Iran – new leader emerges from one sided election

Ebrahim Raisi has won a skewed election in Iran in which all prominent reformist candidates were disqualified from the ballot.  His victory means all the arms of government, elected and unelected, are now in the grip of hardliners.  He is head of Iran’s judiciary, an ultraconservative cleric, who claims a lineage tracing back to the prophet Muhammad, which enables him to wear a black turban. He is associated with a bloody series of political trials and executions in 1988 around t