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Khomeini’s Grandson Warns of 'Illegitimate' Government

Hassan Khomeini during a speech in Tehran on Monday (Jamaran news agency)
Hassan Khomeini during a speech in Tehran on Monday (Jamaran news agency)
    London, Tehran - Asharq Al-Awsat
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Khomeini’s Grandson Warns of 'Illegitimate' Government

Hassan Khomeini during a speech in Tehran on Monday (Jamaran news agency)
Hassan Khomeini during a speech in Tehran on Monday (Jamaran news agency)

Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the founding leader of the Iranian regime, strongly criticized the electoral process following the rejection of dozens of requests to run in the upcoming electoral race.

“The people’s vote is a condition for the legitimacy of the system,” Khomeini told a crowd of Iranians on Monday, adding that a government that does not enjoy general acceptance “has no legitimacy.”

“We cannot choose some [candidates] and ask people to vote for them,” he underlined.

Meanwhile, presidential candidate, Mohsen Mehralizadeh, called on his electoral opponent, Ebrahim Raisi, to submit his resignation from the post of chief justice, or to withdraw from the presidential race.

News sites close to the reformist movement circulated on Monday a photo of a letter sent by Mehralizadeh to the head of the Reform Front, Behzad Nabawi, in which he called for a meeting with the reformist movement leaders to present his presidential program.

After its nine candidates were rejected, the Reform Front said that it had no candidate to present in the elections, while Mehralizadeh would compete with the former Central Bank Chairman Abdolnasser Hemmati, to win the reformists’ support. The latter pledged to form a government of technocrats.

The Iranian Election Commission said that it had filed a lawsuit against the IRGC news agency, FARS, for leaking the list of candidates for the presidential elections last week, a few hours after the Guardian Council confirmed that the final list had been sent to the Ministry of the Interior.

In a statement on Monday, the head of the commission, Jamal Arf, said: “After the names of the seven candidates were announced by (FARS) Agency, we filed a complaint against the agency. FARS officials should tell us where they got the information from.”

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China, Russia May Build Nuclear Plant on Moon to Power Lunar Station, Official Says

The moon is seen over the city of Beijing, China, February 20, 2022. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Photo
The moon is seen over the city of Beijing, China, February 20, 2022. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Photo
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China, Russia May Build Nuclear Plant on Moon to Power Lunar Station, Official Says

The moon is seen over the city of Beijing, China, February 20, 2022. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Photo
The moon is seen over the city of Beijing, China, February 20, 2022. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Photo

China is considering building a nuclear plant on the moon to power the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) it is planning with Russia, a presentation by a senior official showed on Wednesday.

China aims to become a major space power and land astronauts on the moon by 2030, and its planned Chang’e-8 mission for 2028 would lay the groundwork for constructing a permanent, manned lunar base.

In a presentation in Shanghai, the 2028 mission's Chief Engineer Pei Zhaoyu showed that the lunar base’s energy supply could also depend on large-scale solar arrays, and pipelines and cables for heating and electricity built on the moon's surface.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said last year it planned to build a nuclear reactor on the moon’s surface with the China National Space Administration (CNSA) by 2035 to power the ILRS, Reuters reported.

The inclusion of the nuclear power unit in a Chinese space official’s presentation at a conference for officials from the 17 countries and international organizations that make up the ILRS suggests Beijing supports the idea, although it has never formally announced it.

"An important question for the ILRS is power supply, and in this Russia has a natural advantage, when it comes to nuclear power plants, especially sending them into space, it leads the world, it is ahead of the United States," Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program, told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference.

After little progress on talks over a space-based reactor in the past, "I hope this time both countries can send a nuclear reactor to the moon," Wu said.

China's timeline to build an outpost on the moon's south pole coincides with NASA's more ambitious and advanced Artemis programme, which aims to put US astronauts back on the lunar surface in December 2025.

Wu said last year that a "basic model" of the ILRS, with the Moon's south pole as its core, would be built by 2035.

In the future, China will create the "555 Project," inviting 50 countries, 500 international scientific research institutions, and 5,000 overseas researchers to join the ILRS.

Researchers from Roscosmos also presented at the conference in Shanghai, sharing details about plans to look for mineral and water resources, including possibly using lunar material as fuel.

The ILRS preceded Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 but incentives for cooperation between Roscosmos and CNSA have increased since the outbreak of the war, according to Chinese analysts.

With China's rapid technological advances and lunar achievements, and as Western sanctions prevent Roscosmos from many imports of space technology and equipment, China can now "alleviate the pressure" on Russia and help it "achieve new breakthroughs in satellite launches, lunar exploration, and space stations," Liu Ying, a researcher at the Chinese foreign ministry's diplomatic academy, wrote in a journal article last year.