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"Durability of order and continuation of the country's progress hinge on restoring public trust," Khatami, a popular reformist, said, according to the Web sites. "From the start, we said there is a legal way to regain that trust. I openly say now that the solution to get out of the current crisis is holding a referendum."

Under Iran's constitution, a referendum has to be ordered by Khamenei himself. All popular votes in Iran are monitored by an oversight body called the Guardian Council. Khatami, however, proposed that a neutral body, such as the Expediency Council, should monitor the proposed referendum instead.

Strangers chatted about what Rafsanjani might say and expressed happiness at the turnout. The non-religious asked the religious about how to execute namaz (prayers). For many, it was their first time at this decades-long public ritual.

Some in the crowd, obviously novices unfamiliar with the conventions of Friday Prayer, began applauding and whistling. Pro-Mousavi unity aside, I feared that the religious men and women sitting nearby would take offense at this inappropriate behavior. But they merely tittered — and astonishingly, the cleric was clapping along!

Another phenomenal spectacle, a first in the history of Friday Prayers in Iran (and perhaps in a large part of the Muslim world), men and women were not segregated. Thy prayed side by side. This did not appear to offend the religious-minded; they seemed to accept the situation. Women and girls who by Sharia law can pray only when covered with a prayer-chador were doing so in short manteaux, and this too did not upset the religious-minded. In fact, they were probably happy to see non-religious girls and women praying at all.

Hardliners chanted "death to America" while opposition supporters countered with "death to Russia", referring to the Iranian government's ties to Moscow.

Karroubi was certainly not the first senior figure to protest Mojtaba Khamenei’s intervention on behalf of the extreme right. Before him, Ali Akbar Nategh Nouri, another former Speaker of the Majles and a close aid to Ayatollah Khamenei, had quietly protested the younger Khamenei’s meddling in the political process. (Nategh Nouri, a mid-rank cleric, heads the Supreme Leader’s Office of Inspection)

In the last year before the 1979 Revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei and two other clerics, Abbas Vaez Tabasi and Sayyed Abdolkarim Hasheminejad, formed a sort of leadership ring that led most of the demonstrations and political activities against the Shah in Mashhad and the Khorasan province, which was Iran’s largest province at that time.

Vaez Tabasi is now a powerful cleric who runs the shrine of Imam Reza (the Shiites’ 8th Imam), in Mashhad. He is believed to be a Rafsanjani ally.

There was no linking of the protests with any of Mousavi’s demands to work within the system or within a new political party - his name has seemed to separate from his corpus for the protesters. However, this was the most raucous 18th of Tir [9th of July] since the original one, so the regime may have been surprised its scare tactics did not completely work.

In one of the videos above it has been translated that people are chanting “Death to Mojtaba” Khamanei’s son, but the actual translation is more colorful. For the non-Farsi speakers they are actually chanting “MOJTABA, WE HOPE YOU DIE BEFORE YOU GET THE SUPREME LEADERSHIP” responding to reports that Khamanei is grooming his son to become the next supreme leader after he dies.

Hundreds of Republican Guards and Basij at Enqelab, Valiasar and Vanak. At Vanak soldiers every 5 feet around the roundabout. Lots of Basij motorcycle gangs (15-25 in each) swerving around the cars.

After four years in office, Ahmadinejad has filled the Interior Ministry with cronies, many of whom have connections to the Revolutionary Guards. A source who participated in closed Interior Ministry planning sessions, speaking on condition of anonymity to EurasiaNet, says top ministry personnel openly stated during one session that a repeat of the 1997 election, in which the reformist candidate, Mohammad Khatami, scored an upset victory, would not be tolerated on June 12.

By the numbers, it would seem that the country’s vast election apparatus has the ability to guarantee a favorable outcome for Ahmadinejad. According to Kamran Daneshjoo, the Interior Ministry official responsible for overseeing the voting, there are 385,000 citizens who will be administering voting precincts. The Guardian Council is expected to deploy another 340,000 people to monitor the balloting. In addition, there will be hundreds of thousands of security personnel deployed on election day. Overall, the country has about 57 million citizens of voting age, meaning that roughly 1 in 60 Iranians of voting age will be involved in some aspect of conducting the election.

For one, they note that over 59 million ballots have been printed, far more than the number of registered voters

Hossein Rassam,

Yadollah Javani, the head of political department of the elite Revolutionary Guards,

Rafsanjani has created a multimillion-dollar electronic network under the aegis of the Expediency Council to set off alarm bells in case of suspicions of fraud, said one person close to his camp, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He's also dispatching members of his Kargozaran political party to monitor polling stations and the election desk at the Interior Ministry. He convened a regular series of meetings to alert journalists and activists to the possibility of cheating after Ahmadinejad purged longtime employees from the section of the ministry that monitors fraud about two months ago. "He has access to the intelligence systems of the government, and he can put pressure on the establishment," said Kaviani, who has attended the meetings. "The most important thing for him is to get rid of Ahmadinejad, no matter the cost, and he thinks that if there's no cheating Ahmadinejad won't win. All the efforts are to prevent Ahmadinejad to get 51%."

To help Mousavi further, Rafsanjani has thrown open the doors of the 300 branches of Azad University throughout the provinces to his supporters, allowing them to deliver speeches and organize inside their halls; they are often barred from using government facilities by local officials loyal to Ahmadinejad.

