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Culture Minister Helmy al-Namnam attended a press conference Thursday held in solidarity with novelist Ahmed Naji, who was sentenced to two years in prison this week on charges of harming public morality.

Namnam said that laws conflicting with constitutional guarantees for the freedom of expression need to be confronted, explaining that the case sets a precedent extending far beyond Naji's novel. Even if a literary work is challenging to social norms, he added, this is not a criminal offense justifying imprisonment.It wasn’t Naji that harmed public morality, Namnam argued, but whoever filed the lawsuit against him.

Thursday's conference was held at the Journalists Syndicate and brought together nine rights organizations as well as several public figures.Khaled al-Balshy, a Journalists Syndicate board member, jokingly said the conference should be called “Don’t listen to anyone but me,” referring to a speech given by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Wednesday.

The family of Alaa Abdel Fattah, the British Egyptian political prisoner on a hunger and water strike in prison, was informed by Egyptian officials Thursday that he has undergone “a medical intervention with the knowledge of a judicial authority,” they said.

The United States is a close ally of Egypt and provides more than $1 billion in military aid to the country each year, but has repeatedly criticized its human rights record. Abdel Fattah’s family has made repeated public appeals to the White House to intervene in the case.

Abdel Fattah, who is 40 and a once-prominent activist in the 2011 revolution, has been in and out of prison for the past decade on charges human rights groups decry as attempts to silence dissent. He was sentenced to five years in prison last year after he was found guilty of “spreading false news undermining national security.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Khalil canceled a higher-education conference that was to launch the new online publication because of concerns about academic freedom in the United Arab Emirates, where the event was to be held this weekend. That step came less than a week after a similar move by the London School of Economics and Political Science, which canceled a conference it had planned in Dubai after Emirati authorities requested that a presentation on Bahrain, which is facing political upheaval, be dropped from the program. A scholar on Arab politics from the London institution who was to speak at the event was briefly detained at the Dubai airport and barred from entering the country

"We can't talk about upholding academic freedom and launch in Dubai. I don't think it sends the right message."

Al Fanar will start as planned on March 3. It is the first major project of the Alexandria Trust, the charity Mr. Khalil founded in 2012 to improve education in the Middle East and North Africa

Dubai, one of the seven principalities that make up the small, oil-rich United Arab Emirates, is a growing destination for students from the Middle East, India, and China, making it a logical host for the Going Global conference, said the British Council, the British government's cultural and educational arm and the event's organizer. But recently the Emirates have been better known as the site of an academic controversy.

countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, of which the U.A.E. is a member, are at the "cutting edge" of efforts to internationalize higher education, and that holding the conference in Dubai "contributes to the sterling efforts being made in countries like the U.A.E. and Qatar to open their societies to international debates."

Foreign universities are guests in the United Arab Emirates and need to be "aware of the environment they're entering," said Warren Fox, executive director for higher education at the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, a Dubai government agency that accredits and regulates foreign higher-education institutions. "If universities decided they could only go to countries with the same cultural and political values, they wouldn't go abroad at all," said Mr. Fox. "And I think they should, because of the benefits to students and to universities."

the main reason for Kamal’s dismissal was that he made a seemingly minor programming change in his last episode on August 2, going against instructions handed down by a group of young graduates of the Presidential Leadership Program (PLP) who have been put in charge of editorial content for all channels owned by the General Intelligence Service (GIS), including DMC

GIS owns the Egyptian Media Group, the biggest media conglomerate in Egypt and the parent company of several media organizations, including ONtv and the Youm7 news organization. The GIS also owns D Media, which owns the DMC network, Radio 9090 and mobtada.com. The GIS also has majority stakes in channels like al-Hayat TV, al-Nahar TV and CBC TV

Presidential Leadership Program was launched in 2015 under an initiative announced by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Run in partnership with the Ministry of Defense and the Cabinet of Ministers, the PLP “targets young future leaders and enables them to acquire the skills they need to learn about governance, administrative and political fields,” according to their website. The eight-month program is open to university graduates between 20 and 30 years old with the goal of “increasing the awareness of young people on political and national development knowledge.” At the National Youth Conference in April 2017, Sisi said the PLP prepares young adults to fill crucial roles in the presidency, ministries and governorates

Many were too immersed in the daily struggles to tolerate criticism or contradictory points of view. Many others welcomed observations and comments coming from participants who were able to make connections with other historical moments, and to discern patterns or conjunctions that helped to shed light on current events. Enthusiasm, rigorous analysis, heightened emotions, tears, serious reflections, and “a feel of the revolutionary spirit,” in the words of one participant, permeated the proceedings.

