WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday slapped financial sanctions on two North Korean firms, including one based in Iran, as part of a crackdown on North Korea's ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs following a May nuclear test blast and a series of provocative missile launches.

"This is clearly an action that affects Iran as well, but (administration officials) don't want to do something overly provocative given the domestic situation in Iran right now," said Michael Jacobson, a senior researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former top Treasury Department adviser on combating terror financing. » read more

WASHINGTON — The Iranian government's electoral watchdog Monday confirmed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in the disputed June 12 presidential election after police wielding batons and cables prevented more than a thousand demonstrators from organizing a rally to protest the results.

The decision of the 12-member Guardian Council, whose chairman endorsed Ahmadinejad, found no evidence in a random recount of 10 percent of the 40 million ballots cast to sustain charges of massive fraud, state television said. » read more

HERAT, Afghanistan — Students at Afghanistan's Herat University thought that they were living in new era of openness, one in which the right to criticize authority was increasing.

The newspaper was closed for 10 days, the university fired the responsible journalists and the paper was reopened with no news of the protests. » read more

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that his hopes for a direct U.S.-Iran dialogue, one of his signature foreign policy initiatives, have been dashed for now by the Iranian government's violent quashing of protests over the disputed June 12 election.

On Friday, however, Obama said there was "no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks." » read more

TEHRAN, Iran — A senior cleric aligned with Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Friday for leaders of the mass protests over the country's disputed presidential election to be dealt with "mercilessly" and treated as enemies of God, a transgression meriting death.

There was speculation that the denunciation of protest leaders was aimed at setting the stage for the prosecution of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the second-place finisher, whose charge of fraud in Ahmadinejad's unexpected landslide re-election June 12 has fueled nearly two weeks of rallies by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of angry Iranians. » read more