0718 GMT: Supreme Leader Watch. Clerica and students greet Ayatollah Khamenei in North Khorasan Province:
0710 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. The brother of Death Row detainee Saeed Sadighi has been arrested after interviews with the BBC and Voice of America.
Saeed Sadighi has been sentenced to death for drug smuggling. His brother was one of the relatives of Death Row prisoners who gathered outside the Supreme Leader's house and judicial buildings on Wednesday to call for an end to executions.
0705 GMT: Labour Front. Rooz Online reports that 200 members of the Tehran Metropolitan Vahed Bus Company gathered Wednesday in front of the captial's municipal building to protest discrimination in wages. The demonstrators also called for the dismissal of managing director of the company and an investigation of their unpaid salaries.
0655 GMT: Cyber-Watch. The manager of a leading Iranian blog has claimed that the filtering of bloggers' websites has increased six-fold since last year.
0625 GMT: The effective suspension of open-market trade in foreign exchange, accompanied by a near-blackout on currency news, enters its second week. One leading site, Mesghal, is down; another, Mazanex, shows empty spaces where numbers should be.
Reports leaked out, however, that the Central Bank's strategy --- setting up a "trade room" for provision of foreign currency to the most important customers, such as importers --- may be in trouble. If claims that the Bank has suspended the opening of exchange accounts with Iranian Rials and that it is paying out interest on those accounts only in local currency are true, it points to a possible difficulty with the provision of foreign reserves to maintain some economic movement.
And far from stifling the political challenge, the manoeuvres have only fed the criticism of President Ahmadinejad. Habibollah Asgarouladi, a leading member of the conservative Motalefeh party --- linked to economic interests such as the Tehran Bazaar --- attacked on Wednesday:
Mr. Ahmadinejad is someone an assortment of Principalists introduced, but as soon as he got votes he said I don’t owe any party.…He has cast aside everyone who had a party or organizational affiliation and only relied on a hidden group who think like him....The president can’t not have relations with parties and society.
Posted via email from lissping
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