Time | February 4, 2010
Shervin Malekzadeh
Back before protests erupted last June, if you were to see a crowd gathered on the streets in Tehran, odds were that people were buying up the latest U.S. hit movie or television show from a black-market vendor. Customers flip through piles of plastic sleeves, looking for an unseen classic [...]

The people have not sat idly by, and in the past month a clear distinction has been made between the people on one-side, and the regime on the other. The world has seen the people’s aspirations for freedom, and their bravery in the face of terror and the tyranny of a false theocracy. The world has also seen the last shred of legitimacy that the government of Iran may have held disappear to reveal what can be safely described as a government structured like a mafia that sees itself as God’s representative on earth with the right to butcher its own people. It can’t be more clear than that.

The price has been paid in blood by the Iranian people. And blood has been spilled across every facet of Iranian society.

What we are witnessing right now in the streets of Tehran is, first and foremost, a political battle for the future of the Iranian state. But closely linked to this political fight is also an old theological dispute about the nature of Shiism–a dispute that has been roiling Iran for more than a century.

I’m NiteOwl AKA Josh Shahryar – twitter.com/iran_translator on twitter – and I’ve been immersed in tweets from Iran for the past several hours. I have tried to be extremely careful in choosing my tweet sources. What I have compiled below is what I can confirm through my reliable twitter sources. Remember, this is all from [...]

International media is reporting that Mojtaba Khamenei – the son of Ayatollah Khamenei – has taken direct control of Iran’s militia group (Basij) in order to suppress the Sea of Green. They also report that officials within other security forces, along with the powerful clergy, are not happy with the situation. However, solid confirmations from our Iranian sources have yet to be confirmed.

Hamid Maddah, a core member of Mousavi’s campaign in Mashhad, died in custody on Saturday. He had been arrested in Gowharshad Mosque along with many other Mousavi supporters. According to sources, he had been tortured badly and wasn’t able to recover. The official death certificate registers the cause of death as internal bleeding in the skull.

Maziar Bahari was forced to confess at a press conference that the protests were pre-planned and organized from abroad. Bahari is an adroit Iranian-Canadian Journalist and filmmaker, who has written for Newsweek and the New Statesman. Meanwhile,the torture of university students continues in the Ministry of Interior. Some Iranians traveling to Iran for the holidays have been taken in for questioning directly at the airport as they tried to leave the country. They were questioned because of updated information on their Facebook accounts.

Human rights groups claim that so far over 2,000 people are still in detention. Reports have surfaced that there is no more space left for women in Tehran’s official prisons. Human rights’ activists report on unsanitary and inappropriate conditions for imprisoned women protesters in Iran’s overcrowded jails. At least 60 of imprisoned women are in the public wards and have only been given a blanket and are forced to sleep in corridors.