Clashes erupt in Iran over disputed election

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI and ANNA JOHNSON, Associated Press Writers Ali Akbar Dareini And Anna Johnson, Associated Press Writers

TEHRAN, Iran – Supporters of the main election challenger to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clashed with police and set up barricades of burning tires Saturday as authorities claimed the hard-line president was re-elected in a landslide. The rival candidate said the vote was tainted by widespread fraud and his followers responded with the most serious unrest in the capital in a decade.

By nightfall, cell phone service appeared to have been cut in the capital Tehran. And Ahmadinejad, in a nationally televised victory speech, accused the foreign media of coverage that harms the Iranian people. There was more rioting at night and fires continued to burn on the streets of Tehran.

Several hundred demonstrators — many wearing the trademark green colors of pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign — chanted "the government lied to the people" and gathered near the Interior Ministry as the final count from Friday's presidential election was announced.

It gave 62.6 percent of the vote to Ahmadinejad and 33.75 to Mousavi — a former prime minister who has become the hero of a youth-driven movement seeking greater liberties and a gentler face for Iran abroad.

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Don't believe everything you read!

This was forwarded to me by a friend and I want to put it out there because it is important to know the truth about those things floating around the Internet.

"Interesting Statistics

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law,

St. Paul, Minnesota, points out facts of 2008 Presidential election:



Number of States won by:

Democrats: 19

Republicans: 29

Square miles of land won by:

Democrats: 580,000
Republicans: 2,427,000

Population of counties won by:

Democrats: 127 million
Republicans: 143 million

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Democrats: 13.2
Republicans: 2.1

Professor Olson adds:

"In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won by Republicans

was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.

Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in
government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare.

Professor Olson believes the United States is now somewhere

between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's

definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's

population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase."

According to three sources this email is false.

One of these sources is About.com.

"SUMMARY: Forwarded email purports to analyze the results of the 2000 (or 2008) U.S. presidential election in terms of the population density and murder rates of parts of the country that voted Democratic vs. Republican.

Description: Email flier
Circulating since: 2000
Status: Mostly false"

When you click on these links, notice that there are multiple versions of these posts.

Another source is Snopes.com.

"Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University was not the source of any of the statistics or the text attributed to him above. When contacted via e-mail, Professor Olson confirmed that he had no authorship or involvement in this matter"

The third source is FactCheck.org.

"This hoax goes back eight years, when an earlier version began to circulate following the bitterly disputed 2000 presidential election. Snopes.com, a site devoted to debunking urban myths, took that one apart at the time, noting that Prof. Olson denied authorship and that some factual claims didn't check out. A new version went around for a time after the 2004 election, and whoever wrote the 2008 version of the e-mail didn't even bother to make up new "stats," but simply substituted the words "Democrats" and "Republicans" where the names "Gore" and "Bush" had appeared."

In other words, don't believe everything you read.