Three members of an Eastern European criminal organization with ties to Iran were involved in a murder-for-hire plot against a New York-based journalist, a U.S. citizen, the Department of Justice alleged Friday. A loud blast has been reported at an Iranian military facility and officials in the country say it was the result of an "unsuccessful" drone attack. "One of (the drones) was hit by the ... air defense and the other two were caught in defense traps and blew up. Fortunately, this unsuccessful attack did not cause any loss of life and caused minor damage to the workshop's roof," the ministry said in a statement carried by the state news agency IRNA. Iranian news agencies earlier reported the loud blast and carried a video showing a flash of light at the plant, said to be an ammunitions factory, and footage of emergency vehicles and fire trucks outside the plant.

Tehran, Iran – The European Parliament's approval of a resolution calling on the bloc to consider a "terrorist" designation for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has received strong condemnation from senior Iranian officials and commanders. On Thursday, the European Parliament overwhelmingly approved a resolution that calls on the European Union to recognise Iran's elite force and its subsidiaries, like the paramilitary Basij and the Quds Force, as "terrorist" organisations. It also condemned the Iranian government's response to the protests that have been taking place in the country since September, the executions linked to the protests, and drone sales to Russia, while also recommending sanctions against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Ebrahim Raisi and all IRGC-linked foundations. The EU is not obliged to enforce the resolution. While senior EU politicians have voiced their support for the resolution, it is not expected to be among new sanctions on dozens of Iranian individuals and entities expected to be approved by the bloc on Monday.

Over 100 days of nationwide protests in Iran have demonstrated the greatest pushback against the decades-old regime and its repressive policies, showing the world that the people demand rights they have long been denied. Iranian authorities may be using new technology to help enforce the country's strict dress code for women, expanding the use of facial recognition technology to issue fines and other penalties for those breaking the rules. "Many people haven't been arrested in the streets," Shaparak Shajarizadeh, who fled from Iran to Canada in 2018 after multiple violations of Iran's strict laws and became an activist, told Wired in a report Tuesday. "They were arrested at their homes one or two days later." Shajarizadeh is one of several observers of Iran who fear that the country's Islamist regime has begun to weaponize facial recognition technology to find and punish women who flaunt laws about their dress and appearance in public, a setback for activists amid months of protesting for women's rights and regime change.

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)."