Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Nov. 14 – Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei defended President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his administration in the face of dissenting voices among various factions within the religious theocracy that the hard-line president failed to live up to his pre-election promises, the state-run ISNA news agency reported on Monday.

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Nov. 14 – More than a hundred people have been arrested in the province of north-western province of Ardebil for “disturbing the peace” and “causing trouble”, Iran’s state-run press reported on Monday.

AFP: Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has pulled out of the UN’s World Summit for the Information Society in Tunisia this week, the ISNA news agency said Monday.

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Nov. 14 – Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has appointed one of his nephews as his new security chief, according to state-run media reports on Monday.

AP: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave her strongest rebuke yet on Sunday to the renewed hardline Islamic leadership of Iran, saying that “no civilized nation” can call for the annihilation of another.

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Nov. 13 – Seventy-five percent of the ministers and deputy ministers in the government of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad come from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the elite ideological army loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a source close to a state institution told Iran Focus on Sunday.