Daily News Channel
The United Nations should "urge" Iran to release political prisoners rounded up during the recent unrest following last month’s disputed presidential elections, a group of Nobel Peace Prize winners have declared.
Iran’s supreme leader blamed enemies and outsiders on Monday for the turmoil that followed last month’s presidential elections, according to an Iranian news agency. To a gathering in Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused Western governments of having “clearly meddled in the internal affairs of Iran” and the American and European media of depicting Iranians “as rioters,” according to Fars News Agency.
Iran has released a British embassy staffer, leaving one of the embassy’s local staff in jail, the Foreign Office in London said Monday. “We are confirming that one of our staff remains in detention,” a Foreign Office representative told CNN, declining to be named, in line with British government policy. “It remains our top priority to get all our staff freed.” A leading Iranian cleric said Friday that the remaining British embassy staffer could be tried for inciting unrest in the wake of Iran’s disputed June 12 presidential election
Top clerics and seminary students in Iran’s holy city of Qom have come out against the results of the disputed June Iranian presidential election, which was declared a landslide victory for the hard-line incumbent. The Association of Teachers and Researchers of the Qom seminary school issued a statement on Saturday, saying that the election was skewed.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wants to engage President Obama in "negotiations" before international media, a semi-official Iranian news outlet reported on Saturday.
Europe used to be the good cop with Iran, engaging with the regime on tricky issues like its nuclear program while the bad cop, the U.S., rasped that Tehran was part of an “axis of evil.” But the European Union’s moderating stance has done it few favors in the wake of last month’s disputed Iranian elections. On Wednesday, Iran’s military chief of staff, Major General Hassan Firouz-Abadi, accused the E.U.
The Islamic Republic has been busy in three main ways since the presidential elections of June 12. Rejecting charges that the result — a 63% vote for incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — was the result of fraud, the regime organized a partial recount, which on June 29 reconfirmed Ahmadinejad’s victory, a finding the opposition continues to reject. Simultaneously, the regime worked to put down the widespread street demonstrations that followed the disputed poll, sending in police and pro-government militiamen to beat up and disperse demonstrators
The chants, the clashes, the outrage, the blood — for more than two weeks, the world watched as the fallout from Iran’s presidential elections unraveled from peaceful demonstrations to government-led crackdowns on city streets.
No Iranian presidential candidates had filed complaints as a Monday deadline approached in the country’s disputed presidential election, state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting reported. The powerful conservative Guardian Council last week extended the deadline for filing complaints after two candidates — Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi — questioned the legitimacy of the June 12 vote count
After more than two weeks of silence amid Iran’s violent election fallout, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — a key Iranian cleric — emerged Sunday to call out "suspicious sources" who are creating a rift between the public and the Islamic government. He called the aftermath of the June 12 presidential election “a tangled mess, perpetrated by suspicious sources whose objectives are to create differences and separations between the people and the system and eroding the trust of the people in the Islamic system,” the Iranian Labor News Agency reported Sunday.