To supplement reporting by New York Times journalists inside Iran on Friday, The Lede will continue to track the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election online, as we have for the last several days. Please refresh this page throughout the day to get the latest updates at the top of your screen (updates are stamped with the time in New York). For an overview of the current situation, read the main news article on our Web site, which will be updated throughout the day.

Readers inside Iran or in touch with people there are encouraged to send us photographs — our address is: pix@nyt.com — or use the comments box below to tell us what you are seeing or hearing.

Update | 7:12 p.m. The Lede will return on Saturday morning to continue tracking developments in Iran. Thanks for all your comments.

Update | 6:45 p.m. Given that anonymous supporters of Iran’s opposition movement are responsible for almost all of the video, photographs and text messages uploaded to the Web this week on the protests, no doubt some of what has appeared online is not what its makers say it is. With that caveat, here is what bloggers in Iran say is a video made on Friday night in Tehran, in which the shouts of “Allah-o-akbar” called for by the opposition can be clearly heard in the background, as a woman ponders what will happen tomorrow.

As Eric Hooglund, a professor of politics at Bates College, explained in an Op-Ed in The New York Times on Thursday, this chant has been used by opposition supporters in the Iranian city of Shiraz, as well as Tehran:

The most common slogan was “Allah-o-akbar,” the popular chant of the 1978-79 revolution. On Sunday, thousands of people in Shiraz climbed out onto their roofs to chant “Allah-o-akbar” for several hours.

Update | 6:31 p.m. The Los Angeles Times reports that earlier this week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “defended U.S. efforts to ensure that the Twitter social networking service has remained available for use by Iranian protesters, even as Tehran complained about U.S. interference in its affairs.”

On Wednesday Mrs. Clinton said: “I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter, but apparently, it is very important.”

Update | 5:55 p.m. An editor at Demotix, which is a photo agency for citizen journalists that has been getting images from Iranian photographers all week, sent The Lede these observations from three of their anonymous contributors:

• As you know here in Iran there is no normal situation and guards hit and maybe shoot people, even reporters and photographers. … Moreover, the Internet connection became so slow so there [are] some serious problems sending files. But I do my best.

• Tonight I was arrested by police, and they get my camera, and my I.D. card, and my car, and then released me. Since those movies are inside my camera yet, if they watch one of them … they will judge me as I’m a spy, and maybe they gonna execute me. I asked some friends inside government to help me, and I’m waiting for their response. As newest news, all secure connections (SSL, SSH, etc) are now rate limited in Iran, so from now on, even our emails and chats are not safe. Today I should go back to police and they will hand me to the judge. Just pray for me, 10 years ago … I was arrested, and it’s a nightmare for me to repeat my memories.

• It’s 2:00 am right now. I’ve started to send 12 photos to you since 12:00am! It took 2 hours to send them!!! The internet speed was very low tonight.

Update | 5:42 p.m. Iran’s Press TV reports that the opposition candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who has protested the election results along with Mir Hussein Moussavi, responded to a call by the country’s supreme leader for an end to protests by demanding a new election. According to Press TV, Iran’s state-supported English-language broadcaster:

Defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi seconds Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s calls on Iran’s Guardian Council to nullify the June 12 election and called for a re-run. “We expect that you [the Guardian Council] accept the will of the nation by nullifying the election and holding a re-run,” Karroubi, the leader of the National Confidence Party (Hezb-e Etemad-e Melli), said in an open letter to the council on Friday. The letter was posted on his party’s website and is expected to be circulated in his newspaper’s Saturday edition. [...]

Karroubi said “the absolute majority of Iranians” have objected to the election results, adding that anything other than the nullification of the election results by the Guardian Council would be “a grave mistake.”

Mr. Karroubi and Mr. Moussavi are scheduled to meet with the Guardian Council on Saturday.

Update | 5:29 p.m. In Washington, my colleague David Herszenhorn reported earlier today that Congress took a symbolic stand in favor of Iran’s opposition:

While President Obama has been measured in his comments about the Iranian election, the House weighed in on Friday in support of the rights of protestors to challenge the election results and overwhelmingly adopted a resolution condemning the Iranian government for violence against the demonstrators.

Meanwhile, President Obama continued his effort not to “be seen as meddling,” but told CBS News that Iran’s government should be aware that “the whole world is watching.”

Update | 4:50 p.m. On Thursday, NPR’s news blog posted audio of a telephone interview with an Iranian-American in Tehran who described it as “two cities,” at the moment: a daytime city, in which peaceful demonstrations take place, and a nighttime city, in which Basij militia members attack those they hold responsible for the protests.

On Friday, NPR reached an Ahmadinejad supporter in the city of Mashad, who blamed the Western media for “trying to magnify the protests in Tehran” and not covering what he said was the support for Mr. Ahmadinejad in Iran.

Earlier in the week, we posted this video, which appears to show an opposition protest in Mashad.

Update | 4:20 p.m. Interesting time to read this article from The New Yorker’s archives: a Letter From Iran published in December 1978, right before the fall of the Shah. In the article, just posted on The New Yorker’s Web site, Joseph Kraft writes about an interview with the Shah:

He looked pale, spoke in subdued tones, and seemed dwarfed by the vast expanse of the room, with its huge, ornate chandeliers and heavy Empire furniture. He wore a double-breasted suit whose blackness suggested mourning. He started with an apology. He was sorry to have kept me waiting. The American and British Ambassadors had been in to see him. “They tried to cheer me up,” he said. “As if there were anything to be cheerful about.”

I expressed surprise at—and, indeed, felt some suspicion about—this show of gloom. There had been demonstrations in many parts of the country, and strikes, but Teheran, apart from the university, seemed calm, and the Army was in thorough control. Moreover, the opposition was headed by the Moslem clergy, and they were clearly divided. Surely, I said, the factions could be played off against each other.

“Possibly,” the Shah said, shrugging his shoulders in an elaborate show of disbelief. [...]

If worst came to worst, I went on, there was always the Army. The military was strong, and its leaders were loyal. The Shah said that force had its limitations. “You can’t crack down on one block and make the people on the next block behave,” he said.

Earlier this week a letter appeared online, supposedly written by Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son and heir, encouraging the protesters and promising that he would return to Iran within 48 hours. The letter was passed around by Iranian exiles still hoping for a restoration. After the letter made its way to a Farsi-speaking colleague at The New York Times, he called Mr. Pahlavi to ask him about the letter. A member of his staff said that it was a fake.

Update | 4:09 p.m. As the Iranian government indicates that it may no longer tolerate street protests, attention is turning to a volunteer militia group that has been involved in violent clashes with protesters this week. Earlier today, my colleague Neil MacFarquhar reported: “The daytime protests across the Islamic republic have been largely peaceful. But Iranians shudder at the violence unleashed in their cities at night, with the shadowy vigilantes known as Basijis beating, looting and sometimes gunning down protesters they tracked during the day.”

Mr. MacFarquhar explained the origins of the group and how they have been used to suppress dissent in the past:

The word Basij means roughly mass mobilization in Persian, and the original organization consisted of all the civilian volunteers whom the Ayatollah Khomeini urged to go fight on the front in the Iran-Iraq war. Some of them died while tromping across mine fields toward Iraq.

The Basij was reinvented in the late 1990s, Iran experts said, after the government felt that it had lost control of the streets during spontaneous celebrations when Iran won a spot in the World Cup soccer championship in 1998 and again during student protests in 1999. “They decided to invest in a force that could take over the streets that didn’t look like a military deployment,” said an Iran analyst who did not want to be identified because of his involvement in the events.

The Basij was nominally part of the Revolutionary Guards, but it is a loosely allied group of organizations that range from the more official units like the Ansar Hezbollah, which undergo formal training, to many groups controlled by local clerics. Nearly every mosque in Iran has a room marked Paygah-e-Basij or Basij base, which serves as a kind of Islamic club where students study the Koran, organize sports teams and plan field trips.

Some members are religious zealots, and some are not. Most members are lower-middle-class youths who enjoy certain benefits by joining. They can skip the required military service, can obtain reserved spots in the universities and also receive a small stipend. No one seems to know how many people belong to the Basij, but estimates run from a few hundred thousand to more than a million. The age range is from high school to about 30 years old.

During a short-lived student protest at Tehran University in 2003, the Basijis roared around on motorcycles and were trucked in on military vehicles. They hit students with chains, lobbed bricks at their heads and beat them with long wooden truncheons. One Basiji swung at a reporter with such force that the blow shattered a portable satellite telephone in the reporter’s pocket.

Basijis, who can be disorganized and undisciplined, have been known to beat up students for the simplest infractions of Islamic conduct. A male student at Isfahan University said he had once been beaten because he walked down the corridor to the bathroom in just his underwear; Basij students in the dormitory thought he was insufficiently modest.

In a blog post on The New Yorker’s Web site on Friday, headlined “Understanding the Basij,” Jon Lee Anderson adds:

Thirty years ago, during the demonstrations that led to the Shah’s downfall, one of the dominant images was scenes of uniformed soldiers firing live ammunition at protesters. This week, Iran’s clerics seem determined, at least, not to repeat that historic mistake. They remember that the daily news coverage of the Shah’s soldiers shooting and killing unarmed protesters precipitated the collapse of the regime. [...]

In peacetime, the corps lets the Islamic regime employ violence as a form of social control while retaining some plausible deniability; scruffy bearded men in civilian clothes are not, after all, uniformed soldiers. [...]

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who I wrote about for The New Yorker in April, is a Basiji, and the organization has always been an important part of his power base. During the past four years, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president and the reform movement dormant, the Basij has not been needed as shock troops. Instead they have made their presence felt by periodically throwing up traffic barricades on the streets of Tehran and stopping cars to smell the breath of drivers for evidence of illegal alcohol consumption, or to question couples about their marital status. These Basijis are usually scruffy working-class men, and thus bring an element of notional “class struggle” to the otherwise pragmatically lived lives of the citizens of the Islamic republic. Not surprisingly, among more educated and affluent Iranians, they are almost unanimously despised.

In the mass demonstrations that have taken place this week, the modus operandi of the Basijis has been brutal and predatory. They have used the same tactics as packs of African wild dogs worrying a herd of wildebeest. They choose their targets at the edges of the crowds, going for the vulnerable and unwary stragglers, and moving in as a group to reduce them with violence. Last Monday, the men who fired guns at demonstrators from the rooftops of buildings were almost certainly Basijis. They killed seven demonstrators at their leisure, and it also seems likely that they hoped this display of lethal intent would so intimidate the protesters that they would give up and go home. Clearly, that did not work, and it is probable that they were ordered to tone down such public displays of violence, at least for the time being. But they have continued to attack surreptitiously and in terrifying ways, jumping demonstrators as they return home on darkened streets at night. On Wednesday, there were reports that men who appeared to be Basijis had come onto the Tehran University campus and had stabbed students with knives.

Update | 2:34 p.m. The Twitter feed Mousav1388, maintained by supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, has just posted an update suggesting an opposition rally is planned for tomorrow in Tehran:

Please join Mousavi, Khatami and Karoubi tomorrow at 4pm from Enghelab Sq. to Azadi Sq. in Tehran for a crucial green protest

Update | 2:22 p.m. In a telephone interview on Friday, Lindsey Hilsum, the international editor of Channel 4 News, gave her analysis of the Supreme Leader’s speech and how the opposition might respond. Ms. Hilsum explained that one part of the speech that has struck some Western listeners as curious, his harsh attack on the United Kingdom rather than the United States, is, in part, explained by how very influential the BBC’s Persian language television and radio broadcasts are in Iran.

Three decades ago that same station was central to broadcasting the Ayatollah Khomeini’s messages into Iran from abroad.

The BBC’s influence, combined with the British part in Iran’s history, Ms. Hilsum said, makes it “the only country in the world where people believe America is Britain’s poodle.”

Update | 1:47 p.m. Here is a video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speech during Friday prayers in Tehran this morning:

Update | 1:39 p.m. It remains uncertain how the opposition will respond to the Supreme Leader’s call for an end to protests. Reuters reports that an unnamed ally of Mr. Moussavi says that he has no plans to call for rallies over the weekend. But bloggers writing on Twitter insist that there will be a protest on Saturday. Readers might recall that before Monday’s huge demonstration in Tehran, there were reports that Mr. Moussavi had called off that rally, but it went ahead anyway.

Reuters suggests that the Supreme Leader’s speech may have been a threat to the opposition leaders:

His words appeared to hint at a future crackdown by authorities on rallies after the election a week ago, which Khamenei said was fairly won by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and not rigged, as defeated candidate Mirhossein Mousavi alleges.

Khamenei called for an end to the protests in his first address to the nation since the election results triggered the most widespread street demonstrations in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history.

“If there is any bloodshed, leaders of the protests will be held directly responsible,” the white-bearded cleric told huge crowds thronging Tehran University and surrounding streets for Friday prayers.

Mousavi’s supporters had planned another demonstration on Saturday. But an ally of the defeated moderate candidate told Reuters after Khamenei’s speech that Mousavi had no plans to call a rally on Saturday or Sunday.

Update | 12:42 p.m. Here’s a note about how the opposition rallies in Iran are being organized. As we heard from a reader earlier, who has spoken to his mother in Shiraz: “She said the main problem is that it’s really hard to get the word out about where and they are meeting. She said she really didn’t know where until an hour before and some people were arriving when the whole thing was ending.”

While it is easy to get the impression, from following English-language Twitter feeds, that Iranians who are unhappy about the official election results are communicating with each other non-stop through the Web, a source in Iran told The Lede that Twitter may be more important in getting information on events out to the world than as an organizing tool. This source asked 20 people at Thursday’s opposition rally in Tehran how they found out about it and not one of them learned about the rally through Twitter. People at the rally said that they still rely on text messaging and information posted on Farsi-language Web sites, not Twitter, which our source says is “primarily being used to communicate with the outside world.”

Update | 11:08 a.m. Since opposition leaders decided to call off a planned protest during Friday prayers, some Iranian bloggers are pointing to video and photographs shot earlier this week to keep their momentum going online. One blogger uploaded this photograph to TwitPic on Friday of a Farsi-language placard the blogger translates as: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. Mahatma Gandhi.”

Other bloggers who seem to be writing from inside Iran point to this video, showing highlights from Mr. Moussavi’s campaign, which has been subtitled for English speakers:

Update | 11:02 a.m. A blogger who seems to be writing from Iran noted in two updates an hour ago on the Twitter feed Oxfordgirl that speculation is widespread that Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a senior cleric and former president of Iran, may not have appeared at Friday prayers in Tehran because he is working behind the scenes to overturn the election results:

Who not at Friday Prayers: Rafsanjani.

Where is Rafsanjani? He is organising the demise of Ahmadinejad.

Update | 10:52 a.m. In an article for The New Republic earlier this week, Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, looked more closely at the power struggle that seems to be unfolding inside Iran’s clerical establishment. Mr. Milani wrote that the country’s Supreme Leader may come to regret throwing his support so firmly behind Mr. Ahmadinejad:

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — whose rule has been absolute and whose words have been the law of the land–is facing the most public challenge to his authority. His two decades since succeeding Ayatollah Khomeini have been defined by a tendency to keep his options open, a verbal dexterity that allowed him to skirt tough political positions, and an appearance of impartiality in Iran’s fierce factional feuds. His caution has been the key to his success and survival.

But Khamenei has thrown this caution to the wind by unabashedly favoring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Four years ago, his support was instrumental in getting the little-known Ahmadinejad elected president. Even as criticism of the president has been on the rise in the country over the past year, Khamenei reportedly promised Ahmadinejad and his cabinet four more years at the helm.

Mr. Milani added:

What makes this moment different from past incidents of confrontation between the regime and the people is that, this time, many pillars of the regime are part of the opposition. Aside from Mousavi, who was prime minister for eight years, Rafsanjani, former president Mohammad Khatami, former speaker of the parliament Mehdi Karubi, and many other past ministers and undersecretaries are now leading the movement demanding new elections. Moreover, since the demonstrators come from all walks of life, it is more difficult than in the past to accuse them of immaturity or youthful impertinence, or of falling prey to the designs of the “Great Satan.” [...]

The regime still has the capacity to contain the disgruntled demonstrators and maybe even co-opt their leadership. But the majestic power of large peaceful crowds, tasting the joys of victory embodied in acts of civil disobedience, and brought together by the power of technologies beyond the regime’s control, is sure to beget larger, more confident, and more disciplined crowds. When people defied Khamenei’s orders by gathering en masse on Monday, the regime’s armor of invincibility–so central to the regime’s authoritarian control–was cracked. Without it, the regime cannot survive, and reestablishing it can come only at the price of great bloodshed.

Update | 10:23 a.m. On the BBC’s dot.life technology blog, Rory Cellan-Jones posts this interesting look at how, and why, Iran’s Internet service may have been slowed but not stopped entirely.

Update | 9:59 a.m. Not all of our readers support the opposition, or our effort to report on events in Iran. Here is what a reader named Siyamak wrote in the comments thread below after Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech on Friday morning:

I heard Khamenei speak and I liked what he said which I found fair and balanced. Stop interfering with Iran!

Update | 9:55 a.m. One of our readers asks if The Times, by passing on messages about plans for opposition rallies is helping the Iranian authorities to block them. Obviously we have no first-hand knowledge of whether that is the case or not, but there are plenty of reports that suggest that Iran’s government is directly reading (and perhaps even writing) messages posted on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook by bloggers supporting the opposition movement in Iran. They do not seem to be relying on our second hand reports of what these massages say.

It is also clear that each day some of the first and most powerful news of the rallies has come from the photographs and video posted online by anonymous users of these services. It seems likely that if Iran’s opposition bloggers wanted to keep this information secret they would not post it online at all.

The larger point, however, is that Iranian bloggers may be posting this information, often in English, on these sites precisely so that they can be easily picked up and reported by news organizations outside the control of Iran’s government. Whatever their thinking is, it is a fact that, given the nature of the Web, no information posted on these Web sites is private, whether it is described or reported on by news organizations or not. What we do know is that the people posting these messages on their anonymous social-networking accounts are making them public by doing so, and that they frequently ask that the messages be passed on. In a sense “re-tweeting” is a kind of reporting.

Importantly, we also have not seen any messages at all from bloggers who appear to be inside Iran asking that their text messages, photographs of video not be reported by news organizations. A reader of The Lede points out that one blogger writing on Twitter, under the alias Oxfordgirl, wrote earlier today in an update: “u can use my name in RTs.”

With that in mind, here is a message sent to us this morning by one of our readers, who uses the alias gb and says that he has been in touch with his family in Shiraz:

I talked to my mom today about yesterday’s sit-in in Shahe Cheraq.

She said the main problem is that it’s really hard to get the word out about where and they are meeting. She said she really didn’t know where until an hour before and some people were arriving when the whole thing was ending.

They are going to meet tomorrow in Daneshjoo Square (formerly Alam square).

Here is video and a photograph of that protest on Thursday at the Shah-e-Cheraq shrine in Shiraz.

Update | 9:21 a.m. Since the Supreme Leader again stated on Friday that a partial recount of ballots is all that is required to settle this dispute, while the opposition says the whole process was tainted and demands a new vote, it might be worth looking at who will be doing the recount.

The New Republic pointed out this week that this man, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati Massah, “leads the Guardian Council, which runs elections and maintains the power to veto any parliamentary action it views as violating Islamic law.”

According to the New Republic’s description of him, it is not hard to understand why the opposition has little faith in a review led by him:

A hard-liner, he has called for America’s destruction multiple times, as well as George W. Bush’s decapitation. He formally endorsed Ahmadinejad, and he will run the Guardian Council’s election recount.

That information comes from a useful slide show on The New Republic’s Web site, which includes photographs and information on some of the key figures in Iran’s complex power structure who may right now be engaged in a struggle for control inside that labyrinth.

Update | 9:16 a.m. Two hours ago the blogger Persiankiwi, who has had consistently good information on the protests this week, reported via Twitter that another opposition rally is planned for Saturday:

Confirmed - Saturday Sea of Green rally - Enghelab Sq - 4pm - Mousavi, Karoubi and Khatami will attend -

Ten minutes ago the same source added:

confirmed - the Gov has refused to issue a permit for Sea of Green march at 4pm on Saturday in Tehran

Update | 9:10 a.m. The same YouTube channel that has the video of the singing at Thursday’s rally in Tehran also includes these two video clips of Mir Hussein Moussavi among his supporters:

Update | 9:07 a.m. As the opposition in Iran tries to remain united, they will point to video like this, apparently shot at Thursday’s mass rally in Tehran’s Imam Khomeni Square, of the crowd singing a patriotic song:

The YouTube user who uploaded this video says that points to this translation of the song’s lyrics on Wikipedia.

Update | 8:58 a.m. In an interview with Foreign policy magazine on Thursday, the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who is speaking for Mr. Moussavi’s campaign in Europe, made this interesting comparison between the events of 1979 and 2009 on Iran’s streets:

There are some similarities and some differences. In both situations, people were in the streets. In the [earlier] revolution, there were young people in the streets who were not as modern as the people are today. And they were in the streets following the lead of a leader, a mullah — in those times Ayatollah Khomeini. Now, the young people in the streets are more modern: They use SMS; they use the Internet. And they are not being actually led by anyone, but they are connected to each other.

In an e-mail message sent to BBC Persian on Friday, subsequently translated from Farsi and posted online, an anonymous reader of that Web site who says he is one of the opposition protesters in Iran seemed to endorse Mr. Makhmalbaf’s reading:

Whether Mir Hossein Mousavi wants it or not, we will take our vote back. This is a youth movement, it’s our movement and we will not have these men [ie all the politicians] take credit. They are threatening us with violence and they are holding Mir Hossein [Mousavi] responsible. If one drop more blood is shed from anyone, the leader of the nation will be responsible.

Update | 8:54 a.m. Here is what one student in Tehran, identified only as Behrooz, told the BBC in response to Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech on Friday:

We all know that Mr Ahmadinejad did not get 24 million votes. But Ayatollah Khamenei has just repeated that statistic as true. There’s clearly a power struggle going on between Mr [Hashemi] Rafsanjani [a former president and head of an influential body which elects the supreme leader] and Mr Khamenei. I think in the end this can only be good for us, although I think today’s speech makes it more dangerous for us to protest.

We just have to keep the demonstrations so big that they cannot attack us. If the crowd is just 2,000 strong, they can scare us with 200 soldiers. But if we are a million, what can they do?

I don’t think the Guardian Council will agree to a new election. They don’t want to lose prestige. They will agree to a recount which gives the same result.

I voted for Mr [Mehdi] Karroubi because he was the one with the best plan to change this rotten system. Maybe nothing will change for now, but I do think this is the start of some sort of revolution. Hopefully not a destructive one like in 1979. As long as we are in the street, people will know we are not satisfied.

For the moment Mr Rafsanjani is silent, and we don’t know what he’s doing. But he’s a very powerful man. He’s the leader of the Assembly of Experts which selects supreme leader. He brought Khamenei to power, so he will be the one who brings him down.

Another response, on the BBC’s Web site, comes from computer programmer in Mashhad, identified as Arash, who said:

People are being beaten up in Mashhad. There have been no demonstrations in the past two days. People wait until night to go on the roofs and shout “Allahu akbar” ["God is great] to show their support for the opposition. People from here go to Tehran to demonstrate, to be part of the bigger, safer crowds.

Update | 8:42 a.m. In his sermon on Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei attacked what he called attempts by foreign governments to stir up opposition to the election results. He seemed to be saying that reports by foreign media outlets are actually veiled attempts to overthrow his regime. Reporting on what was in part an attack on the corporation itself, the BBC, which maintains an active Farsi-language news service, explained:

He said the election was a “political earthquake” for Iran’s enemies - singling out Great Britain as “the most evil of them” - whom he accused of trying to foment unrest in the country.

“Some of our enemies in different parts of the world intended to depict this absolute victory, this definitive victory, as a doubtful victory,” the Supreme Leader said.

In its own way, the BBC was quick to strike back - passing on reaction to the Supreme Leader’s speech from users of its Web site who claimed to be inside Iran.

Update | 8:38 a.m. In a post on Bits, the New York Times’s technology blog, Miguel Helft reports:

“There is a huge amount of interest about the events in Iran,” said Franz Och, principal scientist at Google, who has been leading the development of Google Translate. “We hope that this tool will improve access to information in Iran and outside,” Mr. Och said in an interview. [...]

