Iran on Saturday expanded limited imports of South Korean home appliances through its border trade system, five years after Ali Khamenei ordered restrictions on products from LG and Samsung.
Iranian hardliners have intensified attacks on President Masoud Pezeshkian after he signalled nuclear flexibility and backed negotiations with Washington in a Fox News interview.
The IRGC-affiliated Fars News criticized Iran’s executive vice-president on Friday for joining Saudi officials in a cake-cutting ceremony marking the kingdom’s National Day in Tehran, which it said created an overly “friendly” image at a time of heightened regional tensions.
Talks between Iranian and US diplomats have continued in New York despite increasingly harsh rhetoric from both capitals, but the emerging dispute is less over whether to negotiate than over who must move first.
President Masoud Pezeshkian’s UN speech won unusual praise across Iran’s political establishment Thursday, but emerging details of negotiations with the United States could soon test the president’s careful balancing act.
Masoud Pezeshkian told the UN that Iran would not accept the language of force. Iranians writing to Iran International had one reply: that is the only language his government uses at home. Their messages picked apart what he said, what he left out, and how he said it.
Iran's generals and hardliners spent the week warning Masoud Pezeshkian not to smile in New York. After his UN speech they lined up to praise him. He had not changed their minds about talking to Washington. He had given a speech that did not require them to.
Iranians writing to Iran International this week did not see a diplomatic visit. They saw the men they hold responsible for January's massacre walking free in New York, and they asked the city's mayor, who once promised to arrest Netanyahu, why.
Iran warned Wednesday that any renewed US attack would draw a stronger military response, even as officials from the two countries pursued a new diplomatic opening in New York that has triggered a backlash among hardliners in Tehran.
Any effort to end the Iran war faces a fundamental obstacle even after the resumption of US-Iran diplomacy in New York: apparent divisions within Tehran over who has the authority to negotiate and how far those negotiations can go.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian is facing competing pressure at home over whether to use his UN visit for direct diplomacy with US President Donald Trump or strike a more defiant tone as the two countries remain at war.
Iranian state media on Tuesday published what they said was a handwritten letter from Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei to a military commander, potentially offering the first physical indication that he survived the February attack on his father’s office.
Iranian hardliners spent the day before President Masoud Pezeshkian left for the UN General Assembly talking publicly about nuclear weapons, leaving the treaty that restrains them, and preparing for a long war with the United States.
Iranian investigative journalist Yashar Soltani says the middlemen who move Iran's sanctioned oil revenues had a financial motive to wreck the June deal with Washington, and that the tanker attacks weeks later served it. Hardline outlets have answered with accusations of treason.
The spokesman for Iran’s mass mobilisation campaign said children under 15 could be introduced to military concepts, while denying that minors were receiving formal weapons training as authorities expand a civilian defence drive launched during the war.
Iran’s nightly pro-government rallies have become an increasingly visible show of political force, occupying streets and squares for 200 consecutive nights and, more recently, turning their fire on rivals within the Islamic Republic itself.
Renewed talk among Iranian hardliners of removing President Masoud Pezeshkian has revived comparisons with Iran’s only presidential impeachment, but there is little evidence so far of a coordinated effort capable of unseating him.
Calls for Iran to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are gaining ground among hardliners after the IAEA referred the country to the UN Security Council and its nuclear chief was barred from attending the agency’s annual conference in Vienna.
The Islamic Republic has launched a platform asking citizens to identify and report opponents living abroad. Iranians met it with ridicule, pointing to how deeply the state's own security apparatus has been infiltrated.
China’s call for a collective BRICS role in restoring peace in the Persian Gulf and Middle East has triggered debate in Iran over whether Beijing is preparing to mediate between Tehran and Washington.
The fall of the Ali al-Taher heights to Israel has turned Iran's hardliners on the negotiators of the June deal with Washington, whose clause on Lebanon was sold at home as a victory and whose defenders now say it has been dead for two months.
Iranian hardliners are demanding that Tehran abandon restraint and restore deterrence through military confrontation following the latest Israeli attack on Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon.