As university students prepare to return to classes in Iran, recent statements by the country's supreme leader are feeding fears that a new cultural revolution could be in the offing.
Some recognize echoes of the mass purges and curriculum revisions that took place just after the founding of the Islamic Republic 30 years ago.
Allegations of prison authorities' use of rape as a means of punishment or intimidation in the Islamic republic are nothing new.
But for the first time, a high-profile figure in the Islamic establishment has acknowledged the apparent rise in the practice, and is calling for an investigation.
Iran has put more opposition activists and protesters on trial in the continuing crackdown against unrest sparked by June's disputed presidential election.
Iranian state media reported that defendants include more pro-reform politicians, as well as British and French embassy staff workers and a young French national arrested in Tehran last month.
Khatami had strong words for the trial, at which several of his close allies, including former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi and a number of other prominent reformists, are charged with serious security crimes.
Iran's Caspian Airlines said it would pay 34,000 euros (some $54,000) in compensation for each victim of its July 15 crash en route to Yerevan, the Armenian news agency Arminfo reported on July 24.
The election in Iran and its violent aftermath could create an undesirable precedent for authoritarian governments in the former Soviet Union, according to a former Bush administration democratization official.
Given the existing geopolitical circumstances, the United States and European Union both say they would oppose Iran's participation in the Nabucco pipeline project. But that isn't stopping Tehran from saying it is willing to commit at least 10 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas annually to the venture.
The early July inter-ethnic violence that hit China's western Xinjiang Province may have been shocking, but it shouldn't have been surprising. Tension between the Uighur and Han Chinese communities had been steadily building over the past three decades, and Communist authorities in Beijing hadn't been doing much to defuse simmering anger.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has only had two supreme leaders in its 30-year history.
For the first 10 years, the Islamic Revolution's founder, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khamenei, was the supreme leader and was unquestionably accepted as such by the ruling clerical establishment.
