Right. I don't know where those parentheses with exposed links are coming from either. That's why some people are getting rid of the links altogether. See above for help on that.

It may be that Adium/libpurple breaks up the links before posting them to statuses. That would be unfortunate. They appear correctly in autoreplies, however.

You're right, as of this version (1.3), the plugin doesn't seem to know anything about DST or summer time. It will be still be correct if you and your contact go on summer time at the same time: the offsets will cancel out.

Iraq abolished DST in 2008, so it's going to be wrong there much of the time.

It's just U.S. Central Time, so America/Chicago works.

Couldn't you be satisfied with choosing America/Chicago and America/New_York instead? ;)

Sorry, apparently I was wrong. The plugin as it exists now (1.3) doesn't actually use OS X's time zone information (zoneinfo).