Said Saffar Harandi, Minster of Culture and Islamic Guidance. This ministry is responsible for checking everybody before publication, giving license to every movie and many many other filterings. This sentence's audience is a group of journalists who traveled to Netherlands some weeks ago. When they returned back to Iran, The airport's police inquired them and too their papers, photos and films on custody.

A few days later, the rightists/conservatives newspapers published "A group of journalists who visited whorehouses in Amsterdam are inquired" !

It seems that government is afraid of the contact and relation between these journalists and reformist/democratic organizations outside Iran and specially in Netherlands.

The minister of Islamic Guidance added "Contacting organizations which's job is influencing other countries is not a professional journalists task". Answering to a journalist who said "I wrote a letter to Information Ministry and asked them if going to this travel is OK or not and they answered there is no problem to go", Harandi said "It is better for you to confess to people where were you, what you did, whom you visited; if you tell these things Ministry of Information will not ask you anymore".

I think he is going to force these reformist journalists to confess about the spy activities and deface reformist activities inside Iran. A part of problem is photo's and movies these people might have from red light district, those material could cause major problems in Iran (haha... we were lucky ! we entered Iran with many of those materials :D and had many shows for our friends ;) )


p.s. I have to learn more English words and expressions specially in these fields ! :)

These days I was busy with my job. I work in an NGO which's duty is capacity building for other NGOs. I had many problems with a Linux machine and after a lot of struggles(!) I've found out the problem was because of a buggy RAM module ! I've even installed another Linux on this machine before finding the malfunctioning hardware. Now I have an Ubuntu Linux on my server. I think It is not very common to have an Ubuntu as an server but I wanted to test.

These days, there were many news. I wish I will have more time to write about it. I have to write about 3 dies :(

• A student murdered by a Basij member because he was talking with a girl ! Basij announced the killer was not a member of Basij !


• My colleagues daughter's friend ran over by her own school bus ! Very depressing.


• A student in our university had an heart attack and died in the class... He was only 20 !

Bad news. I always wanted to write about an ordinary life in Tehran but my weblog is changing to a BAD NEWS site. I have to start to write more about campaign: 1'000'000 signatures against discriminatory laws against women. It is a good move and we have to help more and more to these brave people.

These days in Iran we encounter two things: More official pressure on activists and Assembly of Experts for Leadership elections.

Assembly of Experts for Leadership are a group of religious experts who are elected "by people" to observe Leaders activities ! What a joke ! Any body who wants to enter this Assembly, has to pass many filters and these filters are designed by Guardian Council and this Guardian Council (12 people) are choosed themselves by the Leader ! The result ? Each year these old men gather and spend one week in the best hotels and at the end announce that "Leader is great". These days every official person and every TV / RADIO channel tell us "voting is our duty and part of our religion ! go vote for these Experts".

(to know more about our Constitution have a look at: Iran Constitution)

At the same time, pressures on activists are increasing. Mansour Osanlou is head of the executive committee of the transport workers. He was arrested again yesterday and nobody knows where he is. More and more sites are filtered in Iran. You can not access to blogrolling.com any more and our "WOMYN" campaign page is filtered too (Women are filtered in Iran (Farsi)).

But I'm glad ! Because I see more and more people who bravely write in their weblogs that "I'm not going to vote in Experts election". In Iran this can lead to prison and tortures. I am glad, very glad.

UCPD officers shot a student several times with a Taser inside the Powell Library CLICC computer lab late Tuesday night before taking him into custody. He is an Iranian student called Mostafa.

I can imagine that this student did not behaved well with the police or refused to do what all the other people did (showing ID), but even if this is the case, TORTURING a student several times with a Taser (electrical shock) and asking him to STAND UP while being under electrical shock is kind of sadism.

I'm sure that my country's monopole TV will start to show this video soon. I have to see it several times a day and many people will talk how bad USA is. I have to say that I hate USAs politicians too but THIS MOVIE CAN BE RECORDED AND BROADCAST there. If this thing happened in Iran and anybody was brave enough to record it with her cellphone, she would spend 15 years in prison for "propaganda against the Islamic Republic".

