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Although podcasting is growing in Africa, radio, a close cousin that has been around since the days of colonization, remains prevalent.

The largest podcasting markets in Africa include Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya

the African podcasts that get exposure typically sound familiar with commercial appeal in terms of format, content, and tone

Al Manthari has paid the price for America’s shoot-first-ask-no-questions-later system of remote warfare. The irreparable damage to his body left Al Manthari unable to walk or work, robbing him of dignity and causing his daughters — ages 8 and 14 at the time of the strike — to drop out of school to help care for him. The psychological impact of the strike has been profound, leaving Al Manthari traumatized and in need of treatment. And the financial impact has been ruinous.

While the U.S. has millions of dollars in funds earmarked for civilian victims of U.S. attacks, the military ignored pleas on Al Manthari’s behalf, leaving the 56-year-old to rely on a GoFundMe campaign earlier this year to save his life

Since at least World War I, the U.S. military has been paying compensation for harm to civilians. During the Vietnam War, solatia payments, as they are called, were a means for the military to make reparations for civilian injuries or deaths without having to admit guilt. In 1968, for example, the going rate for adult lives was $33. Children merited half that.

a rare public glimpse of how Israel and its American allies harness Israel’s influential tech sector and tech diaspora to run cover for the Jewish state as it endures scrutiny over the humanitarian impact of its invasion of Gaza.

reveal the degree to which, in the tech-oriented hasbara world, the lines between government, the private sector, and the nonprofit world are blurry at best. And the tactics that these wealthy individuals, advocates, and groups use -- hounding Israel critics on social media; firing pro-Palestine employees and canceling speaking engagements; smearing Palestinian journalists; and attempting to ship military-grade equipment to the IDF -- are often heavy-handed and controversial.

Members of the hasbara-oriented tech world WhatsApp group have eagerly taken up the call to shape public opinion as part of a bid to win what’s been described as the “second battlefield” and “the information war.”

The wars in Israel and Ukraine have fueled an explosion in videos online showcasing the horrors of modern war, bringing killings and cruelty to a global audience of viewers who are unprepared — or all too willing — to watch.

fighters use cellphones and GoPro cameras to record or live-stream footage from a point-blank perspective, either for purposes of military strategy or propaganda

Basem Naim, the leader of Hamas’s international relations arm, told The Washington Post in an interview that the footage was shared on social media both to gain global attention and to embolden Hamas militants for the war ahead.“Who is terrorizing whom? We are the victims … of this huge killing machine,” he said. The videos “show that we can do something. It is not only we who are beaten all the time. No, sometimes we can also hit back.”

Social media platforms provide a channel for citizens to report events on the ground in a faster way and without the editorial interference of newspapers’ managements and the state. It is the only completely free and independent outlet to spread information.

As long as we have a biased, censored media, which is not just in Egypt but any mainstream media, alternative outlets like Twitter and others will be the tools used by the people and activists to expose the truth.

The role will be that of support group, the way it always has been. It's where you get hope, where you know you have people...who share similar views, no matter what those views are, all over Egypt. In a society that is bound to be more isolationist due to fear, Twitter provides a safe mechanism to interact and meet like-minded others and find comfort in that. We will need all the comfort we can get.

As soon as the counting kicked off at the ballot boxes, Turkey’s Twitter timeline was swarming with reports of fraud, power outages, and paper ballots found in trash bins. Calls for people to go to local polling stations to watch the counting were circulating. And the mainstream media, with reports coming in from two news agencies, were reporting totally conflicting results. Journos asked its followers to tweet the results from ballot boxes. Citizens who were already at polling stations started taking pictures of the ballot box results and sent them to Journos, using the hashtag #SandıkTutanağı. Engin says they have never experienced such voluminous response from citizens on one day (bear in mind that they were actively reporting during the Gezi Protests). Thousands of reports reached Journos via Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, and SMS messaging only in a couple of hours.

