Word: iranian
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...Middle East state of Bahrain last week. First, a dodgy propeller apparently stalled their vessel's progress toward the nearby emirate of Dubai. Worse still, seemingly adrift in the Persian Gulf, their 60-ft. boat appears to have inadvertently coasted into the territorial waters of Iran. Duly halted by Iranian naval vessels on Nov. 25, the men - seasoned sailors who had planned to take part in a yacht race from Dubai the following day - were swiftly whisked into the uncertain fate of Iranian custody at a moment of mounting tensions between Tehran and the West...
...time. Desperate to play down the incident and avoid a diplomatic row, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he was looking forward to the matter "being promptly sorted out." Tehran took a different tone. "Naturally our measures will be hard and serious," Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaie, chief of staff to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told the semiofficial Fars news agency on Tuesday, "if we find out [the sailors] had evil intentions." (See pictures of terror in Tehran...
...When Iranian Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work as a lawyer and human-rights activist, the regime in Tehran faced a dilemma. The award infuriated the country's hard-liners, but the regime privately acknowledged that it had also earned Ebadi the admiration of most Iranians. Reluctant to arrest or openly target such a popular figure, the government tolerated Ebadi's activities and limited itself to low-level harassment of her legal office...
...intensifying campaign to silence Iran's opposition, authorities in Tehran last week confiscated Ebadi's Nobel medal from a safety deposit box and froze her bank account, according to Ebadi and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, which protested on behalf of the Nobel Committee in Oslo. A spokesman for the Iranian government denied that the medal was seized and said Ebadi's assets were frozen due to her failure to pay taxes. (See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle...
...past couple of months, the severe restrictions on reporting that have accompanied the government's post-election crackdown have again turned Ebadi into a key source of information on mass detentions and prison abuse. The journalists who would ordinarily report on such violations for the Iranian and Western media have largely been banned from reporting or intimidated into leaving the country. In such an environment, Ebadi's voice was newly critical. In early November, she urged the international community to support a U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning Iran for human-rights abuses. Though the U.N. has passed similar resolutions each...