Defying threats of arrest or worse, witnesses to protests in Iran are managing to leak reports of violence after the country's disputed presidential elections. "Censoring is very bad here and they have reduced Internet speed," two Iranians said to a friend outside the country. The pair wanted to broadcast images of damage and casualties after a reported attack on a dorm at the University of Tehran. "We managed to upload a few pictures and movies ... please give it to ...

Observers with a working knowledge of Iranian politics have largely been able to shrug off President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's bluster and bullying, knowing the diminutive President must still answer to a far more powerful figure: Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Since 1989, the shadowy cleric — a former president himself — has sat at the apex of Iran's complex hierarchy as the final word in all political and religious matters. The massive protests roiling Tehran in the aftermath of ...

Iran's Interior Minister announced Saturday that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won 63.29% of the vote in the nation's closely watched presidential poll. The announcement, greeted with widespread skepticism by Iranian opposition supporters and by foreign analysts, has brought thousands of people onto the streets where they have encountered a strong police presence and the threat of violence. Rumors of vote rigging had been flying for hours before the official announcement. At about 11 p.m. Friday, less ...

Has Sarah Palin started running for president? In the last week alone, the Alaska governor appeared at a Republican fundraiser in Washington D.C., attended a baseball game in New York and even led a small-town parade on the U.S. east coast, 5,000 kilometers from her small town on the western side of the continent. It looks so much like a campaign for the White House, you could almost forget that Barack Obama has just settled into the presidency and will ...

Michel Platini, the president of the governing body for European football (UEFA), has hit out at the large fee offered by Real Madrid for the Portugal playmaker Cristiano Ronaldo. English Premier League side Manchester United announced on June 11 that they had accepted a world record transfer fee of $130M for the 24-year-old from the Spanish side. The news came in the same week that Real confirmed their capture of Brazil forward Kaka for $92M from Italian side AC Milan. ...

All 19-year-old Maria Hernandez wanted to do was escort her grandparents, visiting from Puerto Rico, through a museum whose displays had so impressed her during her previous visit. But their tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum ended abruptly just before 1 p.m. Tuesday, as they were on the second floor. "We were in the 'Remember the Children' exhibit. We were just exiting, and we heard shooting," Hernandez said. "I ran towards the glass doors to see what was going ...

If you prefer to keep the image of meat — say, a juicy hamburger — safely separated from the image of an actual animal — say, a 1,200-lb. castrated bull — then cow-pooling is not for you. Jean Edwards is clearly not squeamish about knowing precisely where her steaks come from. In 2007, she and her husband James, a corrections officer in Vermont, went in with another family to buy a side of grass-fed beef directly from a farmer. ...

As Britain's Prince Harry neared the end of his second and final day in New York City on Saturday, he described his experiences as "fantastic." The 24-year-old visited the Harlem Children's Zone, a nonprofit organization that offers free programs and classes in a low-income area, then went to Governors Island in New York Harbor to play in the Veuve Clicquot Manhattan Polo Classic. Profits from the match will benefit Sentebale, a charity for orphans in Lesotho, Africa, a cause Harry's ...

More than nuclear bomb tests, the suicide of former South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun has stunned the South Korean public. While the news has shocked the nation, perhaps the level of surprise at the method wasn't as great. In a country with one of the highest suicide rates among economically advanced countries, traditional concepts of honor and public "face" remain powerful social forces. According to World Health Organization figures, rates of suicide in South Korea doubled to 21.9 ...

Australia's iconic Tasmanian devil -- widely known as trouble in Looney Tunes cartoons -- has been put on the country's endangered list, environmental officials announced Friday. "My decision to uplist the Tasmanian devil is based on advice from the Threatened Species Scientific Committee, which lists the devil facial tumor disease as the major threat to the devil," Environment Minister Peter Garrett said in a statement. "This disease has led to the decline of about 70 percent of the Tasmanian devil ...