The Latest from Iran (31 December): Selling the President's Car, Seizing the President's Election

1200 GMT: Your Tehran Friday Prayer Summary. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami's message from the pulpit today....

1. We defeated the "sedition" with our march on 30 December last year.

2. Subsidy cuts are excellent.

3. Help Pakistan's flood victims. (And, Pakistan, don't send us your terrorists.)

4. The ban on the hijab in Azerbaijan is very, very bad.

1140 GMT: Rafsanjani Sedition Watch. On the surface, it was just another ritual denunciation of the evil British. Minister of Intelligence Heydar Moslehi told an audience in southern Tehran on Thursday, "One of the intelligence services that sought to overthrow the Islamic Republic since the advent of the Revolution, was British....[It] acted quite diligently with precise knowledge of our culture to influence individuals, and they learned that one of the ways to harm people was through their relatives.”

Go a bit farther, however, and you'll see that Moslehi had a target closer to home. He said that foreign intelligence services tried to to manipulate the elite through their children, citing the visits these children made to Dubai and London to meet with British intelligence agents. Moslehi asserted that authorities have "clear evidence" of Britain's role through connections with aides and family members He warned that Iran's intelligence apparatus closely monitors these activities and will confront them when conditions warrant.

Purely a coincidence, of course, that Mehdi Hashemi --- the son of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani --- has been in London since summer 2009.

1115 GMT: Sedition Watch. Interesting that the prime spot of introducing Tehran Friday Prayers today was handed to Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari Doulatabadi.

The symbolism was as significant as the message, which was a recap of Doulatabadi's press conference earlier this week: the prosecutor against warned opposition leaders that "proceedings are only a matter of time" for their role in unrest following the June 2009.

0915 GMT: Smog Watch. No word yet on how the sale of President Ahmadinejad's 1977 Peugeot will deal with the air pollution that has plagued Tehran and other cities this year, killing --- according to an official estimate --- more than 3600 people in the capital in the past nine months.

The Economist has an overview of the smog.

0755 GMT: A slow start to Friday in Iran, giving us time to note the recurrence of the news that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's car will be auctioned off at an exhibition of classic automobiles.

This is not a sign that subsidy cuts and rising prices are biting at the highest levels of Iranian society. Rather, as EA's investigative journalists reported a month ago, the President's 1977 Peugeot 504 is being sold as part of a fund-raising drive for a housing project.

On a much different front, we post the full video and English transcript of an important presentation on 21 June 2009, nine days after the disputed Presidential election. Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, the head of the Committee to Protect Votes, sets out the case for the illegitimacy of the ballot and calls for an enquiry by an independent committee.

In the end, Mohtashamipour's challenge had little effect, as the Guardian Council persisted in leading the review of the ballot and gave an all-clear in July. However, the video is a reminder of the issues that the opposition raised just after the election.