Daily News Channel
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.
Saying it had completed an investigation into alleged voter irregularities, Iran’s election authority on Monday stood by its findings that gave hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an overwhelming victory and sparked more than two weeks of chaos in the streets. There was “no tangible irregularity,” Guardian Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei told government-run Press TV after reporting that a recount of some 10 percent of the votes found no significant differences.
Iran’s intelligence minister Sunday blamed Western powers for stirring up protests over its disputed presidential election, singling out Britain and saying the British Embassy in Tehran "played a heavy role in the recent disturbances." “The fact that Iran is stable, calm and secure, they’re upset with this,” Intelligence Minister Gholam-Hosein Mohseni Ejei told Iran’s Press TV.
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.
Iran’s government will allow a demonstration at Tehran’s Ghoba mosque Sunday, CNN has confirmed. The gathering is officially meant to honor Mohammad Beheshti, a hero of the 1979 Islamic Revolution who was killed in a bombing on this date in 1981
Two weeks into turmoil, Iran’s leaders turned up the heat Friday as a high-ranking cleric warned protesters that they would be punished "firmly" and shown no mercy. “Rioters and those who mastermind the unrest must know the Iranian nation will not give in to pressure and accept the nullification of the election results,” said Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami during Friday prayers in Tehran, according to Iran’s state-run Press TV.
United States accident investigators are probing two recent failures of airspeed and altitude indications aboard Airbus A330s — the same type of plane that crashed into the Atlantic nearly a month ago.
The United States may have been behind the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old Iranian woman whose fatal videotaped shooting Saturday made her a symbol of opposition to the June 12 presidential election results, the country’s ambassador to Mexico said Thursday. “This death of Neda is very suspicious,” Ambassador Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri said
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urged parliamentarians Wednesday to tolerate the voices of the opposition, government-run Press TV reported.
The Iranian government is considering whether to downgrade ties with Britain amid growing tensions over the disputed presidential election, the ISNA news agency reported Wednesday.