View across the Outer Harbour of Stornoway

Saturday 13 June 2009

Iranian Elections

Twitter once more comes into its own as a means of citizen reporting. This time from Iran, of all places. Rumours (sic) state that the elections were rigged to get current president Ahmadinajad reelected. You can get up to the second updates from people in Tehran and elsewhere in the country by searching for #IranElections on Twitter.com. The election results, as retweeted by @mahdi, were allegedly as follows:

1 Moussavi (45.54%)
2 Karroubi (31.95%)
3 Ahmadinejad (13.60%)
4 Rezaei (8.91%)

There are running battles with riot police in the streets of Tehran, vehicles set alight. Mobile phone and Internet networks are on and off the air.

Front picture

The new picture fronting Atlantic Lines as of this week shows Loch Suainebhat, which lies in the district of Uig. I took the image on Tuesday of this week near the end of a fairly challenging walk around the hill of Suainebhal which looms up on the left of the picture.

The complete lot of pics can be seen here.

Saturday 13 June

Just watched a few minutes of Trooping the Colour, the Queen's birthday parade in London. Nicely choreographed. Think I prefer the Dutch Queen's birthday, some innocent fun to be had by all. Except for this year :-(

Facebook has introduced usernames, so I duly claimed ADB45. Any Facebook friends out there can now collar me using that acronym - http://www.facebook.com/adb45. Every Facebook user will have had an email with a link to a page to claim a username.

Iranians have voted to keep president Ahmadinajad in office, which does not augur too well for relations with the USA and Europe, which are strained to say the least. The belligerent rhetoric can be expected to continue. Iran has a nuclear capability, which it has always stressed is purely for peaceful means. Looking on the other side of the Asian continent, North Korea has announced it will start to enrich uranium, and use plutonium to make nuclear weapons.