After the first night, the city is "calm". By "calm" I mean a police for each pump (not even a police for each gas station). But people are protesting their own style. They are making poem and jokes and circulate them among each other using mobile phones and short messages.

The most offensive and the most funny one I have got is this:

Ahmadinejad recently announced that people should not be afraid of benzine limitations: " If any body needs more transportation than his 3 liters coupon, he can ride one of those 17 million donkeys who voted me 2 years ago."

hahah... I don't know talking like this is OK or not. This joke is offensive for around 17 million people but it causes lots of laugh :D and IS political and IS the act of brave people who make and circulate them (all SMSs are known to be saved).

And one more interesting point: After the couponization of the benzine and receiving the first jokes, the SMSs of all of the three providers, stopped functioning because of some "technical problems" :D

In Iran petrol (benzine) "was" cheap. Before the 1979 revolution it was less that 1 cent for a litre and in the last year it was around 10 Euro cents and the government was arising the price each year by 15%. They've intended to rise the price to "world standards" in less than 10 years. People were considering this 15%, as an official inflation and were adjusting every other thing with it.

At his first year of presidency, Ahmadijenad told that this 15% is one of the problems of our economy and said "this year the oil price will be just like the previous year!".

But what about this year! He said "We are going to limit each persons usage of the gas because one of the economies problems is high oil usage!" and he decided to 1) couponize the fuel and 2) rise up the price.

Yesterday they just announced that "Each car will have a 100 litre per month limitation and the prices are arises too. And if you are going to use more than your coupon, the price is 50 Euro cents per litre!" this means about 5 times more!!! People were mad. At first they went into the long ques to get petrol and after waiting hours and hours there, the riot started. Fire+Petrol+Angry people resulted to armed police and then guards standing in front of each pump!

I can not understand this government. They have to guard pumps, they have to use armed police against women, they have to use secret police against students and the prisons are full of dissidents; even dissident mullas. They should be ashamed. They can not kill everybody. They can not force anybody to believe what they believe.

One friend from a newspaper told me that they've got an order which says "you may nor write anything about oil prices or last nights uncalms in the newspapers". But we have weblogs, we have internet and we have mobile phones. Here are some photos. From Mellat News / ISNA which is an official news agency and from the Dourbin (means Camera) site.

From a few days a ago I had problems logging into Blogger to update my Persian weblog in the blogger. Although I do not get the familiar "Page is forbidden" messege, The page does not loads. I kept pushing F5 and kept getting "Server error" again and again. When I asked my fellow Iranian blogspot users, they confirmed having a same problem.

I browsed forums but did now found any evidence from the blogger.coms side. So it seems to have something with Islamic Republics filtering of the Internet.

Today ITNA | Iranian Technology News Agency published (in Persian) : ....

One of the managers of the filtering system confirms that they've got the request of the "beta.blogger.com"s blocking from the authorities and as it's IP shares with the whole blogger.com, we blocked both

Blogger.com was the host of many Iranian bloggers who wanted to be safe. We also have domestic blogging system but they are strictly controlled by the government and your blog might be DELETED for a political sentence or a criticism. This way - by blocking Blogger.com - I think the authorities are going to restrict the blogging community to the domestic servers and have a full control on what people publish in their weblogs.

Update: You can stop it ! call the Iranian judiciary system and ask "please stop the Stoning (in farsi: SangSar)"! Take action! call the judge! he can stop it.. I mean YOU can make him to stop it

Some VERY brave people in Iran have started a "Stop Stoning Forvere" campaign in Iran. I say "very brave" because stoning has mentioned in Quran and just for this, it is excluded from "1 million signatures campaign" (When it is in Quran, it is an important part of Iran and denying it can lead to a life sentence!). This brave site (within Iran) is called Women's Field (english version). Its recent article is shocking.... :(

URGENT: A Man and a Woman Schedule To Be Stoned on Thursday, June 21

Urgent Press Release
No. 86-3-a
19 June 2007

URGENT: A Man and a Woman Schedule To Be Stoned on Thursday, June 21

The news about the scheduled stoning of a man and a woman in Takistan, Ghazvin, was spread through mobile phone messages and the Internet. The office of Showraye Tameen of Ghazvin province has issued the order to stone and man and a woman in public.

