In this Sunday’s first reading the Lord addresses Job out of a storm. In response to a storm of protest, Iran’s supreme leader reversed course this week and ordered an investigation into allegations of election fraud in last Friday’s presidential election. Earlier having called the reelection of Mahmud Ahmadinejad a “divine assessment,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Monday directed a high-level clerical panel to look into the charges of fraud.

The move was not enough to placate supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who have daily taken to the streets of Tehran to protest. Tuesday the country’s most senior Islamic cleric, an opponent of Khamenei, threw his weight behind charges that Ahmadinejad’s reelection was rigged.

“No one in their right mind can believe” the official results from Friday’s contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi’s charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers “in the worst way possible.”

In an effort to quash media coverage, the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued a ban on foreign news reporting of rallies in Tehran, revoked the credentials of those with temporary visas, and ordered them to leave the country as soon as possible. Cell phone service was cut in the city.

To counter these restrictions a U.S. State Department official Monday emailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: Delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.

The State Department said its request did not amount to meddling in Iranian affairs because the department did not contact Twitter until three days after the vote was held and well after the protests had begun.

Source: Articles by Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay for McClatchy Newspapers, Mark Landler
and Brian Stelter for the New York Times, and Hashem Kalantari and Fredrik Dahl for Reuters