Iran coverage from "Gulf News".

Gulf News is a newspaper based in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates, and is distributed throughout Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and Pakistan. It's *very* interesting to see how they're covering this story.

Gulf News: In Depth: Iran Crisis

They've got pictures. Good ones. From *inside* Iran. That's what I like. Even Al Jazeera (at least on their website) shows way too many talking heads. Good pictures make stories and the people in them *real* in ways that radio never can.

Honestly -- when was the last time you saw a picture of, or even from Tehran? I bet you didn't know there are Zoroastrian fire temples in the capitol of the Islamic Republic. I also bet you didn't know that Tehran's Sister City is Los Angeles, or that over seven million people live there. (I love wikipedia.)

We're talking a *deeply* complex, *ancient* civilization, here. And we're talking about bombing it into oblivion -- why? So Bush and al-Sadr can stoke their respective second-coming fantasies? So Senator Clinton can look "tough enough to be president"? This is insanity.

Gulf News has an interesting article about Iran's most senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who (in the paper's word) "slammed" Ahmadinejad for harming Iran through his hardline nuclear posturing. The article seems to indicate that this conservative cleric was addressing -- get this -- not his followers, but a group of reformists opposed to Ahmedinejad.

Amazing how a bellicose president who fails to meet campaign promises can bring together the right *and* left in *any* country to oppose him, isn't it? A phœnomenally bad president can indeed be "a uniter".

I could go on and on -- they've got a TON of articles, going *way* back.

This morning, I didn't even know Gulf News existed.