News

Kian Tajbakhsh was supposed to be starting a prestigious professorship this month at Columbia University.

Instead, the Iranian-American urban planner is standing trial on allegations that he is one of the masterminds of the protests that followed Iran's June 12 presidential elections.

Mr. Tajbakhsh, who served four months in an Iranian prison in 2007 on espionage charges, is not the most well-known American citizen arrested in recent years by Iran's authorities, but he may be in the most jeopardy.

The government has accused him of fomenting a so-called "velvet revolution" -- the sort of peaceful, mass political movement that ousted several Eastern European regimes two decades ago after the fall of the Berlin Wall and, more recently, governments in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia.