Cyrus Farivar

Financial Mail (South Africa), February 6 2009: Trading looks set to become more difficult in Iran for SA-based emerging markets cellular network operator MTN. The telecommunications group is about to face a spirited new competitor in the Islamic republic in the form of Etisalat. United Arab Emirates-based Etisalat, which claims it has 74m customers, mainly in the Middle East, plans to invest billions of dollars in the next few years building a network to rival Irancell. MTN holds a 49%…

AFP, February 1 2009: But Estonia slid into recession in 2008 as rampant inflation dented domestic consumption. The global economic crisis compounded the bleak picture by hitting exports — as well as the tourist trade, as many would-be foreign visitors stay at home. The economy contracted by an estimated 2.8 percent in 2008. Authorities expect it to shrink by 4.5 percent this year, although analysts say it may plunge by as much as 7.0 percent. Dozens of hotels built in…

Hot damn! I reported on WiFi Rail back in July 2008 for NPR. Well done! From WiFi Rail‘s press release: Service on BART is scheduled to begin on selected segments during 2009. Four downtown San Francisco stations and some segments of the tunnels are already fully functional, and have been providing premium service free to subscribers for the past year. “We are thrilled to showcase our technology in the network designed for the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system,…

My cousin Amir, who I visited while on my Iran (I still need to upload the rest of the photos!) trip in March 2008, just sent me a link to Rick Steves’ hour-long documentary on Iran, which just aired on PBS stations around the country this week. (You can watch it on Google Video here.) Steves and his film crew visited in May 2008 (just two months after I was there), and they hit Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz — taking…

First Estonia. Then Georgia. Now Kyrgyzstan. Computerworld: A Russian “cybermilitia” has knocked the central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan off the Internet, a security researcher said today, demonstrating that the hackers are able to respond even faster than last year, when they waged a digital war against another former Soviet republic, Georgia. Since Jan. 18, the two biggest Internet service providers in Kyrgyzstan have been under a “massive, sustained distributed denial-of-service attack,” said Don Jackson, the director of threat intelligence at…

Rebecca’s back (again!), with yet another potent pairing of poems, this time in Octopus. I will say that I’m a big fan of “Cold,” as it mentions one of my favorite countries, Estonia! ECHOLOCATION Most days I wear the hunched run of an animal, darting until caught in net or claw— and that’s fine. Trapped, I noise and flap, send you pressed air, let you forge toward me. Let you touch me. Let you cut through net and claw. COLD…

I had the honor of being interviewed (again!) by Jesse Brown on his CBC show, “Search Engine“, to talk about Iranian blogging and to provide an update on the Hossein Derakhshan situation. You can download the podcast, once Toronto wakes up, here. Update (6:34 am Pacific): Here’s the permalink. I had no idea I was Search Engine’s Senior Unpaid Iranian Affairs Correspondent. Sweet!

My bodaciously brilliant fiancée, Rebecca Guyon, is back with two newly-published poems in Strange Machine, an online poetry journal: Cull Canyon A girl drowned here one summer, and another the summer after that. This never stopped anyone from jumping in the water, murky as it was, murky, like most made things. We liked to think the bodies were never found, that if we touched the bottom we ran the risk of brushing their saturated skin. Once, instead of swimming, we…

With Obama in the White House, France is hoping to have a much better relationship — at least culturally and culinarily — with the US. However, shortly before leaving office, the Bush Administration approved a 100 percent import duty on a bunch of EU items. France is upset because one of its main cheeses, roquefort, is being hit with a 300 percent tariff. Many read this as one of the Bush Administration’s flipping the bird against France, who still have…

Los Angeles Times, January 21 2009: Is this the end of Two Buck Chuck? A proposal to raise the state tax on wine to a level more than six times higher to help close California’s giant budget deficit would kill the $1.99 price for Charles Shaw wine, said Fred Franzia, who created the famous label sold by the Trader Joe’s grocery chain. Charles Shaw, of course, is the formal name for the California wines sold since 2002 that are now…