Teh interesting (non-PHL-related) news stub thread

[Twin-Skies]

Conspiracy Trial for 100 Dissidents Begins in Iran
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/world/...ss&emc=rss

EIRUT, Lebanon — The Iranian authorities opened an extraordinary mass trial against more than 100 opposition figures on Saturday, accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers to stage a revolution through terrorism, subversion, and a media campaign to discredit last month’s presidential election.

The trial, coming just days before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to be sworn in for a second term, signaled an intensified government attack on the opposition movement, which maintains that the June 12 election was rigged and continues to muster widespread street protests.

The accusations read out in the courtroom were a broadside against virtually every major figure associated with reform in Iran, going well beyond those actually arrested. State television broadcast images of the defendants, who included a former vice president and a Newsweek reporter, as well as some of the reform movement’s best-known spokesmen, clad in prison uniforms and listening as prosecutors outlined their accusations in a large marble-floored courtroom. Some were shackled.

Opposition leaders angrily disputed the accusations on Saturday and protested that the defendants had had no access to lawyers or to details of the charges against them.

The leading opposition presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, issued a call on his Web site, Ghalam News, for Iranians to resume their nightly protest chants of “God is great” more intensely than ever.

One line in particular made me facepalm:

The Iranian authorities opened an extraordinary mass trial against more than 100 opposition figures on Saturday, accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers to stage a revolution through terrorism, subversion, and a media campaign to discredit last month’s presidential election.

WTF is this? The red scare all over again?