Masih Alinejad

The shocking news of the suicide of a 16-year-old girl in Iran who ended her life after being threatened with expulsion when she was recorded dancing without wearing a hijab – days after the story of the Iranian student who stayed in her underwear to protest, was arrested and brutally abused.

An Iranian student was arrested Saturday for taking off her clothes in protest as she was attacked by ethics police at Tehran’s Islamic Azad University in Tehran. Authorities reprimanded the young woman, saying she was not wearing a hijab.

"My dream is to witness an Iran liberated from the grip of the Islamic regime," the Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad tells Kathimerini in an interview. The Iranian women's rights activist is living in exile in the USA, under the protection of the FBI. She spoke to us by phone about what it means to be a woman under Iran's theocratic regime.

Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Friday discussed the fate of Germans held in Iran with her Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, her ministry said.

The two ministers held a telephone call with a "particular focus... on German consular cases", the ministry wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Be My Voice, a documentary about Iranian women's fight against the forced wearing of the hijab, has won the Amnesty International Slovenia Human Rights Film Award as the 25th Festival of Documentary Film in Ljubljana.

An Iranian intelligence officer and three alleged members of an Iranian intelligence network have been charged in Manhattan with plotting to kidnap a prominent Iranian opposition activist and writer in exile and take her back to Tehran, authorities said on July 13.