The Latest from Iran (13 October): "We Hate You War-Waging Power Seekers (Let's Talk)"

The Supreme Leader addresses a crowd in northeastern Iran on Saturday

See also Iran Analysis: A Diplomatic Dance Towards Renewed Nuclear Talks?
The Latest from Iran (12 October): No News is Regime News

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2011 GMT: Execution Watch. HRANA reports that 10 prisoners on Death Row, reportedly scheduled for hanging today, have been returned to the general ward.

United Nations officials have called for a reprieve and for a general moratorium on executions.

2001 GMT: Ahmadinejad Watch. The full text of questions for the Parliamentary interrogation of President Ahmadinejad, sought in a petition by 102 MPs, has been published.

The initial focus of the questions is the currency crisis, with the challenge that the Central Bank did not inject foreign exchange into the market as the Rial sank from 22000:1 to about 40000:1 vs. the US dollar.

The MPs also ask why almost 16,000 luxury cars were imported with subsidsed foreign exchange between March and September and why the Government did not support domestic wheat producers, importing the commodity at a cost of $5.2 billion instead.

The Board of Parliament is considering the petition, which has passed the minimum of 74 MPs for consideration.

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The Latest from Iran (25 August): Does Tehran Face an Oil Crisis?

2010 GMT: Currency Watch. The Iranian toman has now dropped on the free market to 1200 v. the US dollar, a significant gap from the Central Bank rate of 1068:1.

The toman is nearest the low point it reached last autumn, when Iranian authorities intervened with the release of US dollars from foreign reserves.

2000 GMT: Unity Watch. Ayatollah Mahdavi Kani, head of the Expediency Council and one of the driving forces for conservative/principlist unity, has said, "We accept no conditions of the [Islamic] Constancy Front", which has reportedly said it will not join talks if representatives of Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani and Tehran Mayor Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf are involved.

Meanwhile, it is reported that representatives of a leading MP, Rouhollah Hosseinian, did not attend the meeting of the 7+8 unity meeting.

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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....

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Iran Feature: Renewed Claims That Presidential Election Was Manipulated

*From Thursday, 11 June, the Ministry of Communications cut off all links between cell phones of the polling station monitors for Mousavi and another candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, and of the headquarters of the Committee for Protecting People's Votes.

*At 4 p.m. on 12 June, five hours before voting ended, Raja News, linked to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced that Ahmadinejad had been reelected with 63% of the vote, the same percentage that the Ministry of Interior and the Guardian Council late on the night of 12 June and over following days.

*Mousavi's and Karroubi's monitors were barred for many hours from the Ministry of Interior building during the evening of 12 June as the counting of votes took place. By the time they were allowed to enter, state television was broadcasting "results", even though the locations where votes were supposedly cast were not showing any numbers.

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