Ruhollah Khomeini

British writer Salman Rushdie attended a New York gala on Thursday night in his first public appearance since a knife attack that nearly took his life last year.

The award-winning novelist, a naturalized American who has lived in New York for 20 years, lost sight in one eye after being stabbed on stage in August while speaking at a US arts center.

Salman Rushdie's agent says the author has lost sight in one eye and the use of a hand as he recovers from an attack from a man who rushed the stage at an August literary event in western New York, according to a published report.

Tens of thousands of Iranians thronged the streets of Tehran on Jan. 6 for the funeral of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani who was killed in a U.S. airstrike last week and his daughter said his death would bring a "dark day" for the United States.

Hundreds of Iranians on Aug. 31 attended the funeral of Ebrahim Yazdi, one of the country's most influential dissident politicians and a former foreign minister.

Chants against the Saudi royal family and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) mingled with the traditional cries of "Death to Israel" and "Death to America" at Jerusalem Day rallies across Iran on June 23.

Iranian authorities have arrested seven people suspected of helping militants involved in twin attacks in the capital Tehran, a judiciary official said on June 9. 

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings and gun attacks on parliament and the mausoleum of the Islamic Republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, that killed 17 people on June 7. 

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish strategic theorist who was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter in the tumultuous years of the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s, died on Friday at a hospital in Virginia. He was 89.

Today's Iraq is one of the countries that have emerged at the end of the 400-year-old Ottoman Empire rule after the First World War. 

According to OECD data, nearly 19 percent of Turkish youth are unemployed. Some 13.3 percent of men aged 15-19, 18.3 percent of men aged 20-24 and 47.6 percent of women aged 20-24 are unemployed, not getting training and not getting an education.

The world?s biggest book fair opened in Frankfurt on Oct 13 with a press conference by British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, saying ?Expression of speech is fundamental to all human beings.?All attempts to curb free speech are ?an attack on human nature,? British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie said Oct. 13 at the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world?s biggest book fair.