
A month of protests inside Iran, a widening crackdown and repeated warnings from President Donald Trump have brought Washington to a decision point on whether to use force, as senior Israeli and Saudi officials arrive in the US capital this week for talks on possible next steps.

US President Donald Trump said a “massive armada” of American naval forces was heading toward Iran, warning that a future attack would be “far worse” than past strikes if Tehran does not agree to a deal.

As the threat of attack by the United States looms, Iranian commentators are sounding the alarm on the existential danger they see to Tehran, with one former envoy even saying US President Donald Trump should be hosted for talks.

Iranian bank branches are facing growing shortages of cash as demand for banknotes rises sharply, prompting informal daily withdrawal caps of 30 million to 50 million rials per customer (about $18 to $30), Iranian media reported.

The possibility of US military action against Iran is eroding Iranians’ purchasing power and deepening their sense of insecurity, according to Iranian economic news outlets which provide a rare window into economic behavior amid an internet blackout.
Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, directs a significant overseas real estate network through intermediaries, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday citing a year-long investigation.
Iran’s internet, throttled for 20 days amid the mass killing of protesters, began to partially resume on Wednesday, according to monitoring groups and users inside the country, who said access remains heavily restricted and unstable.
Amirhossein (Iman) Seyrafi, a former political prisoner and digital security expert previously accused of spying for the United States, has been arrested amid Iran’s sweeping crackdown on dissent, sources familiar with the matter told Iran International.

Brothers Hamid and Vahid Arzanlou were two well-known entrepreneurs in Iran’s furniture industry who despite their wealth still chose to raise their voices in anti-government protests this month and paid with their lives.

Mojtaba (Shahmorad) Shahpari, a protester from the southwestern Iranian city of Izeh who was injured during the nationwide protests and later found dead in a cold storage warehouse in Isfahan, was laid to rest wrapped in the lion and sun flag, fulfilling his final wish.

Iranian families are turning funerals of youths killed in a deadly protest crackdown this month into celebrations of life, with dancing and wedding music aimed at defying their heartbreak and state repression.
Many Iranians on social media have been referring to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as ‘Moush-Ali’ (Rat-Ali), a nickname rooted in reports that he has repeatedly gone into underground seclusion and now echoed at rallies inside Iran and in diaspora protests.
Iranians’ chants against the Islamic Republic—muted for now by brute force—are viewed in Turkey not as a struggle for freedom but as a geopolitical risk from migration and militancy.
A long video of an Iranian father's agonized trudge among the bloodied corpses of slain protestors in a Tehran morgue in search of his son has seared viewers with the enormity of the state's mass killings this month.
The United States has deported three former members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said in a post on X.
Iranian and Venezuelan opposition figures in a meeting in Washington DC urged the United States and its allies to act against what they described as an axis of repression between their two countries.
Germany’s federal interior ministry warned that members of the Iranian diaspora in Germany face a risk of intimidation and harassment by Iranian state actors, including possible cyber attacks, in a response to a written question from Green lawmaker Marcel Emmerich.
More than 36,500 Iranians were killed by security forces during the January 8-9 crackdown on nationwide protests, making it the deadliest two-day protest massacre in history, according to documents reviewed by Iran International's Editorial Board.
Emory University has dismissed Fatemeh Ardeshir Larijani, the daughter of the US-sanctioned security chief of the Islamic Republic, the university confirmed to Iran International on Saturday, following growing calls for her removal.

I am writing this from Tehran after three days of trying to find a way to send it: things may get a lot worse before they get any better.

There is a cruel ritual in Iranian opposition politics: some voices abroad constantly interrogate the “purity” of activists inside—why they did not speak more sharply or endorse maximalist slogans, why survival itself looks insufficiently heroic.
