Neda Agha-Soltan Graduate Scholarship the country the status of "international basket case". While the problems of Iran were no longer front-page news, it said, they still existed. In the circumstances, the editorial concluded, "A scholarship at The Queen’s College in memory of Neda Soltan is, indeed, politically motivated, and admirably so". UK diplomatic sources, speaking anonymously to "The Times", said that if the government had been asked, it would have advised against the creation of the scholarship, because Iran would see it as an act of provocation, and because it would interfere with efforts to free Iranians working for the British Embassy in Tehran
Khalifeh Soltan in 1623/4. He was, however, in 1632, disgraced and exiled by the ruthless newly-crowned shah Safi. Later, in 1645, Khalifeh Soltan was re-appointed as grand vizier by the latter's son and successor, Abbas II, whom he became a close companion of, and gained considerable influence. Khalifeh Soltan later died in 5 March 1654 in his ancestral homeland of Mazandaran due to illness, and was succeeded by Mohammad Beg. Khalifeh Soltan was born in ca. 1592/3 in Isfahan, where he grew up; his father Mirza Rafi al-Din Muhammad was a prominent aristocrat who occupied high offices in the Safavid Empire, and