Al Arabiya has reported that Iran's Revolutionary Guard has now deployed 15,000 armed troops to Syria recently in order to help Syria's Bashar Assad against rebel forces. This corroborates a communication I had had from a source of mine on the ground that Assad has had a decent amount of defections from his army, almost entirely among Sunni troops.Hezbollah has also sent trained troops t...

Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred,...

Italy’s technocratic prime minister has no criticism of ratings downgrades – just of persistent policy weakness at the European level

There has not been such a radical restructuring since the spread of comprehensive schools 50 years ago, says Anthony Seldon.

In their most heady days, New Labour was radical, a revolutionary movement within the confines of the Labour Party, they tore up the old, stuck dogmatically to a new plan despite calls for compromise and a slowing of the pace by those reluctant to change. Sadly, Ed Miliband's reign has shown very little of this courage.

Iran is finally reporting on a major fire and explosion that took place yesterday at its Isfahan refinery, the second largest in the country. According to the official account,a malfunction at the refinery caused a leakage of cooling water from its generators, causing a power outage and blackout.One pereson was reported killed. The official story is that there was no explosion, and that fires were...

Michael Fitzpatrick recalls his first meeting with Christopher Hitchens 40 years ago, when there was more to him than flashy posturing.

contribution by Andy Ryan Michael Gove wants to be a revolutionary. When seeking to prove his revolution, he encourages people to count his beloved academies. Over one in six of UK secondary schools have taken the step and gained independence from their local authority. Gove crafts an image of school leaders enthusiastically seizing power and,

There are concerns that the changes will not live up to their revolutionary billing and that autonomy could lead some to perform less well

It's a weird irony that Iranians know the history of Anglo-Persian relations better than the Brits. When the newly installed Ministry of Islamic Guidance asked Harvey Morris, Reuters' man in post-revolutionary Iran, for a history of his news agency, he asked his London office to send him a biography of Baron von Reuter – and was appalled to discover the founder of the world's ...