As Journos kept on receiving and documenting those results through the early hours of 31 March, people in front of their television and computer screens witnessed this: in Ankara, where the votes had been swaying between the AKP candidate Melih Gökçek and the CHP’s Mansur Yavaş, vote-count pages stopped refreshing. At the time, a sizeable portion of votes were left to be counted in two neighborhoods that are CHP strongholds, and Gökçek was leading by only three thousand votes. For almost an hour, there was no incoming data. In the meantime, citizens reported that the Interior Minister, Efkan Ala, arrived at a polling station with riot police, while Melih Gökçek went to the building that houses the Supreme Electoral Board (YSK). When the data page was finally refreshed, people saw that all the results were uploaded at once, and Gökçek was leading by twenty thousand votes. Whether or not that pause meant fraud, people’s concerns with the process skyrocketed, and reports of ballot box results soared on Twitter.

the launch of Turkey’s first citizen vote counting system

“Social media is a positive asset to Tunisian media. It is a source of information for the Tunisian people and the most trusted source of news,” said Hichem Snoussi, a media expert and member of the National Committee of Information and Communication Reform (INRIC). “These sites are the hardest thing for the government to control. Peer-to-peer information sharing destroys the possibility of monopolizing information,” Snoussi continued

“These sites can be bought by people who want influence. They can also foster rumors,” he said.

“Right after the revolution, media regained the trust of Tunisians. The state television channel got 40% of their audience back but now, it’s losing people’s trust again as the government exerts control over the media once more. It’s an issue of trust. People don’t trust traditional sources of news anymore.”

they do not kill us to restore their state; they kill us because killing and jailing are normal behaviours in their state

It wasn’t only the police of their state who let us down; did the deans of their colleges not share in running over our children? Were we not let down by the bakeries and the gas depots of their state? By the ferries and ports of their state? Were we not let down by its wheel of production that lavishes millions on the director and the consultant while at a standstill but cannot spare a crumb for the worker when turning? Were we not let down by its economy that closes down the textiles factories while the cotton is piled high in the farmers home but keeps the fertilizer plant pouring poison into our water? Were we not let down by its football clubs that let security brutalize the fans if they cheer too noisily but intervenes to shield players when they raise arms? We are let down by all its institutions and every leader in it and tomorrow we will be let down by its parliament and its president.

That you should bury your son rather than he bury you? Is there a worse injustice? Is there a worse imbalance? We kid ourselves and pretend it’s an exceptional event and that it is possible to reform that state, but all the evidence shows that it is a normal event and there is no hope except in the fall of that state.

About half the political prisoners he met in jail told him police had tracked their communications and movements through their cell phones

Stockholm-based Ericsson AB, Creativity Software Ltd. of the U.K. and Dublin-based AdaptiveMobile Security Ltd. marketed or provided gear over the past two years that Iran’s law enforcement or state security agencies would have access to, according to more than 100 documents and interviews with more than two dozen technicians and managers who worked on the systems.

When Iranian security officers needed to locate a target one night in late 2009, one former Ericsson employee says he got an emergency call to come into the office to fix a glitch in an Ericsson positioning center.

while viewership for TV news still easily outpaces those consuming news on YouTube, the video-sharing site is a growing digital environment where professional journalism mingles with citizen content.

Other popular news events included the Russian elections, unrest in the Middle East, the collapse of a fair stage in Indiana and the crash of an Italian cruise ship.

"One of the things that emerges here is the power of bearing witness as a part of a news consumption process,"

Jridet announced his intentions to start the hunger strike on May 3, on the occasion of the World Press Freedom Day, and asserted that unfair distribution of paid public advertisements and other announcements was the main reason for the the action. “Favoritism, party affiliation, and political loyalty are still governing the process of attribution of public advertisements,” he said.

After the revolution, the ATCE was abolished and no other body was created to take over the allocation of public announcements to different media outlets. “Today, we are back to same old practices of the ATCE…The most obvious example is that Al Fajr, [the newspaper of the Ennahdha Party] takes a larger share of public ads, and needless to ask about why,” Jridet told Tunisia Live

report charged the media advertising sector in Tunisia with “complete absence of ethical rules and codes of conduct.”

