Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.

Al-Monitor – A history of support for Kurdish extremists comes back to haunt Tehran   Bahram Fatehi’s tea house in Paveh was bustling with clients smoking shisha when the religious fanatic who would later stab him to death first walked in. For months prior to that fateful late summer evening in 2013, the hardscrabble mountain town in the heart of Iranian …

CHRI – A coalition of Iranian human rights NGOs including Centre for Defenders of Human Rights, Centre for Human Rights in Iran, Impact Iran, Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre, Justice for Iran, and the Siamak Pourzand Foundation, has provided the Government of Germany with compelling evidence that Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the former Head of the Judiciary of the Islamic …

RFL/RE – A 19-year-old participant in Iran’s recent street protests says that while the wave of public demonstrations has subsided, the antiestablishment unrest in December and early January opened many Iranians’ eyes and the underlying anger remains.

nbcnews – Iran’s most significant protests in almost a decade may have calmed, but anger that fueled the nationwide demonstrations lingers and could erupt again at any time, according to experts. Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, called the recent rallies “one of the most serious crises Iran has faced in the past …

theguardian -Lifting of capital punishment for some drug-trafficking offences set to be applied retrospectively to convicts on death row