Hassan Rouhani spoke after Iraqi president’s visit to Iran at request of UK defence ministry
Iran has indicated it wants to de-escalate the British-Iranian crisis, hinting at swapping two captured tankers.
“We do not seek the continuation of tension with some European countries,” Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said on Wednesday during a weekly cabinet meeting. “If Britain steps away from the wrong actions in Gibraltar, they will receive an appropriate response from Iran.”
Continue reading...Japan’s prime minister isn’t the first leader to regret trying to do Trump a favor – but he must have known he was taking a risk
Shinzo Abe’s trip to Tehran this week turned out to be one of the more ill-fated mediation efforts of recent times.
What was billed as a grand gesture – the first Japanese leader to visit Iran in four decades – ended in humiliation, with split-screen television pictures showing Abe being told off by a stern supreme leader, while a thick plume of smoke rose from a burning Japanese tanker in the Gulf of Oman.
Continue reading...Lawyer sentenced to decades in prison and 148 lashes, husband writes on Facebook
Nasrin Sotoudeh, an internationally renowned human rights lawyer jailed in Iran, has been handed a new sentence that her husband said was 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.
Sotoudeh, who has represented opposition activists including women prosecuted for removing their mandatory headscarf, was arrested in June and charged with spying, spreading propaganda and insulting Iran’s supreme leader, her lawyer said.
Continue reading...Hundreds of thousands of students, clerics, soldiers and black-clad women holding small children thronged streets across Iran to mark the toppling of the shah – many carrying portraits of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in 1989, and Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Continue reading...