Page F30: 22 Bahman 1388 (11 February 2010) protests in Iran

Today's long-awaited protests have begun in Iran and sites such as Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Lede and Tehran Bureau are keeping track of events, and I'll add information here whenever I find anything useful and/or in Persian and not yet translated into English.

If you're here from a Twitter update, check the bottom of the post.

This is no surprise - foreign press is banned from covering anything but Ahmadinejad's speech. Associated Press says that they haven't been given permission to cover the streets of Tehran. As always though all you have to do is do a search by date for تهران (Tehran) on YouTube to see what's going on. Here's a recent video:

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Here's a tweet from a minute ago about Mashhad today:

"Widespread crackdown in Mashhad. The city has been completely turned into a garrison. People are protesting in Mashhad as well."

Apparently 100 people have been arrested there.

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If you're a Reddit user, here are three (1, 2, 3) recent threads to vote up and/or comment on.

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Here's a video taken from next to the government rally in Azadi square earlier, showing a military helicopter taking off as well. That rally comes off as rather stale, with even some balloons seen at 0:48.