"It wasn't about elections anymore," says Mr. Moradani, a short, skinny man with pitch-black hair and a beard. "I was defending my country and our revolution and Islam. Everything was at risk."

They collected rocks, tiles and bricks from construction sites and spilled oil on the roads, an attempt to sideline the Basij's motorcycles. When a Basij rider would go down, the young men would beat him, according to the student. Women stood back, screaming "Death to the Dictator" and stoking bonfires in the street. Older supporters remained indoors, throwing ashtrays, vases and other household items from their balconies and windows onto the Basij motorcycle riders below.

He says he hopes one day to follow in his father's footsteps and join the Revolutionary Guard. He has taken the Guard's rigorous entrance exam twice, passing the ideology and the written portions both times. But he failed the final hurdle: an intense interview that lasts six to eight hours. Applicants must discuss why they are loyal to the regime and the Supreme Leader. He intends to try again.

The opposition website Rooz Online carried what it said was an interview with a man the government had shipped in to Tehran to quell the demonstrations. He said he was being paid 2m rial (£122) to assault protesters with a heavy wooden stave, and that other volunteers, most of them from far-flung provinces, were being kept in hostel accommodation, reportedly in east Tehran.

. In December 2008, the Office of the Tehran Public Prosecutor announced the formation of a “special office to review Internet- and SMS-related crimes and violations”, stating that the office would review election campaign violations and “offensive remarks”made by SMS. These measures may in part be intended to stifle debate, prevent the organization of peaceful demonstrations, and to silence critics of the authorities in advance of the election.

The arrest on 19 April 2009 by officers of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran of Mehdi Mo’tamedi Mehr, a member of the Committee to Defend Free, Healthy and Fair Elections and a member of the Freedom Movement, a banned political party. Prior to his arrest he had been telephoned by a Ministry of Intelligence official and told that publication of a statement entitled “Civil Society Institution as Election Observers: An Assurance toward Free, Healthy and Fair Elections” by the Committee would be an act against national security. The statement was published anyway, and he was arrested. He has been accused of “acting against state security”. On 29 April, security forces prevented other members of the committee from holding a meeting in the “Raad” Legal Institute which belongs to Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, a prominent lawyer and member of the High Oversight Council of the Centre for Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). The CHRD was forcibly closed in December 2008 and has not been allowed to reopen.

At least three Amir Kabir University students who remain detained without trial in Section 209 of Evin Prison in Tehran following their arrests in February 2009. O

6.15pm: Iranian filmmakers Marjane Satrapi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf just held a press conference in Brussels to say they have a document proving election fraud, Adnkronos news agency reports.The document, seen here, says that Mousavi won the election with 19m votes, with cleric Mehdi Karroubi coming in second and Ahmadinejad coming in third. Satrapi and Makhmalbaf said the document had come from the Iranian electoral commission, and is dated June 13, the day after the election.

Saeed reports that Mousavi's wife Zahra Rahnavard today joined injured students at Tehran University, and condemened violence by the government and riot police.

A friend of the Guardian in Tehran writes that her Gmail account has been filtered, and that her internet service provider said it has been ordered to cut all emails, messaging software and many websites, especially foreign news outlets.

The Iranian website Balatarin posted an email said to be from an internet inspector in charge of six polling stations. It alleged that software had been rigged to register ineligible votes, including ones cast by children, dead people or by the same individual several times.

The harsh responses and treatment that intelligence and judiciary officials of the Islamic ‎Republic of Iran have embarked against a group of political and social activists who have ‎been promoting the idea of international monitoring of Iran’s forthcoming presidential ‎elections on June 12, 2009, indicate that they view this issue to be a red line not to be ‎crossed, and if done would not be tolerated. ‎

intelligence-judiciary agents to prevent a regular meeting of ‎the members of the Committee for Free, Healthy, and Fair Elections

ayatollah Khamenei, the leader of Iran, has directly engaged ‎himself in the issue by barring, through harsh and threatening language, presidential ‎candidates and their supporters from questioning the integrity of the elections.

n early March when parliament, in an unprecedented move in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history, rebuffed the president’s move to lift state subsidies on essential items, including electricity and bread, and offset the higher prices with straight cash handouts to needy citizens.

When the president insisted on an "all-or-nothing" version of his subsidy plan, parliament had little choice but to reject the project, although the legislature did end up passing a $279 billion preliminary budget.

out-of-control spending has blown a gaping hole in the budget so that the country will face an estimated budget deficit of $46 billion.

Political analyst Saeed Leilaz called the rebuke "unprecedented" and said it "clearly means that Khamenei doesn't insist that Ahmadinejad deserves to remain as president. That's the message."

Leilaz said Rezaei would have never entered the race without consultation with Khamenei first. His candidacy is "another indication that Khamenei is keeping his options open to deal with a president different from Ahmadinejad," he said. Notably, the largest conservative political faction, Jame-e-Rouhaniat-e-Mobarez, has not endorsed Ahmadinejad in the elections, saying it would have no preferred choice.

"Regarding the replacement in the Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization, the president was strongly notified that the annexation of this organization to the tourism committee is not appropriate," the government daily Iran quoted Khamenei as saying. He ordered that the "situation remain as it was before."

we have not put any development project on hold. We decide on a project and push for its completion.

Shora-Yaari, or assisting councils.

We have divided Tehran into 380 neighbourhoods with defined geography. People have elected their representatives to these councils to take over some development work. The work might be small-scale but is important. This helps people take part [in the city’s development] from their doorstep.