We all grew up with the standard formula: journalism plays a crucial role in making western democracies work by providing citizens with the information that enables them to make informed judgments about urgent issues of general interest. Therefore, the fundamental question for those who study the western new media is: Do they in fact do what they are supposed, and claim, to do?

The crucial western capitalist context in which the news media operate in Dutch society and which they fundamentally reflect, is the same as that of British and American societies. Economic and foreign policies in the three countries are much more alike than different. The Netherlands too avowedly promotes ‘free trade’ and ‘the spread of democracy’ to less fortunate countries. In the Netherlands too, neoliberal thinking dominates politics. Journalism in the three countries is also very much alike. The ruling professional ideology is ‘objectivity.’ The media are mostly privately-owned and depend on advertising revenue. In the name of ‘freedom of the press’, the government exercises restraint, taking the position that, as much as possible, the market should decide which publications live and die. But journalists and politicians are caught in a symbiotic relationship and the PR industry exerts a lot of covert influence on journalism. It was American journalist Ben Bagdikian, who claimed in his popular The Media Monopoly , now in its sixth edition, that continuing concentration in the American media industry amounts to a de facto news monopoly. As a result, American news reflects the interests of political and economic elites. Just like in the Netherlands, where media markets are dominated by a few big corporations.

The official version of Dutch media history maintains that the partisan journalism which was prevalent until the 1970s fell far short, because it was intimately tied to political parties. In the 1970s, journalism professionalized and since then it has done more or less what it is supposed to do. But this is a very partial account. Indeed, the partisan media hardly practiced journalism as we like to see it done: acting as the watchdog of democracy. But when journalism shrugged off its political ties, the market filled the vacuum, and far from the market functioning as an ‘engine of freedom,’ to use British scholar James Curran’s words - the market in reality amounted to yet another ‘system of control,’ to cite Curran once again. The commercial media’s primary task is not to provide the population with relevant, independently-gathered information. Their primary task is to deliver readers, viewers and listeners to advertisers. As a consequence, the media in the Netherlands are owned by rich corporations and persons who have a stake in maintaining friendly ties with other corporations and also the government, for access to powerful political sources needs to be kept at all costs. No wonder that the journalistic product reflects the interests of elites. The media are the elite, also in the Netherlands, its reputation of a progressive country regarding ‘cultural’ issues like abortion and the death penalty notwithstanding. Dutch journalism thus remains far from independent, at least, if we take Jurgen Habermas’ definition seriously, whereby a public sphere ‘can only approach autonomy if it is independent from both the state and commercial interests’. 

“The conditions that they are being held in now is much better than before. Definitely a result of foreign media pressure,” tweeted the family members of Greste’s detained colleague, Mohamed Fahmy, from his Twitter account on Feb. 5.

A campaign first begun in Kenya to support Greste and other detained journalists in Egypt is growing daily, expounding the message that “journalism is not terrorism.” Supporters across the world are sharing photos with their mouths taped shut, holding handwritten signs with the hashtag #FreeAJStaff.

Fahmy’s family members also tweeted from his account on Feb. 5 that the three journalists are being held in the same cell. The news comes as a great relief to supporters who have been worriedly reporting on their ill treatment in prison — including the detention of Fahmy and Mohamed in insect-infested solitary confinement cells in a maximum security wing of Tora prison, 24 hours a day, for more than a month without beds or sunlight, sometimes without blankets.

In the absence of protest workshops and ‘how-to’ manuals, video footage captured on mobile phones in Kiev (and elsewhere) and uploaded to social media sites now serves as a repository for protest tactics, to be studied and adapted by anti-coup protesters thousands of miles away in Cairo. These instances of unsentimental appropriation mark an interesting departure from previous patterns of resource sharing and border-crossing diffusion of protest tactics, patterns which saw Egyptian activists cultivate a series of formative linkages with pro-democracy movements such as Serbia’s Otpor movement in the years before the Jan. 25 revolution.

