authoritarianism in MENA

the country’s democracy, its rule of law and its freedom of expression are at stake.

In an extensive study of the case for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a Washington research institute affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, Gareth Jenkins, a Turkey specialist, noted the pervasive fear among Western analysts of Turkey that Ergenekon “represents a major step, not, as its proponents maintain, towards the consolidation of pluralistic democracy in Turkey, but towards an authoritarian one-party state.”

Pakistan’s security agencies have left us no political way forward. They have radicalised all the liberal forces by torturing them

Not long ago, the student was a patriotic Pakistani. He had a poster of a war hero, Captain Karnel Sher Khan as a teenager. “Pakistan needs to reflect upon what made me hate Pakistan”, he said. “They make us feel that we are slaves. I can wear western clothes and move freely in the city but if I’m wearing my baggy Baloch shalwar, they’ll strip search me.”

many Baloch nationalists are socialists and abhor religious fundamentalism. “There is no solution with packages, and our problem can’t be solved with dialogues either. Our ideology is different from Pakistan’s. We can’t live under an imposed and fake religious identity. We are secular people

the regime is quietly clamping down on some of the nation's best students by derailing their academic and professional careers

In most places, being a star means ranking top of the class, but in Iran it means your name appears on a list of students considered a threat by the intelligence ministry. It also means a partial or complete ban from education.

Ms. Karimi says she thinks she got starred because she volunteered in the presidential campaign of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi last spring. She also participated in several antigovernment "Green Movement" protests that are convulsing Iran. "They tell me, 'You are not allowed to study or work in this country any more.' Why? Because I voted for Mousavi and wore a green scarf?"

In contrast, Europe’s eastern and southern neighbors, Russia and the Muslim countries of the Near East, provide many examples of churches and mosques standing side by side. Most certainly not more democratic or liberal than Western Europe, Russia and the Muslim countries of the Middle East are more accustomed to and accepting of religious diversity and its architectural representations. A bewildering variety of Christian denominations and their churches adorn the Syrian landscape, and I was pleasantly surprised to find churches along with synagogues and mosques in Moscow and elsewhere in present-day Russia, despite the pervasive anti-Semitism and Islamophobia found in that country. Even in Turkey, where, as a result of nationalism, discriminatory policies and multiple wars in the first half of the 20th century, only a very small Christian minority remains today, one can nonetheless find hundreds of churches relatively intact. A comparison with the vanished mosques and minarets of Hungary, Greece, Spain, Sicily, Romania, Serbia and elsewhere in Europe is inescapable.

as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.

"Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.

an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).

he broad-based opposition movement has continued to subvert the Islamic Republic's ideological, political, and religious symbols and occasions through a range of sophisticated and creative means.

The false dichotomies of secular versus Islamic, and/or imperialist versus anti-imperialist which at one point may have applied to Iranian political discourse, are not applicable to the current national opposition movement in Iran.

"People don't accept the fact of metal being music and having fun. It's always in conflict with religion,"

In Bahrain, metal bands and their followers are often branded as Satan worshippers. Gigs are regularly shut down, and the movement largely stays underground to avoid public attention. Many groups rely on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to stay connected.

the rock and metal movement, which is mostly an expression of freedom

For decades, Saudi Arabia has served as the world's central banker of oil supplies. In unstable times, most famously in the wake of Iraqi's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, it has drawn from its spare production capacity of some 1 million barrels to bring prices to heel.

Iraq's revival as a prominent oil exporter is bound to reshuffle a careful power balance in the energy-rich Arab world, particularly between bitter rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saddam Hussein's 2003 toppling created a vacuum that both sides rushed to fill, for example deploying proxy forces at the height of Iraq's sectarian civil war. OPEC is another battlefield for the Saudi-Iran rivalry, and the Saudi kingdom is in no hurry to lose its uncontested status as No. 1. Now, as Iraq stabilizes politically and slowly rebuilds its oil-production capacity, both sides will have to accommodate a more assertive Baghdad. Even if oil production doesn't reach the Iraqis' goal, it will likely be higher than the approximately 1.7 million barrels per day that Iraq was producing just prior to the U.S. invasion.

quota smashers like Iran and Venezuela, who routinely oversell to pay for their costly entitlement programs

"The United States not only has a terrible domestic human rights record, it is also the main source of many human rights disasters worldwide," the Chinese report said, according to the official Xinhua news agency. "Especially a time when the world is suffering serious human rights disasters caused by the global financial crisis sparked by the U.S. sub-prime crisis, the U.S. government has ignored its own grave human rights problems and reveled in accusing other countries."

An astonishing 45 million documents were ripped up, and stuffed into rubbish bags

The reunified German state insisted that the files be reconstructed, and a team of 30 in Nuremberg set about manually sticking the documents together using old-fashioned puzzle methods, tweezers and lots of sticky tape. But in the course of 15 years, just 350 sackfuls of paper have been reassembled this way: completing the task, it was estimated, would take at least another 400 years.

the E-puzzler, the most sophisticated digital pattern-recognition system in the world

the strategy of supporting authoritarian rulers in an effort to combat the threat of Islamic extremism had been a failure

"I see increasing radicalisation in this area of the world, and I understand the reason. People feel repressed by their own governments, they feel unfairly treated by the outside world, they wake up in the morning and who do they see – they see people being shot and killed, all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur."

where do you find this regime change in international law? And if it is a violation of international law, who is accountable for that?

Opposition leader Roza Otunbayeva, the former foreign minister, said parliament was dissolved and she would head the interim government. She said the new government controlled four of the seven provinces and called on President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to resign. "His business in Kyrgyzstan is finished," she said Thursday. By Thursday afternoon, there was no sign of Bakiyev. Otunbayeva said he had fled to the central region of Jalal-Abad, the heart of his political stronghold, to seek support. This raised some concerns that Bakiyev could try to exploit the country's traditional north-south split to secure his own survival.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. deplored the violence

Bakiyev had effectively been removed from power.

Recent widespread anger over the 200 per cent increase in electric and heating bills unified opposition factions and galvanised support for them.

The unrest followed rising tensions between the opposition and Bakiyev's government, which they accuse of cracking down on independent media and fostering corruption.