It Is Official (at least according to President Ahmadinejad): The Cape Verde Islands Are British!

The President's speech at Hamedan (where he may or may not have been attacked) included the following bit of historical geography news:

• Look at this country of England — a small island west of Africa. These people made weapons and ships; they attacked people; they subjugated India, whose area is 10 times the size of England, whose populations is tens of times larger! (August 4, 2010, "The Iranian President’s Geography Lesson," by Robert Mackey, The Lede)

(It would make for longer days in Winter in Lincolnshire.)

Rereading Tehran

Misreading Tehran is a fine series of articles by Iranian-Americans looking back over the past year of the so-called Green Revolution. (Foreign Policy, 7 June 2010).  As much as these are from outside Iran, they often still point to the importance of "granular details from Iran" to get a fuller story.  ("What the West Isn't Hearing About: To understand the big stories of the last year in Iran, we need better access to the little stories," by Azadeh Moaveni, July/August 2010)

 (picture from "A Year Later," the Daily Dish, 8 June 2010)