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AFP: Sat Jul 4, 3:46 pm ET: HELSINKI (AFP) – Finland put an end to Estonia’s 11-year reign and took gold and bronze on Saturday at the annual Wife-Carrying World Championships held in Sonkajaervi, central Finland, organisers said. Taisto Miettinen raced through a 250-metre (273-yard) course with two hurdles and a pool in 62 seconds, carrying Kristiina Haapanen on his back. The winners beat Estonia’s Alar Voogla and Kristi Viltrop by 0.1 seconds. Miettinen has been attending the competition for…

PEN American Center, The New York Review of Books and 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center present: Iran: A Conversation About the Elections, Protest and the Future With Shaul Bakhash, Roger Cohen, Haleh Esfandiari, and Karim Sadjadpour [Note: Karim Sadjadpour is my cousin!] Wednesday, July 15, 2009 New York City—Only one month following the start of Iran’s civilian uprising, PEN American Center joins forces with The New York Review of Books and 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center for New…

Dear Friends, I’ve been informed that my radio piece on Haystack and the Dutch Parliament’s new technological support for Iran is airing today. It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams): NYC – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg Boston – 4 pm Eastern –…

Dare I say it, “green hat” hacker extraordinaire Austin Heap (See SF Chron a few weeks ago) and a group of domestic and foreign techie folks wanting to help Iran have announced the upcoming release of Haystack. Heap writes on his blog that it’s a “new program to provide unfiltered internet access to the people of Iran. A software package for Windows, Mac and Unix systems, called Haystack, will specifically target the Iranian government’s web filtering mechanisms.” I’ll be reporting…

My old friend and traveling buddy from my Senegal days, Al, writes: Hey Cyrus, Thanks for the Canada Day shout out. Sounds like things are pretty awesome with you, and that you’re up to the old traveling quite a bit. I thought I’d ask if you knew any potential candidates for a tech.-and development position I’m trying to fill. I’m spending the summer working for TechnoServe (poverty alleviation in agro-business, mostly) in Tanzania, where I focus on the cotton sector.…

While at the salsa bar at Cactus with Rebekah today: C: How do you say ‘Here, take this,’ in Persian? R: بفرماید (Befarmaeed.) [Go ahead ; By all means ; Be my guest ; Please, have some] C: Really? R: Really. C: Doesn’t that seem overly formal? R: You’ve been Persian for how long?

I first heard about it from Omid Habibinia. Confirmed on Balatarian (“Highest”), as shown below. Click image for the Google Translated English version:

Since Iran has been going nuts since the election, I’ve found myself glued to Twitter much more than before. I’ve used it to send out articles that I’ve found interesting, and get a handle on what people are talking about. More recently, I’ve used it to experiment with sending out photos of what I see when I’m out in the world. I have my Flickr email address and my Twitpic address both in my iPhone, so that with a single…

Back in 2006, a group of wacky Swedes founded the Piratpartiet, which is exactly what it sounds like, the Pirate Party. The party’s main platform revolves around copyright and other intellectual property reform. Remember those crazy kids at the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden earlier this year? Right after the trial, membership in the Piratpartiet surged to over 30,000 members. Today, there are nearly 50,000 members. While this may have been laughable earlier this year, just a few weeks ago…

Everyone knows that the media (the Chronicle included) is going through some major changes. We’ve got newspapers folding (and not in the usual way) left and right. We’ve got ads that don’t quite translate into online revenue, and online journalism sites that can’t seem to charge money, or at least seem to largely exist in the non-profit model. NPR’s On The Media has been covering this nonstop. There have even been Congressional hearings about it. But ok. The media is…