In 1953, a CIA outfit, working with MI5 and based at the US embassy in Tehran overthrew the only democratic government Iran has ever had. American and British removal of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh ushered in 20 years of repression at the hands of Mohammad Reza Palavi, in which millions of ordinary people [...]
I'm Ben West, 19, from Southampton UK. From October I'm a History & Politics student at Oxford, but beforehand, I'm travelling overland (by train) to Iran, crossing the US during the 2008 elections and reporting from Chernobyl's 'red zone'...
The Democrats can’t afford to underestimate Palin as they did Bush. Not because of the candidate herself is anything special, but because the RNC knows how to frame the debate, and they don’t.
Something is afoot in America. I deliberately avoid the term ‘change’ because at the moment, it’s politically loaded, and what we’re seeing, I think, goes far beyond any individual politician.
Today, I saw a guy wearing a politician’s face on his t-shirt. I see his face on posters in people’s windows, and his words on baseball [...]
Anyone who doesn’t believe in a place called ‘Europe’ has never travelled from Kiev to Warsaw.
Arriving at 7:05 in Warsaw, we decided we better buy our ticket for Cologne or, failing that, Berlin. This would be the third time in a week that we’d queued for tickets. The first two times, it had taken over [...]
200m away, I can just about make out a Blue Star and the words ‘WELCOME TO ISRAEL,’ painted in bold, capital letters across the roof of what appears to be a gas-station type construction, here out in the middle of nowhere. A tarmac road runs from where I stand right up to it and continuing, [...]
“Ahhmaaayyzing”, Hussein exclaimed, with the unmistakably deep, throaty voice of a well-practised smoker. As he said it, the said smoke bellowing from his nostrils as if they were the windows of a house on fire.
Having only taken up the art of shisha a few days before, I was amazed how he managed it, my own [...]
By the end of my first evening in Aleppo, I had already met a couple of people. The first, owned a jewelry shop in the souk, and, as it turned out, during term time was a student of English Literature at York University in England. I was duly invited into his store to sit on [...]
It’s been a little while since I posted anything, and you haven’t really heard much about Syria so far since I arrived just over a week ago.
This is partly because there’s just so much to compute and get used to, so much to write about and observe that I’ve been reluctant to get started or [...]
Stranded on an grey island, surrounded on all sides by dusty road, litter, bits of tyre and crystals of broken glass, I arrived in Syria. A small grove of pathetic looking trees provided the only cover from the afternoon sun, and within them, a young man lay back in a plastic chair, doing his best [...]
So now things get interesting. Just under an hour ago, me and my rucksack got shoved out of a moving train onto the platform of a train station somewhere in South Western Turkey station into the late afternoon sun. Aleppo remains about 200km away, and with the train 3 hours late, I’m running out [...]
“Adana?” he repeated, presumably to ensure there was no confusion with Antakya, Antalya or any of the other similar-sounding places in Turkey. “Erm, yep, definitely Adana” I replied, tentatively fingering the newly-acquired train ticket in my pocket, not wanting to bring it out in public, lest I look even more unsure of my destination than [...]
