This is the last issue of the Eastern Echo for spring semester, and the editors would like to thank you again for picking up our paper and for participating in the online version at EasternEcho.com. It’s been a great year, but for Echo readers it’s going to get better yet!

Although the Echo is taking the rest of the summer off, we are looking forward to returning this fall with new energy, new voices, and even a brand new look in our print and online editions.

It would be wise of the clerics, jurists and other varied Islamic elites to quickly fabricate a recount in which Mousavi is declared the winner. After all, what is the difference between one figurehead and another? The job can be filled by anybody. Your only real duty is to make enough TV appearances that your face becomes associated with the country, thereby absorbing all the hatred and blame created by the decisions of your faceless superiors.

One of my favorite times of the year is barbeque season. Barbeque season is that time when people get together to eat and talk about what’s been going on in their lives. It’s also a time for showing off and finding out people’s business whom you probably haven’t talked to since you participated in a thing called “homeroom.”

Yet, when my friend and I were invited to a barbeque on Memorial Day, I still had mixed feelings. I knew the girl who was throwing it because we all went to the same high school, but at first I declined.

Who else but Stephen Colbert would submit to a buzz cut by a four-star general after getting the president of the United States to make fun of his own big ears before thousands of U.S. soldiers and millions of late-night TV watchers?

This definitely was not Bob Hope’s USO show. Sure, during episodes of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” filmed in Baghdad and airing last week, Colbert carried a golf club in homage to Hope, the comic who entertained troops overseas for six decades.

The far-right religious zealot who, in his first term as president, continually embarrassed the country with his outrageous statements and did everything he could to make his nation an international pariah, has nonetheless defeated his liberal opponent to win a second term.

This pitiful political tale of an electorate gone mad, although painfully familiar to American voters, is not a look back at the victory of George W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004. It’s a sad synopsis of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory last week over his reformist opponent Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Have you noticed the “How to Handwash” flyers posted in our bathrooms recently? Now-a-days, we are engaged in a great war. The US Government Center for Disease Control is dedicated to the proposition of a new nation, conceived disease-free.

Everywhere you look is the eminent threat of diseases like swine flu and smallpox and like terrorists, they test whether our nation or the mutating adversaries so conceived might long endure.