As a friend wrote to me, "This morning at 4:45 am [California time] the Sun crossed the equator signaling the first moments of the Spring, and the start of the Persian New Year :-) The site http://www.timeanddate.com/news/holidays/vernal-equinox-2008.html has a good explanation of what constitutes March Equinox."
Foreign ministers of Persian speaking countries celebrated Nowruz in Afghanistan.
Returning home always makes you wonder what is going on.
No place on earth has the art of engineering elections been better perfected than in America, the "mother" of all modern Western "democracies" with the possible exception of the version of it practiced in the British Isles. Queries and probes can now be blocked at a whim, and all possibilities of candidate comparisons relegated to remote, meaningless but comfortable corners. The "system" systematically survives even as it atrophies and wilts to its very roots.