Nintendo President Saturo Iwata is speaking to the Japanese press right now in the first of three regional press conferences in which Nintendo is expected to finally provide important details on the global Wii launch.

If you absolutely must have the news direct from Nintendo, IR Webcasting is providing a live stream of the press conference here. If you don’t understand Japanese, GWN (Gameworld Network) is live-blogging the event. For the die-hard fans, I’d recommend keeping track of both. Even if you don’t understand Japanese, you can read the release dates and there may be new gameplay videos!

The UK and US press conferences are both occuring within the next 30 hours. So global launch details should be available soon, even if they aren’t announced at the Japanese event. The Thursdayton website is running countdowns for all events. The Japanese countdown says that it’s been almost 2 hours since the event started, but from all accounts on various forums, the event started late and no announcements have been made so far.

We’ll post the details here as soon as we have them!

Update: GWN was reporting from an old news feed. Online forums everywhere are going crazy!

Update: Digg is reporting that the conference doesn’t start for another 3 hours and that the correct feed is here.

Update: YTMND user elmnt61 coins a new term: n. GWNAGE. def. When Nintendo fans get suckered into watching a fake feed.

Update:Vooks is reporting that seattlepi is calling a November 19 launch in the US for $250 (with Wii sports included). Gamespot is reporting the same citing the New York Times.

Update: Press conference has started. Famitsu is live-blogging (Google English translation). Watch for a summary as a new post here soon.

Update: Press conference is over. See our Official Japanese Wii Launch Details post for a wrap-up!

Via Infendo, NeoGAF forums, and The Magicbox message boards.