Iranian security forces have shut down a science and research centre operated by the Bahai’i Institute of Higher Education (BIHE) at Iran’s Open University and arrested a number of its staff and faculty members. The Human Rights Reporters Committee reports that Iranian security forces searched the homes of several BIHE acadmic staff and arrested at [...]

Iranian film director Mohammad Rasoulof has won a prize for best director in the “Un Certain Regard” section at the Cannes film festival in France. Rasoulof was awarded for “Be Omid e Didar” (“Goodbye”), a film shot semi-clandestinely in Iran about a lawyer who turns to extreme measures in order to get a visa to [...]

One man was hanged in the prison of Ahvaz in southwest of Iran, reported ths state run Iranian news agency ISNA. According to the report, the man who was identified as “Amer H.”, was charged with keeping 50 kilos and 40 grams of Hashish (cannabis) and sentenced to the revolutionary court of Abadan and hanged [...]

150 professors from the humanities departments of Iran’s Allameh Tabatabai University are to be fired or forced into early retirement. Kaleme opposition website reports that as the end of the academic year approaches, the head of Allameh Tabatabai University is preparing the files of 150 outstanding senior professors of business administration, sociology, economics, communications, law [...]

Iranian opposition leader Mehdi Karoubi has been allowed out of house arrest to look for a new home where he will be put under house arrest again, a conservative website said on Saturday. “Karoubi has been released temporarily, he and his wife are looking for a new house,” the Jahan website said. “In the new [...]

Iran arrests 30 individuals accused of being CIA agents and announces the “collapse of a spying network” in the country. The ministry of intelligence issued an announcement saying: “This network aimed as collecting information and forcing people to engage in spying activities with traps such as offering foreign visas and residency as well as employment [...]

Some Iranian students may seek two-year, multiple-entry U.S. visas, the State Department said on Friday, giving them greater freedom to travel to the United States in a gesture to improve people-to-people ties. The step is the latest in a series by President Barack Obama’s administration to reach out to the Iranian people and, in particular, [...]

Normally filmmakers send the Cannes Film Festival their submissions by mail. Internationally acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi smuggled his out of the country and to festival organizers on a USB key hidden in a cake. The movie, “This Is Not a Film,” is Panahi’s cinematic response to his sentencing last year to a six-year prison [...]

Two defectors from Iran’s intelligence service have testified that Iranian officials knew in advance about the attacks of September 11, 2001, says a US court filing that seeks damages for Iran’s ”direct support for, and sponsorship of, the most deadly act of terrorism in American history”. One of the defectors also claimed that Iran was [...]