Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts - NYTimes.com - 3 views
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The social media giant finds itself under countervailing pressures after the uprisings in the Middle East. While it has become one of the primary tools for activists to mobilize protests and share information, Facebook does not want to be seen as picking sides for fear that some countries — like Syria, where it just gained a foothold — would impose restrictions on its use or more closely monitor users, according to some company executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal business.
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Last week, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, urged Facebook to take “immediate and tangible steps” to help protect democracy and human rights activists who use its services, including addressing concerns about not being able to use pseudonyms. In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, Mr. Durbin said the recent events in Egypt and Tunisia had highlighted the costs and benefits of social tools to democracy and human rights advocates. “I am concerned that the company does not have adequate safeguards in place to protect human rights and avoid being exploited by repressive governments,” he wrote.
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This is an incredible challenge and an incredible opportunity for Facebook, Twitter and Google,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he works on projects about the use of technology and media in the developing world. “It might be tougher for Facebook than anyone else. Facebook has been ambivalent about the use of their platform by activists.
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Arab Leaders Keep a Wary Eye on Tunisia - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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In Egypt, where the leadership continues to rely on a decades-old emergency law that allows arrest without charge, there is a lot of room for free and critical speech, offering a safety valve for expression that did not exist in Tunisia, he said.
U.A.E. Moves to Block BlackBerry Services - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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The dispute between the United Arab Emirates and R.I.M. took an unusual turn about a year ago when the company warned users that software described as a BlackBerry upgrade by an Emirates carrier, Etisalat, was actually spyware. “Independent sources have concluded that Etisalat’s ‘Registration’ software application is not actually designed to improve performance of a BlackBerry Handheld, but rather to send received messages back to a central server,” R.I.M. warned customers in an online posting that included directions on removing the software.
President Morsi of Egypt Is Undercut by State-Run Media - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo, said the state media’s attacks on the head of state made the situation perfectly clear: Mr. Morsi represented a double threat as the first civilian and the first Islamist to hold the presidency. “This is a deliberate and well-orchestrated campaign to shake Morsi’s image, ensure his failure and frustrate the revolution,” Mr. Shahin said.
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Ahmed Abu Baraka, a lawyer for the Muslim Brotherhood, said the issue was deeper than bias. “It is an incurable disease in state media that needs surgery,” he said, blaming 60 years of parroting the ideology of secular dictatorship.
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Taghrid Wafi, a state television producer, said she and her colleagues were in “confusion.” “They don’t know who is in charge,” she said, noting that in some ways the military’s grip on the news media had loosened since Mr. Morsi’s election. For the first time, she said, she could interview activists who criticized the military for court-martialing civilians. “You know we don’t work on our own; we need approval for our guests.”
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Egyptian Judge Speaks Against Islamist Victory Before Presidential Runoff - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The president of the association of Egyptian judges said Thursday that they were abandoning their neutrality toward the coming presidential runoff in an effort to guard against an Islamist monopoly of power.
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if the group’s members had known Islamists would win most of the seats in Parliament after elections that ended in January, they would not have supervised the voting
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the effect of Judge Zend’s appearance was a public pitch for the presidential campaign of Ahmed Shafik, the last prime minister under Mr. Mubarak, who is now squaring off against the Brotherhood’s nominee, Mohamed Morsi
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A Middle Eastern Primer - NYTimes.com - 0 views
Pete Seeger: 'It's Hard for Me to Talk About the Media Without Getting Angry' - 0 views
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if the United States or the world goes down in disaster, I would blame the media first of all, because the people running it are intelligent people. They know very well how evil they are. And when they say, "Oh, I'm just giving the people what they want." Sure–so do the drug pushers.
U.A.E. Moves to Block BlackBerry Services - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the southeastern corner
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Saudi Arabia has been closely studying the issue and may follow suit. Other countries, including Kuwait and Bahrain, have also raised concerns.
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the BlackBerry’s highly encrypted data system, which offers security to users but makes it more difficult for governments to monitor communications.
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Tunisia's Inner Workings Emerge on Twitter - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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In a remarkable shift, the police, previously the enforcers of Mr. Ben Ali’s rule, organized a protest of their own on the city’s central artery, Bourguiba Boulevard. They wore red armbands in solidarity with the revolution, complained that Mr. Ben Ali and his family had put cronies in charge of the security forces and demanded a trade union that could negotiate for higher wages. Tunisians were stunned to see police officers, once silent and terrifying, complaining about their working conditions in interviews with Al Jazeera.
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“The most rapid revolution in history,” he wrote. “Because we are connected. Synchronized.”
A Song Contest Becomes a Hot Spot in Feud Between Countries - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The simmering conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has entered a new theater: the Eurovision Song Contest.
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some Azerbaijanis who took impartiality to impressive lengths, voting for the Armenian entry in the 2009 final in May, reportedly were called in to the Azerbaijani National Security Ministry
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Previously, the Armenians had raised tensions by slipping images of a memorial in Nagorno-Karabakh, the enclave at the center of the dispute between the countries, into the video presentation that introduced their representative in a preliminary round.