Last month, a young woman went to work at Sarzamineh Shadi, or Land of Happiness, an indoor amusement park east of Iran's capital, Tehran. After a photo of her without a hijab circulated on social media, the amusement park was closed, according to multiple accounts in Iranian media. Prosecutors in Tehran have reportedly opened an investigation. Shuttering a business to force compliance with Iran's strict laws for women's dress is a familiar tactic to Shaparak Shajarizadeh. She stopped wearing a hijab in 2017 because she views it as a symbol of government suppression, and recalls restaurant owners, fearful of authorities, pressuring her to cover her head. But Shajarizadeh, who fled to Canada in 2018 after three arrests for flouting hijab law, worries that women like the amusement park worker may now be targeted with face recognition algorithms as well as by conventional police work.

Ministers of the European Union of Foreign Affairs have imposed new sanctions on Iranian religious leaders, senior officials and top state media employees over new crackdowns on antigovernment protests and supplying drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Twenty individuals and one entity were sanctioned on Monday over human rights abuses, while four more people and as many entities were added over the issue of drones. Sanctions include freezing of assets and travel bans to the EU. The state-owned Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting had its assets frozen; the EU said the media outlet was a "mouthpiece" for "the violent response to the recent demonstrations in Iran". Iranians have protested against the government's restrictions on their daily lives since late September, following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic's strict dress code.

Tehran, Iran – Iran has suspended its morality police as the country continues to deal with two months of protests, the Iranian prosecutor general has suggested. The protests erupted shortly after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was arrested by a unit of the morality police in Tehran for allegedly not adhering to the country's mandatory dress code for women. Speaking on Saturday at an event aimed at "outlining the hybrid war during recent riots", which is how Iranian officials describe alleged foreign influence in the unrest, prosecutor general Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying by local media the morality police operations are over. The morality police "has no connection with the judiciary and was shut down by the same place that it had been launched from in the past", he said, reportedly answering a question on why the morality police has been shut down. There were no other confirmations that work of the patrolling units – officially tasked with ensuring "moral security" in the society – has been terminated.

Ukraine's state electricity operator has announced blackouts in the capital, Kyiv, and seven other regions of the country in the aftermath of Russia's devastating strikes on energy infrastructure. The move comes as Russian forces continue to pound Ukrainian cities and villages with missiles and drones, inflicting damage on power plants and water supplies, in a grinding war that is nearing its nine-month mark. Ukrenergo, the sole operator of Ukraine's high-voltage transmission lines, initially said in an online statement on Saturday that scheduled blackouts will take place in the capital and the greater Kyiv region, as well as several regions around it – Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Poltava and Kharkiv. Later in the day, however, the company released an update saying that scheduled outages for a specific number of hours are not enough and instead there will be emergency outages, which could last indefinitely. Ukraine has been grappling with power outages and disruption of water supplies since Russia started unleashing barrages of missile and drone attacks on the country's energy infrastructure last month.

Tehran, Iran – Iran for the first time confirmed it sold drones to Russia, but said this happened "months" before the start of the war in Ukraine. Speaking to reporters after an event in Tehran on Saturday, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian addressed claims by Western officials that Iranian drones were supplied to Moscow for its invasion, and that surface-to-surface missiles may also be on the way. "Their comments on the missiles part are completely wrong, and the drones part is correct. We gave a limited number of drones to Russia months and before the war in Ukraine," Amirabdollahian said. Iranian officials had previously said on numerous occasions that Tehran had "defence" cooperation with Russia, but had not supplied the Kremlin with arms "for the purpose of being used in the war in Ukraine".

'Putin's Playbook' author Rebekah Koffler and former U.S. State Department Deputy Special Envoy Ellie Cohanim react to reports that Russia is seeking Iranian missiles. Two weeks ago, the co-founder of a think tank affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Defense, Ruslan Pukhov, accidentally admitted on Russian TV what Moscow has been denying for several weeks – Russian forces are using Iranian drones to bombard Ukrainian cities, killing civilians. Implicitly criticizing the Russian authorities for being secretive about the deal, Pukhov compared the topic of Iranian drones with a body part. "There's an a** but you can't use the word," he said, adding "we all know they are Iranian, but the powers that be don't acknowledge it." Drones, in fact, are not the only type of military assistance that the Ayatollahs are handing to Putin as Iran emerges as the principal backer of Putin's savage war on Ukraine.

Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin provides insight on responding to drone attacks in Ukraine on "America Reports." The Paris-based dissident organization National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) accused the Iranian regime of furnishing Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's army with more than 3,500 drones for his scorched-earth war against Ukraine. According to reports from the social network of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) inside the Islamic Republic, "Iran's UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] sale contract to Russia includes various offensive drones, including Shahed-129, Mohajer-6 and suicide drones Shahed-136 and Shahed-131." MEK is part of the National Council of Resistance of Iran umbrella organization. The NCRI dossier states, "Tehran has sold more than 3,500 UAVs to Russia. Most of these were made at the factories of the Ministry of Defense, with others produced by the factories of the Iranian Aviation and Space Industries Association (IASIA)."

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said he demanded Tehran stop providing Russia with weapons in a phone call with his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amirabdollahian. Ukrainian officials and their Western allies have accused Iran of providing so-called "kamikaze" drones to Russia, which have recently been used to devastating effect by Moscow's forces in strikes aimed at Ukrainian infrastructure. Iran has strenuously denied that it has sent any weaponry, including drones, to Russia. "Today, I received a call from Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian," Kuleba wrote in a tweet late on Friday. "I demanded Iran to immediately cease the flow of weapons to Russia used to kill civilians and destroy critical infrastructure in Ukraine," he wrote.

Tehran, Iran – Iran and the West are clashing over Tehran's alleged drone sales to Russia for the war in Ukraine, an issue now being linked to a UN resolution backing the country's nuclear deal with world powers. UN Security Council Resolution 2231 was unanimously adopted in 2015 to endorse the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the accord that Iran signed with China, Russia, United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany to get sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme. The US unilaterally abandoned the accord in 2018 and imposed harsh sanctions that remain in place today. Efforts since April 2021 to restore the deal have stalled. European powers are now trying to use a periodic reporting mechanism in the resolution.

Fox News' Trey Yingst reports on Ukraine's efforts to conserve electricity after Russian forces target Ukrainian power grid. The Iranian military has personnel in Crimea to train Russian troops on how to pilot drones that have been decimating civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, the White House said Thursday. "They can lie to the world, but they certainly can't hide the facts, and the fact is this -- Tehran is now directly engaged on the ground," National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters. Russia started purchasing Shahed-136, or "kamikaze drones," from Iran this summer and have used them to strike Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials. A Russian drone is seen during a Russian drone strike, which local authorities consider to be Iranian made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) Shahed-136, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine Oct. 17, 2022.