Washington Post: The hard-line, working-class mayor of Tehran will face former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a millionaire cleric, in a runoff election for Iran’s presidency next week, according to first-round results announced Saturday. Rafsanjani, who came in first, had been
a favorite in recent polls.

AFP: A US plane with 255 passengers on board was forced to make an emergency landing in Tehran early Sunday after experiencing technical problems, airport officials told AFP. The Northwest Airlines DC 10, en route from Mumbai to Amsterdam “landed here at 4:00 am today (2330 GMT Saturday) because it had a problem with the cargo hold,” Mehrabad airport spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh said.

AFP: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday slammed the presidential election in Iran as failing to be a legitimate exercise in democracy. Rice criticized the election, saying it “took place with an unelected few having decided who could run, with thousands of people having been disqualified, with women having been disqualified altogether.”

Reuters: An exiled Iranian opposition leader dismissed Iran’s presidential election as a sham on Saturday and urged foreign leaders not to recognise the vote. Centrist cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani faces a run-off against hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after Friday’s election in which no candidate secured outright victory and turnout was 62 percent, an Iranian Interior Ministry source said in Tehran.

Iran Focus: Cergy, Jun. 18 – One day after the controversial presidential elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran, thousands of Iranian exiles gathered in a stadium north of Paris to cheer a woman they would like to see as “the liberated Iran’s president”. Under a scorching afternoon sun with temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius, Iranians sang, cheered and danced to celebrate what they described as “the triumph of the boycott call” and declare their support for exiled opposition leader Maryam Rajavi.

AFP: The shock presidential election showing by Tehran’s right-wing Mayor Mahmood Ahmadinejad was the result of an elaborate plot to rig the polls, defeated reformist contenders claimed Saturday. “There has been bizarre interference. Money has changed hands,” the centrist-reformist cleric and former parliament speaker Mehdi Karoubi told reporters in an unprecedented allegation.

New York Times: The race for the presidency in Iran was thrown into turmoil on Saturday when one of the top vote getters accused conservative hard-liners of rigging the election and threatened to continue to press his case publicly unless the country’s supreme leader ordered an independent investigation – a bold move in a country that does not generally tolerate such forms of public dissent.

Iran Focus: Tehran, Jun. 17 – In a vote that has caused much controversy at present, two different official organs in Iran are giving greatly varying preliminary results of yesterday’s presidential election. The latest figures released by Iran’s Interior Ministry, the official organ responsible for counting the ballots has thus far placed Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as leading the polls with 21.3 percent of the votes, down from an earlier estimate of 21.9 percent.