INTERNATIONAL LABOUR-IRAN:

GOOD NEWS-FARZAD IS STILL ALIVE:

Molly has just received the following from the Labour Start people, and it explains a lot as to what happened with their solidarity campaign for Iranian teacher Farzad Kamanger (see previous post on this matter a couple of days ago on this blog). Happily Farzad is still alive, but he still needs your support.

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We're back - and we need your help:‏

As you may be aware, Labour Start was offline for most of Wednesday and Thursday this week.

This was due to a decision by our web hosting company to move Labour Start to an 'auxiliary server' which effectively shut us down.

This decision of theirs followed a huge surge in traffic when we launched our appeal in support of Iranian Kurdish teacher Farzad Kamangar on Wednesday.

It took six phone calls, countless emails, and nearly 36 hours to convince them to put Labour Start back online.

Obviously, we're going to need a better web hosting company. We're working on this right now.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Farzad was not hanged as we feared. That's the good news. But he is still under sentence of death.

We've been asked by the Education International to continue with the campaign.

We've modified the text slightly but it is essentially the same campaign as before.

If you have not already sent a message, please do go here: http://www.labourstart.org/farzad

The Education International has its own online campaign - feel free to participate in it as well: http://www.ei-ie.org/form/20080818_en.php

Finally, individual messages can be sent by email to President Ahmadinejad:

dr-ahmadinejad@president.ir

I apologize to all of you for what happened this week and can assure you that we are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.

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