Supreme Leader

Iran's supreme leader wrapped up an unprecedented 10-day visit to the Iranian seminary city of Qom on Friday that was widely seen as an attempt to bolster support among those in a clerical establishment either indifferent or hostile to his conservative agenda. FOR THE RECORD: Iran clergy: An article in the Oct. 30 Section A about Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and reform-minded clergy said an influential cleric, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, died 40 years ago. He died last year.

Iran's supreme leader urged the "speedy formation" of a new Iraqi government at a meeting Monday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, who is visiting Tehran as part of a tour of regional countries aimed at securing support for his bid to keep his job. Maliki's visit underscores Iran's continued role as a major powerbroker in Iraqi affairs and a potential spoiler of the United States' plans to establish a more-inclusive and Western-leaning government....

In a region where Confucian thinking about seniority still holds sway, where political life generally begins at 50, it isn't easy to sell the public on a twentysomething who has never held a real job. So North Korean propagandists are hard at work spinning Kim Jong Eun's youth into an asset, trying to convince a wary public that the youngest son of leader Kim Jong Il will bring the country lurching toward modernity. The ruling Workers' Party is convening a rare congress on Tuesday in Pyongyang to name the next generation of leadership.

Iran's top political and religious authority lashed out at the United States at a nuclear disarmament conference Saturday in Tehran meant to counter a nonproliferation summit in Washington earlier in the week. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, described the United States as the world's "only nuclear scofflaw." He called Washington hypocritical for advocating arms control while retaining a huge nuclear weapons stockpile, and for accepting the atomic arsenal of Israel.

Though Disneyland sadly still lacks a little bit of Figment, the popular character found in Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center, some cult favorites such as Fuzzbucket, Hooter and Major Domo have returned to the park, as Michael Jackson's sci-fi short film "Captain EO" has officially reopened in Tomorrowland. The 3-D film has replaced "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience," which closed on Jan. 3. Fans have been lobbying for the return of "Captain EO" since the pop star's death last summer, and it has been absent from the park for 13 years.

Iran's supreme leader Saturday told shadowy pro-government militias not to interfere in the nation's postelection unrest even as the head of the notorious Basiji militia warned that his forces would "jump into the fray" if authorities didn't act strongly against the opposition movement. In his first public comments since protests last month that coincided with a major religious holiday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a rare attempt to ease tensions. Two days after gunmen with suspected ties to Iran's Revolutionary Guard allegedly opened fire on the car of opposition figure Mehdi Karroubi, Khamenei urged all to abide by the law. "Relevant bodies should fully respect the law in dealing with the riots and the ongoing events," he told clerics and seminary students bused to Tehran from the shrine city of Qom for an annual political commemoration.

Large-scale protests spread in central Iranian cities Wednesday, offering the starkest evidence yet that the opposition movement that emerged from the disputed June presidential election has expanded beyond its base of mostly young, educated Tehran residents to at least some segments of the country's pious heartland. Demonstrations took place in Esfahan, a provincial capital and Iran's cultural center, and nearby Najafabad, the birthplace and hometown of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whose death Saturday triggered the latest round of confrontations between the opposition movement and the government.

Itried to visit Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri once. He was 75 years old and had just been placed under house arrest. It was November 1997. My interpreter and I drove through the streets of the holy city of Qom searching for him. We'd been directed to his neighborhood by a minor dissident cleric we'd found teaching a Koran class. Now we stopped and asked every few blocks whether anyone knew which house was belonged to Montazeri. Qom is a smallish city, the foremost center of Shiite scholarship in the world and the place where the Iranian revolution was born.

Political turmoil built Sunday over the burning of an image of Iran's revolutionary founder, which was aired, in a controversial move, on state television. Accusations that the incident was carried out by anti-government demonstrators sparked protests as well as threats against reformist leaders. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday said reformist politicians and anti-government demonstrators had defiled the image of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, during National Students Day protests last week.