Word: mehdi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ELECTION SHOWDOWN With Iran's presidential election quickly approaching, competition among the four main contenders is heating up. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Moussavi (above) are the current front runners; they face off against Mohsen Rezai, former chief of the Revolutionary Guard, and respected cleric Mehdi Karoubi. On June 3, during a televised presidential debate, reformist candidate Moussavi came out with guns blazing, accusing Ahmadinejad of "undermining" Iran's dignity and criticizing his "mismanagement" of the country's faltering economy. Voting begins on June...
...dispensing with the formal line that the U.S. doesn't talk to Iran. On the weekend of March 27, a U.S. diplomat discussed economic issues with his Iranian counterpart in Moscow. Days later, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, met with Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Mehdi Akhundzadeh at an international conference in the Hague. At a Friends of Pakistan meeting in Tokyo, one of Holbrooke's diplomats met with his Iranian counterpart. And in a secret back-channel outreach in April, State Department staffers working for Ross got clearance from Tehran for a possible trip there...
...released too quickly and were given out as a single number rather than broken down by province, as in previous elections. They also charge that some numbers simply don't make sense, such as Ahmadinejad's higher count in Mousavi's hometown of Tabriz and the other moderate challenger Mehdi Karroubi's less than 1% vote count, despite his relative popularity among ethnic Lors, Kurds and Sufis, as well as women's and students' rights activists...
...warnings about vote-tampering were not restricted to rumors and hearsay. These past days, both reformist candidates, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi, have held press conferences with often threatening tones to warn against vote interference from the ruling government of Ahmedinejad. "I am saying this seriously," announced Karroubi. "This time we are awake and we are aware...
...office, a little more than a week ago, opinion polls showed Ahmadinejad ahead of Mousavi. And opposition supporters were depressed by what at first appeared to be Ahmadinejad's victory in the country's first-ever TV debates, as he accused both of his reformist rivals, Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, of being part of a corrupt political establishment...