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Fears are growing for the safety and wellbeing of Malak al-Kashef, a transgender woman seized during a police raid from her home in Giza in the early hours of 6 March and who has not been heard from since, Amnesty International said. Malak al-Kashef was taken by police to an undisclosed location. Her lawyers have not been able to locate her and police stations have denied she is in their custody.

Egyptian authorities have a horrific track record of persecuting people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity

Amnesty International believes that Malak’s arrest relates to her calls for peaceful protests following a major train crash in Cairo’s central train station on 27 February that killed at least 25 people. “Malak al-Kashef appears to have been detained solely for peacefully exercising her rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly

The appearance of prominent Egyptian actor Hesham Selim and his transgender son on DW's Arabic program "Jaafar Talk" has made waves in a country where sexual identities are rarely discussed.

After the actor first spoke publicly about Nour, formerly Noura, on local television last weekend, the two went on international TV to express support for one another and talk about Nour's transition and the challenges he has faced.

As Egyptians stay glued to their favorite TV series during Ramadan, the rare public message of solidarity from a top actor in a largely conservative and patriarchal country generated an emotional response on social media.

Emirati boys are posting lower examination scores and dropping out of high school at a much greater rate than Emirati girls, newly released research shows.It also found that among pupils who complete secondary schooling, many fewer boys go on to a university education.

although 70 per cent of Emirati girls enrol at university after high school, the figure for boys is only 27 per cent.

The drop-out rates are highest in Grade 10, the first non-compulsory year of school, when many boys abandon their education to pursue jobs in the public sector.

Knesset member Ksenia Svetlova, a member of Shaffir’s party, raised the gauntlet March 2 by filing a sexual harassment complaint against Channel 20 and the show with the Council for Cable and Satellite TV. Svetlova claims that Segal and the members of the panel violated a clause in the law that defines sexual harassment as a degrading or derogatory comment made because of the subject’s gender or sexuality. It will be interesting to see how the council handles Svetlova’s complaint, especially when dealing with freedom of expression and satire.

Segal is refusing to apologize. He will simply admit that it was a stupid and tasteless joke. During a bellicose interview with Army Radio on March 3, Segal shifted the debate to the political arena, turning it into an argument between right and left. He said, among other things, that the left-wing media was being hypocritical. He has no reason to apologize, he claimed, just as the popular satirical TV show "Eretz Nehederet" ("A Wonderful Land") was not asked to apologize for the sexual connotations of their jokes about right-wing ministers such as Ayelet Shaked (HaBayit HaYehudi) and Tzipi Hotoveli (Likud). When asked about why he was doing his satire on a news show, especially on one devoted to Jewish heritage, Segal responded that he does not make a firm distinction between current events, lighter news and humor. Toward the end of his interview, he said, “Personally, I feel bad that she was hurt. If only she would have left it as a personal insult, instead of bringing in sexual harassment. … But this is an attempt to silence Channel 20.”

Today, Twitter has a different story, and it is not one of speaking truth to power. Twitter is no longer empowering its users. Its platform cannot be considered neutral. Twitter’s actions suggest it is systematically suppressing voices in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

What started out as an investigation into the mass suspension of accounts of Egyptian dissidents, uncovered a mass censorship algorithm that targeted users who use Arabic flagging their text as hateful conduct. This story is still unfolding. As you read this, mass and unjustified systemic locking and suspension of Twitter Arabic accounts continues. Users are angry and bewildered.

draconian yet lazy algorithms have systematically shut down voices of dissent – and pulled unsuspecting social media users down with them

Because these films are set in America, race and gender sometimes conceal the class tensions.

Because of its title, American viewers will likely assume that Atlantics, the new film from the French Senegalese director Mati Diop, is about either slavery or refugees. Even after seeing it, they may assume it is about love or ghosts or exoticized life on the west coast of Africa. But Atlantics is fundamentally about class. Despite the familiar trappings of esteem—like Parasite, it won a prestigious award at Cannes, and Diop’s family background suggests that she is the epitome of an Afropolitan elite—the way it reckons with capital and labor is far more interesting than this recent spate of class warfare films. Atlantics cannot overthrow film as an institution, but it does overthrow many of film’s formal conventions. In so doing, it wreaks havoc with the interlocking hierarchy of class, race, and gender that most of these other films assume, leaving in its wake a startling study of power in the raw.

Labor drama, love story, surrealist film, crime thriller, zombie flick—these shifts are both smooth and unsettling, just like that train in sudden reverse. They keep us on edge but never just for the sake of it. And they continually bring us back to the central question of class, even as they keep us from mapping it onto a single hero or plot or genre.

Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon. 

“This vast influence operation highlights the ease with which malicious actors can exploit the identity of real people, dupe international news outlets, and have propaganda of unknown provenance legitimized through reputable media,” Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who first noticed suspicious posts by members of the network, told The Daily Beast. “It’s not just fake news we need to be wary of, but fake journalists.”

placed articles critical of Qatar and supportive of tougher sanctions on Iran in conservative North American outlets like Human Events and conservative writer Andy Ngo’s The Post Millennial, as well as Israeli and Middle Eastern newspapers like The Jerusalem Post and Al Arabiya, and Asian newspapers like the South China Morning Post.

This film industry has been coined Kannywood, after the city it originated in. According to statistics from the National Film and Video Censors Board, its movies make up about 30 percent of the films produced by the Nigerian-based film industry popularly called Nollywood, which is often portrayed as the third-largest in the world, after Hollywood and Bollywood. Kannywood even has its own TV channel, Africa Magic Hausa, showing Hausa-language movies on satellite TV.

stricter guidelines, such as the banning of married women from acting, while also requiring all women in the industry to have a male guardian who would be legally responsible if their ward broke the rules

Their tone is devoutly Muslim, though, and quite often the very last line of the end credits is "Glory be to God". Many of these movies also denounce the hypocrisy of the ruling classes who preach piousness in public while sinning in private.

There is no filtering by keywords if a user chooses another country (e.g., United States, Canada) as their location even if they are physically located in an Arab country. - One anomaly we found when probing filtering by keywords is that filtering does not work if a filtered Arabic keyword is used together with another non-filtered keyword. For example, a search using the Arabic word for “sex” is banned, but using the Arabic term for “sex stories” is not banned.

We found no evidence of filtering of keywords in Arabic or English that could return results in other content categories. We tested keywords that could yield politically sensitive content (e.g., “democracy”, “freedom”, “opposition”), content related to violence and terrorism (e.g., “torture”, terror”, “explosive”), Web sites related to minority and religious rights (e.g., “Shiite”, “Baha’i”, “Christian”, “Jews”), and content related to women’s rights (e.g., “gender”, “equality”). None of the tested keywords were found banned.

It is interesting that Microsoft’s implementation of this type of wholesale social content censorship for the entire “Arabian countries” region is in fact not being practiced by many of the Arab government censors themselves. That is, although political filtering is widespread in the MENA region, social filtering, including keyword filtering, is not practiced by all countries in MENA. ONI 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 testing and research found no evidence of social content filtering (e.g., sex, nudity, and homosexuality) at the national level in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Libya.10