The world’s attention may have wandered from Iran, but recent reports from the country reveal a government that is as willing as ever to suppress dissent and a judiciary that still plans to execute a woman saved from a stoning sentence last month.

As The New Yorker reported in August, government oppression of opposition reformers, who are known as the Green Movement, has taken a more tacit and sinister turn. Instead of allowing rallies in the streets and cracking down on them with armed Revolutionary Guards, as happened last year, writes Jon Lee Anderson, potential troublemakers are watched by plainclothes paramilitaries called Basijis. “They sniff out everything,” one alleged reformer told Anderson, “not only in public but in private life, too.”