Post-election events in Iran: 21 July (30 Tir)

Yesterday's big news was probably Mousavi's speech on the current state of the country. IMO he struck all the right notes, saying that it was ridiculous to claim that protests are somehow being managed by foreign forces, and mentioning that one of the reasons why coverage by outside news media outlets is being followed so much is because internal media is being shut down all the time by government order, which naturally weakens their ability within the country to effectively report on what's going on.

The other big piece of news would probably be this one, where Rafsanjani is in Mashhad to meet with ayatollahs there.

It was also reported that Ahmadinejad's VP pick has said that news on his resignation was a lie.

A video was uploaded yesterday of the small crowd in Mashhad to listen to Ahmadinejad's speech there on the 17th. The video is pretty grainy so I'll make it as small as possible.



Khamenei made some remarks yesterday in response to Khatami's call for a referendum and there was nothing new there, basically saying that comments like that were a danger to Iran's security and security is paramount.

Trending topics on Twitter are back to what they were over the past two weeks or so, with #Iranelection sometimes around the bottom and sometimes knocked off the list by some other event. At the moment three of the trending topics are about Apollo 11 (Apollo 11, Moon, Neil Armstrong), which is certainly better than most. At the same time though I do wish a bit more attention would be paid to the future of space exploration instead of the past. The day after the Falcon 1 flight, for example, it received next to no attention whatsoever while Apollo 11 was on the front pages.