Atlas Shrugs: Day 31 Iranian Revolution: "hundreds of unidentified dead bodies are piling up in Tehran's morgues"

Twitter: Norooz: Bodies of hundreds of martyrs from protests in the past month are kept in a morgue in south-west of Tehran.

While our dear leader preaches to us about our moral authority and fundamental values and hope and change, injecting us with his daily dose of morphine, the bodies in Iran pile up. Rantburg has this here:

The on-line Farsi-language newspaper, Nooroz, reports that hundreds of unidentified dead bodies are being held in Tehran's morgues. One of the few official organs providing information on the detainees is the office of unidentified dead persons, which has summoned some families to various morgues around the city to determine whether their loved ones are among the dead. Nooroz newspaper reports that those families, who find their sons or daughters among the countless corpses, are threatened and pressured into signing statements attesting that their family members died in car crashes or as a result of other ordinary, run of the mill accidents. Unless the families sign these statements, the cherished bodies of their loved ones are withheld from them.

One person who reportedly visited the morgue in south-west Tehran [which in the past had been used only for the storage of fruits and dairy products]reports to Nooroz that she was presented with an album containing hundreds of pictures of the dead and was told to try and find her child among these images. This woman reports that, as she was leaving the morgue, she saw hundreds of dead bodies piled on top of one another.

Yesterday we also received news from one of our readers that the mother of Sohrab Arabi, the ninteen year old student whose mysterious death in connection with the Tehran protests recently made international headlines, was also asked to identify her son from amongst some sixty pictures of nameless corpses.

Tajzadeh's wife: This flow of returning bodies of the youth has made me more worried.

Source: Atlas Shrugs

Websites respond to heavy traffic with Farsi translation

Murad Ahmed | June 22,

GOOGLE and Facebook have set up Farsi versions of their websites and services, saying that they were responding to the importance of the internet as a communications tool for Iranians during the turmoil in the country.

The web has made it possible for many Iranians to communicate since last week's disputed election, and the international media have used services such as Twitter and YouTube in their reporting of the protests.

Recognising the internet's role in events in Iran, Google added a Farsi dictionary to Google Translate, its online translation service. It will enable millions of Iranians who are trying to get their message out to the wider world to translate any text, from blog posts to Twitter messages, from Farsi into English and vice versa.

A Google spokesman said: "This is not a political statement. There's a huge amount of interest in the events in Iran and we hope this tool will improve access to information for people inside and outside the country."

The company said that it was working to provide Farsi translations for the other 40 languages in the service.

Facebook hastily launched a Farsi version of its website. The website had appealed to its Farsi-speaking users around the world to help.

A Facebook spokesman said: "We could not have made this happen so quickly without the more than 400 Persian speakers who submitted thousands of individual translations of the site."

Despite attempts by the authorities to control the flow of information from Iran, those angry at the disputed election results have been finding ways around the virtual barriers. Until now, Twitter and YouTube have been central in the protesters' efforts to communicate with each other and with the wider world.

Tweets -- messages sent through Twitter -- have been used to organise the time and place of protests. At the request of the US State Department, Twitter delayed shutting down the site for maintenance last week to ensure that Iranians could continue to use the service.

YouTube, the video-sharing website, appears to have been blocked by Iran's censors. Google, which runs the site, reported that traffic from within Iran to the site was down by 90 per cent since the protests began.

However, this has not prevented thousands of videos pouring on to the site, showing skirmishes and the enormous scale of the protests. It is believed that most of these videos have been emailed from Iran to people outside the country, who have then loaded them on to YouTube.

Early reports from Tehran after the announcement of the election results suggested that the authorities had tried to interfere with, or had disabled, access to many websites and had blocked text messaging. But hackers are helping to keep web channels open and have taken down President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's website.

Iran is a computer-literate society, with an estimated 700,000 bloggers, making Farsi the second-most popular language on the web after English.

Source: The Australian