In a blog post, Mr. Och warned that the service is not perfect, so mistakes are possible. It is optimized to translate between Persian and English, but Google is working on improving translation between Persian and the other languages in Google Translate.

Update | 8:30 a.m. The automatic translation tool introdcued by Google on Friday was quickly used by supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi. One hour ago, Mousavi1388, a Twitter feed maintained by opposition supporters, reported:

Mousavi’s official news site GhalamNews in now available in English thanks to @GOOGLE, see http://is.gd/16b2j

In reference to reports from Twitter that we cite, we should note that, after consulting several experts, The Times has decided to include the user names for the Twitter posts that are quoted here and elsewhere on NYTimes.com. We concluded that the user names would better allow readers to judge the source and value of the posts that are quoted. The user names are already publicly available on Twitter and accessible, along with all content created on Twitter, through Twitter’s search index and on any number of third-party search engines.

Update | 8:20 a.m. Iran’s authorities are no doubt hoping that images broadcast on Iranian state television this morning, of the Supreme Leader speaking to a large number of loyal followers at Tehran University — including incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — will give many Iranian citizens the impression that the opposition protests are doomed to failure. Largely shut out by state television, and barred from speaking to the foreign press, the opposition will continue to rely on citizen journalists within the movement to get word of its protests out to other Iranians and the world through the Internet.

To that end, their efforts may be aided by the introduction of two new tools from Google and Facebook, announced on Friday. Google has sped up the release of automatic translation software that will help with translations of Internet messages to and from Farsi. On Google’s official blog, the company explained:

Today, we added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it’s a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message. The service is available free at http://translate.google.com.

We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information.

Pointing to the importance of their social-networking site in Iran, Facebook announced that they have made the entire site available to users who speak no English:

Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared has been in Persian—the native language of Iran—but people have had to navigate the site in English or other languages.

Today we’re making the entire site available in a beta version of Persian, so Persian speakers inside of Iran and around the world can begin using it in their native language.

If your browser is set to Persian, you should automatically see the Persian version of Facebook.

Update | 8:11 a.m. According to a Reuters report, there were tens of thousands “gathered in and around Tehran University to hear Khamenei’s Friday prayer sermon.” The news agency added:

People chanting slogans and holding posters of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, the father of the 1979 Islamic revolution, packed streets outside the university.

Update | 8:00 a.m. Iran’s Press TV, an English-language satellite channel financed by the Iranian government, reports that the nation’s Supreme Leader made no concessions after days of massive street protests:

Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said high turnout in the election, which witnessed more than 40 million Iranians casting their votes, was a great manifestation of people’s solidarity with the Islamic establishment. Addressing Friday prayers congregation, Ayatollah Khamenei said that last Friday’s election indicated a ‘common sense of responsibility’ of the Iranian nation to determine the future of the country. [...]

The Leader said the high voter turnout in the election was a ‘political quake’ for the enemy and a ‘real celebration’ for the friends of the country. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will by no means betray the votes of the nation,” the Leader said, adding the legal system of the election will not allow any ballot rigging in Iran.

Ayatollah Khamenei, however, maintained that the Guardian Council, the body tasked with overseeing the election, would look into the complaints of the candidates who are unhappy with the election results.

The Leader also added that the establishment would never give-in to illegal demands, urging all presidential candidates to pursue their complaints through legal channels. Ayatollah Khamenei called for an end to illegal street protests aimed at reversing the result of the election.

Update | 7:54 a.m. The BBC has this video of Ayatollah Khamenei’s stern rebuke to the protesters on Friday, which was broadcast by Iranian state television.

Update | 7:51 a.m. As Nazila Fathi reports from Tehran, Iran’s ruling cleric took a firm stand against the opposition protests during a televised sermon on Friday:

In his first public response to days of protests, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sternly warned opponents Friday to stay off the streets and denied opposition claims that last week’s disputed election was rigged, praising the ballot as an “epic moment that became a historic moment.”

In a somber and lengthy sermon at Friday prayers in Tehran, he called directly for an end to the protests by hundreds of thousands of Iranians demanding a new election.

“Street challenge is not acceptable,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. “This is challenging democracy after the elections.” He said opposition leaders would be “held responsible for chaos” if they did not end the protests.