Hobo Traveler, an American traveler, is in Mosul, Iraq, and has an interesting picture from Arbil:

Nojavan links to pictures of people mourning for the 3rd imam. ;-)

Washington Post writes about the Iranian government giving $3 million to Islamic Jihad. Transparency in the budget would help prevent this kind of atrocity...

One of my correspondents asks for the 1,000,000th time on thorntree about being an American travelling alone to Iran :-)

Economist writes about "All the Shah's Men" a book about the 1953 coup in Iran:

In Iraq, it took coalition forces only a month to oust Saddam Hussein, despite being outnumbered almost two to one on difficult enemy terrain. In Iran, the same period elapsed between presidential approval and the coup. Admittedly MI6 had already laid the groundwork by establishing a network of operatives. But it is still astonishing how readily Roosevelt and his Iranian agents found mobs-for-hire, happy to riot for pay with no questions asked. Mix mobs with a sustained press campaign and corrupt military officers, and voilà: regime change. The really cautionary tale of Mr Kinzer's book is how easy it would be for any democracy erected by America and Britain in the Middle East to fall again.

I promise to take more photos!