We have teams of people who go on YouTube and search for videos of other protests around the world and when they come across a new tactic, they post it on the Facebook page. If we find a good tutorial video, we translate it into Arabic

The co-ordination of protests themselves, however, is increasingly occurring offline: Egyptian state security has grown so adept at infiltrating online groups, that mosques and university campuses are now the two most important associational spaces in which to organize. In many neighborhoods, certain mosques have a reputation for playing host to rallies that are launched after prayer. Here, would-be protesters do not need access to formal protest networks to participate; they simply need to turn up. These are often the same mosques from where protests were launched during the Jan. 25 revolution. If the protests begin elsewhere, the relevant times and locations are distributed to a trusted list of regular protest-goers who then relay the information to friends and relatives

the Egyptian government issuing a press release on Sunday saying that the army has "achieved a scientific breakthrough by inventing systems for diagnosing hepatitis and AIDS without any need to take a sample of blood from the patient". The claims went further, with the C-Fast device supposedly capable not just of diagnosing, but also treating the diseases

Egypt has the highest rate of hepatitis C in the world, with around 20% of people either suffering or having recovered from the disease according to the World Health Organisation. Sunday's announcement has caused a stir, with a video of the inventor being shared 12,000 times on Facebook and an ongoing Twitter discussion under the hashtag "Virus C miracle". A few of the tweets were supportive of the government, but what is striking is that the majority were satirical and questioned the science. "There is no such thing as secret military reports in medicine," TV presenter Khalid Muntasir told his 20,000 Twitter followers. "For a medical discovery to be recognized and be declared as such, it must be revealed to the public."

One user tweeted: "I suggest you inject Al-Sisi with the virus and then cure him using the army's invention as means to inaugurate it and prove its efficacy."

The recent literature on Putin is correctly in drawing attention to his pro-Soviet imperialistic views: remember, to Putin the collapse of the USSR the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of 20th century. But what exactly this pro-Soviet worldview means is fairly poorly understood. To get a grasp on one needs to check what Putin’s preferred readings are. Putin’s favorites include a bunch of Russian nationalist philosophers of early 20th century – Berdyaev, Solovyev, Ilyin — whom he often quotes in his public speeches. Moreover, recently the Kremlin has specifically assigned Russia’s regional governors to read the works by these philosophers during 2014 winter holidays. The main message of these authors is Russia’s messianic role in world history, preservation and restoration of Russia’s historical borders and Orthodoxy.

another Putin’s favorite that was rumored to be very popular in his close circles a few years ago: “The Third Empire: Russia that Ought to Be” by Michael Yuriev. It’s a utopian fantasy written as a history book from a perspective of a 2054 Latin American narrator. The book describes how 2054 world order was established, and the process has a striking resemblance with contemporary Ukrainian events. It begins with a Recovery period of 2000-12, when the Great Russia starts its resurgence under the rule of Vladimir II the Restorer. Importantly the First Expansion that leads to reunification of significant territory occurs when Eastern and Southern Ukrainian regions rebel against west-organized Orange revolution (supported by western Ukraine). To help the revolting Ukrainians (that want to rejoin Russia) Vladimir II offers to include their Eastern territories into Russia. He then passes a referendum on those territories, and replaces the Russian Federation with the Russian Union (refer to the Custom Union) that also includes Belarus, Prednestrovie, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, South Ossetia and Abkhazia

Again, it may sound implausible but that is exactly what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted in his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order“: alignments and wars among various civilizations — Western, Islamic, Chinese, Orthodox/Russian Latin etc. Notice that the Orthodox/Russian unity has already been restored in Russia. In response to the Ukrainian Church’s call to stop the Russian troops, Saturday a representative of Russia’s Orthodox Church suggested that Ukrainians shouldn’t resist the Russian military “peacekeepers.” Their mission – as was pointed out – is “to restore Russia’s historical unity.”