North Korea To Punish Mourners Who Were Insincere

You’d better watch out, you’d better cry. You’d better pout, I’m telling you why: North Korea’s punishing insincere mourners, according to the Daily NK. An anonymous source tells the Daily NK, a South Korea-based publication in opposition of the North Korean regime, that “authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp […]

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Iran prisoner beaten to death, coroner says

A coroner’s report says that a man arrested in the violent aftermath of Iran’s presidential elections died from beatings, Iranian media reported Monday in what appeared to be the first official confirmation of a detainee’s death from mistreatment. The death of Mohsen Rouhol-Amini was the result of “repeated blows and severe physical injuries” and other mistreatment at Tehran’s Kahrizak prison, the semiofficial Mehr news agency reported, citing an informed source.

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Ahmadinejad may face bumpy 2nd term

Four years ago, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei kissed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the cheek before he was sworn in as Iran’s new leader. Song and prayer heralded a new start for Iran with the hard-line Tehran mayor, virtually unknown to the outside world in 2005. He promised to stamp out corruption and fight for justice

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Ahmadinejad: There’s no rift with supreme leader

Iran’s controversial president defended his government’s relationship with the country’s supreme leader on Friday, disputing charges of a political rift. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking to a gathering in Mashad in northern Iran, rejected claims by people who have attempted to cast the relationship between his government and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “as tainted,” according to Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency.

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Memorial Crackdown Helps Sustain Iran’s Protest Movement

Crying “Death to the dictator!” supporters of Iran’s opposition movement charged once more into the breach on July 30, defying a government ban on protests by gathering in the thousands at Iran’s largest cemetery to honor slain victims of the government’s crackdown. The protest was timed to coincide with the traditional Shi’ite practice of observing the 40th day of mourning following a death — the deceased in this case being Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose videotaped shooting at a June 20 demonstration against the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made her a global icon of Iran’s protest movement

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Iran warns opposition ahead of key sermon

Former president and one of Iran’s most powerful clerics, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has started delivering the Friday sermon at Tehran University, witnesses told CNN. Rafsanjani, who backs reformist Mir Hossein Moussavi, the opposition candidate who challenged hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the disputed June 12 elections, planned to offer a solution to the ongoing crisis in the latter part of his sermon, witnesses said.

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