Palestinian Authority Attorney General Ahmad Barak announced on Monday that he was banning the distribution of a new novel on the grounds that it contained “indecent texts and terms that threaten morality and public decency, which could affect the population, in particular minors.” The book, Crime in Ramallah by Abbad Yahya, reportedly contains explicit...

The Middle East is the birthplace of many things, some positive, others less so. Amongst the region’s primary creations has been the postmodern idea that there is no real objective truth—simply competing “narratives” with equal claim and validity. But every so often the truth makes itself clear in the most...

An British-Iranian charity worker who was arrested last year by Iran on charges of attempting to overthrow the government has had her five-year sentence upheld by Iran’s judiciary, the Guardian reported Sunday. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in April while preparing to depart from Tehran’s international...

Iranian authorities are exposing their “utterly brutal sense of justice” by continuing to carry out “cruel and inhuman” corporal punishments including floggings, amputations, and forced blinding, Amnesty International charged on Wednesday. Hundreds of prisoners are flogged in Iran each year, sometimes in public, Amnesty noted. In the latest flogging case on January 5,...

Twelve people who work in the Iranian fashion industry were sentenced to up to six years in prison for “spreading prostitution,” the BBC reported Monday. The twelve were convicted of spreading prostitution and promoting corruption by publishing images online that were considered obscene. They also were charged with causing Muslims...

An American-Iranian dual national and his wife were arrested by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in July, and have been detained ever since without charge or access to a lawyer in Tehran’s Evin Prison, a New-York based human rights group said on Friday. Before their arrest and detention Karan Vafadari, a...