Amongst the objections voiced was that it was Euro-centric because it framed the protests with reference to a European precedent, the Prague spring; it implied Arab stasis preceding the coming of spring; it predicted imminent decline as spring is bound to be followed by autumn. Debates over the phrase “Arab spring” encapsulate the overriding theme of the conference: the conflicting narratives of and about the Arab revolutions and the geopolitics of these narratives were put at the centre of debates and analysis.

“Peacefulness” is fetishised reinforcing the premise that the state is the sole legitimate entity entitled to the use of violence, a premise challenged by the revolutionary project.

A survey, publicised at a conference at Tel Aviv University in December, found that while 17 percent of Jewish citizens claimed to understand Arabic, that figure fell to just 1 percent when they were asked to read a book

those with a working knowledge of Arabic were mostly elderly Jewish immigrants born in Arab countries - a generation rapidly dying off

half of Israeli Jews with a western heritage wanted Arabic scrapped as an official language, while the figure rose even higher - to 60 percent - among Jews whose families originated from Arab countries

the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”

the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with

a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business

“The Arab media is trying to find its way after this 180-degree about turn,” said Nabil al-Khatib, editor-in-chief at Al Arabiya news channel. “Many journalists were used to receiving orders from information ministers in their countries on the coverage of events, and suddenly they found themselves free,” he told AFP.

Social networks that have given rise to so-called citizen journalism are a window with which to “mislead public opinion,” argued Amr Khafagi, editor-in-chief of the Egyptian Shorouk daily.

for Nakhle El Hage, Al Arabiya’s news director, “they can hold a treasure of information, (although) they are a land filled with mines.”

The media world's fetishization of social media has reached idol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with panels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify coverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should actually be about. As Wadah Khanfar, former Director General of Al Jazeera, told our editors when he visited our newsroom last week, "The lack of contextualization and prioritization in the U.S. media makes it harder to know what the most important story is at any given time."

locked in the Perpetual Now

There's no reason why the notion of the scoop can't be recalibrated to mean not just letting us know 10 seconds before everybody else whom Donald Trump is going to endorse but also giving us more understanding, more clarity, a brighter spotlight on solutions

Tim Sebastian, journalist and head of the New Arab Debates, announced during a press conference today that the Ministry of the Interior has assured him that they did not direct police officers to gather information about the attendees of the May 29 debate. During the debate, which took place at the Institute of Cultural Heritage in Tunis’s old city, two policemen allegedly asked a Tunisian staff member of the New Arab Debates team for the list of attendees at the event, claiming that they were acting on “orders from superiors.” The New Arab Debates team announced the suspension of their activities in Tunis as a sign of protest against the incident.

“We thought we just acquired freedom of speech. If they’re trying to intimidate us with such acts, we shouldn’t remain silent,”

“What matters the most for us is the reputation of Tunisia. Excuses such as ‘orders from superiors’ are tools of the old regime,”

Ben Ali’s regime deployed the surveillance gear to demonstrate its power, Wagner says. Changing e-mails into nonsense, rather than luring dissidents into ambushes, created a pervasive unease, in which even spam could be perceived as the work of Ammar 404, he says.

“It leaves citizens in a persistent state of uncertainty about the security and integrity of their communications,” he says. Western suppliers used the country as a testing ground. Moez Chakchouk, the post-revolution head of the Tunisian Internet Agency, says he’s discovered that the monitoring industry gave discounts to the government-controlled agency, known by its French acronym ATI, to gain access. In interviews following Ben Ali’s ouster after 23 years in power, technicians, activists, executives and government officials described how they grappled with, and in some cases helped build, the repressive Wonderland.

