The Huffington Post: The “Bomb Iran” crowd, fresh off their historic blunder in Iraq, is now at it again with Iran. As if the daily drumbeat of articles and op-eds advocating war with Iran was not enough, Republicans in the House of Representatives have introduced a truly dangerous resolution — explicitly green-lighting the use of [...]

Newsweek: In 2003, administrators at Stanford University’s Electrical Engineering Department were startled when a group of foreign students aced the notoriously difficult Ph.D. entrance exam, getting some of the highest scores ever. That the whiz kids weren’t American wasn’t odd; students from Asia and elsewhere excel in U.S. programs. The surprising thing, say Stanford administrators, [...]

This highly emotional HBO documentary on the death of Neda Agha Soltan is a must see.

Speaking of Iran being on magazine covers (see the post below this one)… here are most though not all of the issues of Time Magazine with Iran on the cover. Did I mention that when I was an undergraduate, I began collecting these through eBay? I have all of them, even the black and white [...]

This is one of the few times you’ll see me agree with Fareed Zakaria. Here he speaks about the possibility of regime change in Iran and sharply and convincingly criticizes McCain’s wishful thinking.

My friends in Iran say that Iran was dead today and that nothing happened on the streets. Of course, they couldn’t be everywhere at all times. Here’s footage of a protest at Sharif University.  Here’s footage of a protest at Tehran University. And here’s footage of rooftop chants the night before. Still, they’re all a far [...]

Foreign Policy – Excerpt: But it is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right. Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. As Mehdi Yahyanejad, the manager of “Balatarin,” one of the Internet’s most popular Farsi-language websites, told the Washington Post last June, Twitter’s impact inside Iran is nil. “Here [...]

Football fans of the world unite! World Cup 2010 is here at last. For us Iran football fans, disappointment occurs often, yet we will never forget 1998, the underdog story behind Iran’s bid to qualify for the tournament and it’s epic win over Team USA. Watch this ode to 1998. I wonder what’s going to [...]

al Jazeera – Excerpt: However, Iran’s nuclear technology has advanced faster than expected and a 2007 report by the US government accountability office (GAO) found that “since 2003, the Iranian government has signed contracts reported at about $20bn with foreign firms to develop its energy resources. Further, sanctioned Iranian banks may fund their activities in [...]

AFP: “France decided Monday to send home an Iranian agent it had jailed for murdering the Shah’s last prime minister, two days after Tehran freed a young French academic accused of spying. Ali Vakili Rad was serving a life sentence for stabbing Shapour Bakhtiar to death at his home outside Paris in August 1991, but [...]

I don’t know much about Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Da Silva, but I like what he has to say regarding Iran. He seems both reasonable and fair. See the al Jazeera interview here.

There are some slogans with which I can identify and there are others that I think are either politically immature or underdeveloped, but one slogan from the recent protests at Shahid Beheshti University really fascinated me. The protesters declared: ما اهل کوفه نیستیم ، نیمه راه بایستیم The translation reads something like this: We are [...]

I met the journalist, Iason Athanasiadis, when I was a graduate student at Harvard. He was there through a fellowship and sat in in one of my classes a few times. He later gave me a documentary on the Lebanon war (2006) that he had made. I respect him as a journalist, he’s fearless and goes where [...]