Anyway, I wrote a polite letter to these people:

Norman Abrams
chancellor@conet.ucla.edu

Evc Neuman
evc@conet.ucla.edu

william Bratton
brattonw@lapd.lacity.org

Antonio Villaraigosa
mayor@lacity.org

Asking them "justice for Mostafa".

BlogRolling.com this service call itself "A web service designed to make your blogging life easier." This service is the most famous service in Iran which people use to make FRIENDS LISTS for their weblogs. Using this service all the people will know when you've updated your weblog and vice versa.

This service is unavailable from 2 days ago. If you type www.Blogrolling.com in your browser you will reach to the page which says: "The requested page is Forbidden". Why ? because this tools can empower weblogs and weblogs can empower civil society. This is simple.

In my job I'm in contact with many reporters. From yesterday there was a rumor: A Mermaid fished yesterday ! Many reports made jokes about it except one person: Asieh Amini (her Farsi weblog). I was curious. I've never seen a mermaid myself and the idea of a half-woman / half-dolphin creature is far from my mind, but I accept that there might be something that people are speaking about.

Next news... All the people are talking about it in the area. Even the Muslims think that they have to pray for her dead body because "she" is somehow human (so why they don't pray for dead chimps?). My reaction was "something have to been happen and it is important but I need more proof". And at last here is the proof. There is a cell-phone video of her body. I don't know about biology but I think if real it has to be some kind of dolphin of wale with a mutation ! I want to know experts answers.



It's really fun that you can hear the Quran which is read aloud because of this creatures soul ! I'd liked to remove this sound but I've though it's better not to edit the movie in any form. This movie is exactly what I've got. Muslim read Quran in funerals of humans but here they are reading it for a fish and I think this is degrading !

(I'm not sure if I've added this SWF file to my post correctly. if you can not see it, just download the file and watch it stand alone)

I'm back. After a one week in Turkey and learning about SPIP. Just wanted to inform that I'm alive ! We had internet access in Turkey but because of VERY tough schedule I was unable to write even an email for my wife :( But everything is OK once more. I'm sure you will face more SPIP sites in Iran and the good point: SPIP is one of the best site to build multilingual sites. You may face more and more English / French / Spanish and ... sites soon.

I am in Turkey for a week. I'm attending to a TOT workshop (training of trainers). I'll be back in Iran after a few days and I'm going to start holding workshops on "SPIP" (an Open Source content management system which is used by Le Monde, RSF.org and ...). I think the results will be good ! After the workshops, the NGOs will be able to have their own dynamic/potentially active website !

I spend all the day in the workshops or doing the assignments ;) right know it is 2am and I have just finished my home works and I have to sleep soon so I'll be ready for tomorrow's classes. Good night !

Oh.. our women's part is going to be more active ;) Leila has referred me to an Idea ! Thank you Leila email

You know "Ayatollah"? It means "god's sign" and in Islam HE is a person who studied Islam for many years and other people can trust him about the Islamic rules. There are also some "Grand Ayatollah"s. These are the people with the MOST possible understanding of Islam and every shi'i Muslim HAS TO choose one of this persons as her/his reference and obey HIS ideas and ask him, her/his Islamic questions.
One of these grand ayatollahs is Makarem Shirazi. Luckily he has an multilingual website: http://www.makaremshirazi.org/english. I was surfing his English weblog and reached this question:

It is correct that the Holy Quran has authorized corporeal punishment of the ladies refraining their marital obligations?

and the answer ? The answer starts with women are very valuable in Islam and then but in some occasions... but the most shocking part is the last part :

It is remarkable that as per psychologists, there is a state of masochism in some women which is sometimes intensified, and appears as a mental crisis. In such critical and exceptional cases, mild punishment is effective in their mental relief.

!!! have a look yourself !!!
p.s. It seems that his site is built with PHP Nuke but the designer has ripped off the software's GPL license ! I wrote a letter to this great religious leader and mentioned this and asked him not to use stolen software.