom still live at home, eventually will. “All I want for them is to be happy and find people with the same background.”

“For me,” says daughter Sabrina, an aspiring fashion designer, “I think it’s a lot easier to fall in love with someone who has the same ideas and experiences.”

“I need to love their family, and they need to love mine,” adds older sister Jessica, a documentary filmmaker. “Some of my American friends have told me that you’re not dating the parents. They say you don’t need to meet the parents on the first, second or third date. That’s not my view. I think the longer you postpone the introduction to the family, the longer it takes you to get to know if this is someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.”

Among much older women, the Iranian custom of the doreh—a semiformal circle of women who meet to eat home-cooked Persian fare, play cards and gossip in Farsi has also proved resilient enough to make it to the 21st century. But whether the tradition survives two generations in America is an open question as women’s roles change. “The younger generation works more,” says grandmother Jacqueline Moradi during the brunch gathering at Moghavem’s house. “In our generation in Iran, that was unheard of.”

The Baradarans represent this new face of the Persian upper-middle class. Natasha, who has a busy career, doesn’t attend a doreh, and Bob shares the job of raising their two young daughters. The Baradarans’ circle not only includes Persian friends but also his colleagues, her clients and other parents from the girls’ prestigious private schools. “I am raising kids in a city in which I was raised,” says Natasha. “This is my home. I don’t feel like a transplant.” And why should she? After 30 years in Beverly Hills, few, if any, Persians still hope to return to Tehran. “It’s a reality,” says Gabbay of his community’s new life in California, as he gazes out his office window at the Golden Triangle. “We are a reality.”

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A third earthquake in less than six weeks has hit Iran, killing at least three people and injuring 21. The 5.9-magnitude quake hit the city of Damghan in northern Iran, 175 miles east of Tehran, late Friday August 27,2010. Fifteen villages were reportedly damaged.

Experts have warned that Iran’s propensity for earthquakes, its non-strict building codes, and the fact that several of its nuclear facilities are situated near densely-populated urban areas could have catastrophic consequences for Iran. Experts estimate that an average of one serious tremor hits the country every day.

Seven years ago, 26,000 people were killed by a 6.6-magnitude quake in the historic city of Bam in south-eastern Iran.

Roger Meece, the new U.N. special representative for Congo, stated peacekeepers didn’t learn about the “horrific” rapes of at least 154 Congolese civilians for nearly two weeks, showing that the force’s actions to protect civilians were insufficient.

The U.N. Security Council are examining why two U.N. peacekeeping patrols were not informed by villagers that mass rapes were taking place near their base.”It is of utmost importance that the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue to pursue its efforts to fight impunity,” the council said in a statement released amid growing criticism that more was not done to prevent the attacks.

U.N. authorities are considering having villages report to the U.N.’s forward operating base daily, and requiring a patrol to investigate if reports are not received. Following the Security Council briefing, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice issued her country’s “strongest possible condemnation” of the gang rapes. “It was a disturbing briefing, both for what we learned and what we do not know still.”

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has sent Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Atul Khare to Congo to help investigate. He also has sent his Special Representative for Sexual Violence in Conflict, Margot Wallstrom, to handle the U.N.’s follow-up to the attacks.

A Congo government spokesman in Kinasha stated that the country’s security forces need more on-the-ground support from the international community to prevent future attacks.

It was not possible to independently verify the document’s authenticity August 25, 2010. If true, it’s another step by Iran to control the media after closing nearly all reformist publications and putting curbs on the Internet in the upheaval from the disputed elections. The reported ban would actually change little since pro-government media have dropped most coverage of the opposition or refer to them only as “enemies” or other indirect references. Opposition leaders and supporters have relied on Internet outreach through social networking sites and others. The letter cited on the reformist sites says the ban is needed to maintain a “calm atmosphere” and avoid the “negative effects” of political dissent.

Komathy Suppiah, a Kuala Lumpur district court judge, convicted both of them Friday of “mischief by fire” with the intention of destroying a place of worship. The two brothers in their 20s were arrested and placed on trial for the attack, which partially gutted a Protestant church. The judge was scheduled to sentence them August 13th. They face up to 20 years in prison.

A firebombing last January was the first in an unprecedented string of arson attacks and vandalism at 11 churches, a Sikh temple, three mosques and two Muslim prayer rooms.

The photographs in question were given in March 2010 by activists to a German human rights delegation, comprised of experts, journalists and politicians from Turkey’s Left Party. The photos feature burned, maimed and scorched body parts, so much so that the victims are unrecognizable as human beings.

Hans Baumann, a German expert on photo forgeries has confirmed the authenticity of the photos, which according to Turkish-Kurdish human rights activists show eight members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). They are believed to have been killed in September 2009. A forensics report released by the Hamburg University Hospital has stated that it is highly probable that the eight Kurds died “due to the use of chemical substances.”

Turkey has long been suspected of using chemical weapons against Kurdish militants and the evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government to come up with answers. German politicians and human rights experts are now demanding an investigation into the incident.

Claudia Roth, co-chair of Germany’s Green Party, told Der Spiegel: “The latest findings are so spectacular that the Turkish side urgently needs to explain things. It is impossible to understand why an autopsy of the PKK freedom fighters was ordered but the results kept under seal.” Roth also demanded that Turkey issue an official statement on the possible use of chemical weapons.

Die Tageszeitung, a daily newspaper in Berlin, reported that the Turkish Foreign Ministry has rejected the accusations. The Ministry stated that Turkey is a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention and as such its armed forces do not possess any biological or chemical weapons.

The newspaper also reported that it has obtained additional pictures from the autopsies of six other killed Kurds. These images have also been submitted to the experts for examination. Human rights activists in Turkey have also demanded an investigation, but the Turkish army has refused to comment.

Recently, there has been an increase in acts of PKK freedom fighters against Turkish military targets. A PKK rocket killed six Turkish soldiers in the Mediterranean port at the end of May. At the end of June, Turkish security forces shot dead two villagers gathering herbs in northern Kurdistan after mistaking them for Kurdish freedom fighters.

In response the Kurds attacked foreign military positions in portions of their homeland [Kurdistan] occupied by Turkey and on a bus carrying military personnel in Istanbul. Since 1984, more than 45,000 people, mostly Kurds, have been killed in the conflict.

Many of the victims died when flood waters swept away hundreds of mud houses in parts of Swat Valley and the districts of Shangla and Tank, according to a provincial minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A Pakistani Red Crescent official stated that the number of people affected by the floods has risen to nearly 2.5 million people, with infrastructure receiving major damage. Rushing water also has washed away thousands of acres of crops, government buildings, businesses, schools, bridges and homes.

Flooding has cut off the Swat Valley and the districts of Shangla and Peshawar. The government is sending boats and helicopters in an attempt to reach people and bring them to safety. Damaged roads and bridges have made rescuing stranded residents difficult, in which a U.N. warehouse where the organization stores food, blankets, soaps and bucks is partially underwater. The rescue and recovery efforts of the Pakistan flooding could become more complicated as weather officials predict more monsoon rains August 2, 2010.

The Pakistan Meteorological Department reported Sindh, Punjab, Kashmir, eastern parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and eastern parts of Balochistan would receive monsoon rains. Areas along the Indus River would be badly affected due to extremely high flood conditions. The same weather system is also responsible for flooding in bordering Afghanistan, where 65 people have died, and 61 were injured according to disaster management for Afghanistan.