Iran

Big news at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. The economics are having to take back seat to the huge news that America, Britain and France have known for ages that Iran has a second secret nuclear facility. It’s a very major announcement that has re-jigged the president’s schedule and completely altered the agenda – for…

The Iranian government would have us believe that the opposition is dying, suppressed out of all existence. Since mid July it’s been pretty much impossible for large crowds to gather – every time they do, basiij militia come out to beat people up or arrest them. The opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi said he had evidence…

At some parties the buzz is all about who’s there. The big issue at President Ahmadinejad’s inauguration was who wasn’t there. There was a distinct lack of former presidents – no Khatami, no Rafsanjani. He wasn’t doing well on former parliamentary speakers either. No member of the late Imam Khomeni’s family.

Neda Agha Soltan, who was shot on July 20th during street protests in Tehran, has become a symbol of protest. Today thousands went to the cemetery where she’s buried south of Tehran to mourn 40 days after her death and remember others killed during these last six weeks of protest.

For weeks we’ve been trying to find people who have fled Iran after being arrested or injured in the demonstrations. It’s been difficult – not because such people do not exist, but because they’re all so scared. Those who have come to Europe know that if they speak out, their relatives back home are likely…

This is the way the Brit mission ends. No bang; just the whimper of a procedural delay in the Iraqi parliament. After six years, the number of British troops in Iraq has gone from 46,000 to zero. (Well zero-ish, as there are some still based in Baghdad.) A photograph in The Times said it all.

Iran’s opposition supporters have a way of turning things upside-down and back-to-front in the Islamic Republic. Many of them are secular, yet they go onto their balconies every night to shout “Allah Akbar,” putting the Basij militia, the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, into the invidious position of telling people to stop praising God. That’s…

The announcement by the head of Iran’s guardian council that locally employed British embassy staff in Tehran are to be put on trial plunges UK-Iran relations to a level possibly even lower than when British sailors were captured and accused of infringing Iranian territorial waters back in 2007. Back then President Ahmadinejad let the sailors…

Was he as famous as the Duke of Wellington? There has been some debate about how much time a show like Channel 4 News should devote to a story like the death of Michael Jackson. Both in the newsroom and, I imagine, among our viewers too. Is it really “our” kind of story? Is it…

So did they rig it and if so, how? So far the evidence seems circumstantial and no-one I’ve spoken to has managed to provide hard proof.

Every now and again you get a day in journalism which you will never forget. Monday was one of those. We set off in the morning not knowing what the day would bring. Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition candidate, had said he and other reformists would attend a mass rally but the Interior Ministry had…

TEHRAN, IRAN – Whenever the riot police charge, waving their batons, with their shields to the fore, people run down the streets to escape. The black-clad riot squad move in phalanxes on motor-bikes, riding up on the pavements, swiping at passers-by. You don’t have to be a protestor to get hit.

  I feel as if I went to bed in one country and woke up in another.   Yesterday, I saw thousands of Iranians laughing and happy as they queued in the sunshine to vote. Today, thuggish looking secret policemen with walkie-talkies stood on every street corner, while riot police with truncheons roared around the…