The New York Times reports that more protesters battled with police and other security forces today in Iran:
Iranian security forces fired repeated rounds of tear gas, and militamen wielding batons moved in quickly to try to disperse thousands of protesters who massed in the streets of central Tehran on Thursday evening, witnesses said, defying government warnings and resuming a strategy of direct confrontation with the police nearly a month after Iran’s disputed presidential election. […]
A middle-age woman ran through the crowd, her coat covered with blood stains. Trash fires burned, cloaking the streets in black smoke, as protesters lobbed rocks at security forces. Two men held a huge floral arrangement of yellow and purple flowers on green leaves in commemoration of those killed last month and 1999, a witness said.
“Tell the world what is happening here,” one 26-year old engineering student demonstrator said. “This is our revolution. We will not give up.”
Asked what he wanted, he said: “We want democracy.”
This is far from over.
I found this informative:
A leaner, meaner Iranian regime
A few residual protests aren’t going to change anything. The level of popular unrest simply isn’t high enough for it to affect the existing regime.
It’s entirely possible that Mr. Abedin is not a neocon propagandist, but with a resume like that, it’s hard to imagine how.
10-year anniversary of the 1999 student protests.
There are a lot of things in life that I just don’t understand, and one that I never will is how oppressive leaders cannot let go, even when it becomes obvious that history will spit on their name.
You see it over and over, a point comes where leaders can become heros by taking a society to the next logical step, and yet they crack heads, and go down in history as evil.
Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines
Reza Pahlavi of Iran
Kim Jong of North Korea
The list can go on and on. It is no longer the 18th century, where this was more understandible. The world is now completely interconnected.
I have become convinced that desire for Power is a version of insanity, and people who desire it simply cannot let it go, and defend even the littlest parts of thier perks with a tenacity that verges on pathological. It crosses all boders, and infects all societies.
nalbar
You can say that again! I just finished reading this at Common Dreams, and it’s horific regarding certain “leaders.”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/10-2