Saadaoui, who has a master’s degree in computer science from Michigan State University, says he helped procure and set up the system that captured and changed e-mails. It uses a technique called deep-packet inspection, which peers into the content of communications and sends suspect e-mails to the Interior Ministry. During an hour-long interview in his office at the National Telecommunications Agency, he describes a monitoring room with metal bars on the windows and 20 desks, where staffers review the e-mails in an array of languages. “They were able to read why it was blocked and decided whether it should be re-routed to the network or deleted,” he says. “Or changed.”

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.

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

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

An Arabic net address ending has become the first to go live as part of the rollout of more than 1,000 new generic top-level domain (gTLD) name suffixes. The first websites ending in شبكة. - pronounced dot shabaka, and meaning web - went online a day ahead of schedule.

The DotShabaka Registry - the Dubai-based business running the شبكة. gTLD - announced that both its own homepage and that of the United Arab Emirates telecoms provider Etisalat had started using its new suffix, at a conference in Dubai.

"It's monumental, in my opinion, because it means the internet finally speaks in Arabic," Yasmin Omer, general manager of the DotShabaka Registry told the BBC.

When 55 people protesting against the military overthrow of Egypt's first freely elected president were killed after the army opened fire on Monday, you might have expected the country to unite in condemnation.A surprisingly subdued public reaction, and the independent media's outright vilification of protesters, reflects in part the depth of political opponents' distrust of Mohamed Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood.But it also represents a triumph for the military's public relations machine which, aware of its fumbled handling of the turbulent aftermath of Hosni Mubarak's overthrow in 2011, has moved decisively, and successfully, to gain the upper hand.

Independent newspapers, many of which were fiercely opposed to Mursi when he was in power, have been, if anything, more partisan. Daily Al-Masry Al-Youm wrote the bloodletting was "the Brotherhood's responsibility." Al-Watan decried a "conspiracy by the 'Armed Brotherhood' against the army."

With television stations sympathetic to the Brotherhood shut down, senior leaders arrested and its newspaper appearing only intermittently, Mursi's supporters have struggled to convey their view of the killings - that security forces, unprovoked, fired on them while they conducted dawn prayers."The military coup has showed its hideous face after just six days," said a flyer handed out by young men at the main pro-Mursi sit-in at a mosque in northeastern Cairo."Were these people firing bullets while they bowed upon their mats in prayer?"

Only a day after the US-based watchdog Freedom House, in its "Freedom of the Press 2014" report that was released May 1, relegated Turkey from the league of “partly free” countries to the league of “not free” countries, Davutoglu exploded. Speaking at a joint news conference with Omani Foreign Minister Yousef bin Alawi bin Abdullah in Ankara on May 2, he said, “No one can put Turkey in that category. All kinds of opinions are openly voiced in Turkey. In this sense, the press freedom in Turkey is freer than some countries called 'partly free.'” If he had left it there, there would be no problem. But, he urged Turkish reporters to act against the Freedom House report: “I’m calling on the press and the intellectuals to display a stance against this report. We expect our journalists to reject this report,” he said, and alleged that “a perception operation is being conducted against Turkey.” The term “perception operation” is increasingly used by government officials and pro-government media to describe an alleged smear campaign underway against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of Turkey.

in a manner that would further complicate the AKP’s image in the Western world, the pro-AKP mouthpiece daily Star drew attention to Freedom House President David J. Kramer’s “Jewish origin,” and also alleged that Freedom House is financed by philanthropist George Soros and Jewish lobbies. Mehmet Ocaktan, editor-in-chief of the staunchly pro-AKP daily Aksam (who is also a former MP of the ruling party), was very blunt. He wrote: “Half-witted Turkish friends of proven anti-Turkey foreign sources are quietly skilled in covering up anything good that has been done. For example, they grab as a salvation nothing but a scandalous Turkey report of the Freedom House that is financed by famous speculator Soros, who has made a billion dollar profit from domestic troubles he instigates in various countries, and [the] Israeli financial lobby. For one thing, the data about detained journalists in Turkey [are] old and almost none of them [are] accurate. For Freedom House, [which] always lists Israel among free countries, to put Turkey in the same bracket as Uganda, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Tanzania and Kenya is not only dimwitted but also an indicator of absolute ignorance.”

 “What I think would change the way people look at Turkey is if they unblocked YouTube, if they didn’t block Twitter. I think that’s what drives people other places to say, ‘Hey, maybe freedom of expression isn’t that great in Turkey right now,’”