Word: iran
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...first day of class in Iran comes with its own traditions, designed to help students ease into the academic year. First-graders have it the best. The children are designated as shokoofeh (literally, blossoms), and the teachers give each child a stalk of a fragrant flower. The principal raises a microphone and calls all of the kids into rows, regimented by grades. Then, at exactly the same time across the country, an official strikes a metal plate with a small hammer, the aural signal for the year to begin. The kids pass under a Koran and into their new classrooms...
...confront in a formal social setting what has happened to the country since the controversial presidential election in June. As the principal of a Tehran high school put it to me in his own understated way, "We will surely have problems." (See pictures of the turbulent aftermath of Iran's presidential election...
...Iran there can be no moving on, not yet, because what has happened is not over. Not with show trials being broadcast on state television, the cautionary call of a worried regime, met every night by the response across rooftops, "Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar" (God is great, God is great). Not with every holiday, religious event and memorial day an opportunity, a possibility, for protest. Things are not yet over in Iran. The phrase "Atash zire khakestar" (There is yet fire under the ash) is heard a lot these days...
Accounts of schooling in Iran by the American media tend to depict classrooms there as assembly lines, factories of indoctrination and fanaticism quietly churning out fully formed citizens. A pair of reports published in 2008 dubiously claimed that Iranian schools were preparing future generations for self-immolation, a youthful cadre of suicide terrorists ready to hurl themselves into salvation. It was said that schools fostered in young people an intolerance that would surely undermine any movement toward democracy. These reports received considerable coverage by newspapers and television stations throughout the United States and Europe. A year later, many of these...
...February 2007, U.S. troops detained al-Hakim as he crossed into Iraq from Iran in a heavily armed convoy. The officials said they only had questions about his passport but allegedly blindfolded and strip-searched him. The then U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, issued an apology to al-Hakim, which he accepted...