The judge of Branch 1 of the Criminal Court of Takistan will be present in person to throw the first stone. This was scheduled to be done on Sunday, June 17, but the Office of Showraye Tameen of Ghazvin province postponed it to Thursday, June 21.

Mokarrameh Ebrahimi is a 43 year old woman and mother of an 11 year old who has spent the past 11 years in Choubin prison in Ghazvin after being sentenced to stoning. The father of the child has also been in prison for 11 years and is scheduled to be stoned with her.

According to the Meydaan, the official site of the Stop Stoning Forever Campaign, an informed source has verified the news and added that “the pits are dug and prepared in Behesht Zahra cemetery to implement the sentence.”

This source also added that the sentence has been issued solely based on the judge’s knowledge, and there have been no witnesses to the so called crime of adultery and having a child out of wedlock. It seems that the couple have lived together for a while and shortly after been imprisoned. There are different rumors about the woman’s past. Some say that her husband had thrown her out of the house and she had been living with her mother for two years. Both the man and the woman have children from their previous marriages. Mokarrameh, who is the mother of three children, is very distressed and in sever disarray in prison.

It seems that after the appeal to the Judicial Commission for Amnesty and Clemency had been rejected, it is going to be carried out as the result of the perseverance of one of the judiciary officials in Ghazvin.


The official announcement about the stoning is going to be posted at the site of execution in order to invite the public to participate in the process in Takistan. This is while the Iranian officials continue to deny any stoning sentence.

The Stop Stoning Forever Campaign activists plea to the citizens of the world to take any actions they possibly can in order to stop the stoning of this couple from taking place.

Further detailed information will be provided as campaign activists are trying to obtain more knowledge about the case in Takistan. To contact campaign activists in the US or Iran please email Soheila Vahdati or Shadi Sadr .

By: Stop Stoning Forever Campaign

It asks us to do "anything" we can to stop this. But what can we do? We do not have a right to decide for our own life, let alone another persons life. I can only write here and in my Farsi weblog that I am against Stoning. I am against any kinf of torture. I am against execution and I hate having the second rank in the world about this. I have to say even if this is part of Islam, we have to reconsider about it! Slavery is also part of Islam and is accepted in this religion but nowadays nobody -directly- enslaves anyone. We've reconsidered and we have to do it again and again to have a live religion.

Some countries filter sex. Some filter uncommon believes or disbelief. Some other, filter the sites of the opposition political parties. There are also some countries who block the individual blogs. A few also block satire. Iran blocks all of these :) and not only these but also some nonsense sites. Just like this one:



Here is a screenshot of a dangerous site: Web.Resource.org but luckily our wise government is here to defend us. If you try Web.Resource.org in Iran you will see nothing harmful:



:) Thank's to our rulers, know we are safe :)

At first I saw it on boingboing.net; Authorities in China blocking Flickr images? and then on the Cnet. San Francisco Chronicle also writes:

Flickr not even flickering in China
Internet photo site says service is being blocked and hopes it's only temporary

The popular Internet photo site Flickr said that its service is being blocked in China, although the Yahoo subsidiary did not directly blame the Beijing government, which aggressively censors the Internet of material it deems subversive.

We had a same problem in Iran for about one year but we had a FireFox based solution: Access Flickr! plugin. This plugin is written by Hamed Saber and after installing it and restarting Firefox, let's you access the flickr once more :) Good luck.

I was in Afghanistan / Kabul for two weeks. I was training two NGOs to start their websites. Unfortunately both are in Persian.

This was my second time in Kabul. It is a nice city with friendly people. The main problems there are not being clean and not being safe. Everyday the are some killings in the news and you read about how "some people" killed "some other". While I was there, 3 newspaper reporters where murdered and more than 20 polices. One day one of trainees did not attended the class. When I asked him the day after he said: "One of my relatives were killed during a conflict with Taliban; he was a policeman".

One good point there is the freedom of expression :) Although it is dangerous but legally you have the right to speak out your idea. This might be only available during the "honeymoon" of the country and it seems the government is trying to decrease it because of national security.

I met many people there. I went to Afghan PEN sessions, met politicians and people from newspapers and media. This was good. Most of the people were not with the Karzai and told me that he is not doing well.

Oh and as soon as I have returned back to Iran, Police have arrested one another activist! Again an active woman from "1 million campaign". This time Ehteram Shadfar. A 62 years old woman is in the prison because of ... nobody knows.