The authorities in Iran continue to block the travel of the nation’s most prominent poet.

Last week, as she was about to board a flight to Paris, police seized the passport of Simin Behbahani, who is 82 and nearly blind.

Behbahani was interrogated all night long and then sent home — without her passport.

So far, she has not been charged with any crime. Neither the police nor the Revolutionary Court has asserted any legal basis for taking her passport.

‘We All Thought She Was Untouchable’

Known as the "lioness of Iran," Simin Behbahani has been writing fierce poetry for decades, during the reign of Iran’s Shah, during the Islamic Revolution, during the reign of the ayatollahs, and over the past year’s political turmoil.

Through it all, she was not imprisoned and continued to enjoy the freedom to travel, says Farzaneh Milani, who teaches Persian literature at the University of Virginia and is one of Behbahani’s translators.
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March 19 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. issued a license to a company to boost Internet access for Iranians, though the government in Tehran will likely attempt to block U.S. efforts, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.
“We’re doing a lot, let me just put it at that, because we think it is in the interests of American values and American strategic concerns to make sure that people have a chance to know what is going on outside of Iran,” Clinton said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in Moscow today.
Clinton didn’t name the company or elaborate on what it would do to expand Iranians’ access to the Internet.
The Internet became the most important tool for opposition candidates in Iran’s June 12 presidential election as the government restricted their access to the airwaves and closed their newspapers.
Before the election, opposition campaigns circumvented government disruption of the Internet by relying on proxy servers that disguise a…

AFP - EU nations are determined to take action to end Iran’s "unacceptable" jamming of satellite broadcasting and Internet censorship, according to a text agreed by European ambassadors in Brussels.

"The EU calls on the Iranian authorities to stop the jamming of satellite broadcasting and Internet censorship and to put an end to this electronic interference immediately," said the text prepared for a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.

"The EU is determined to pursue these issues and to act with a view to put an end to this unacceptable situation," the EU nations added in the document seen by AFP.

The initiative came notably from Britain, France, Germany and the EU’s foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton.