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About 46 per cent of the world's people believe that al-Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks, while 15 per cent think the US government was behind the assault, and seven per cent blame Israel, according to a2008 world public opinion study carried out by the Program on International Policy (PIPA) Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which interviewed 16,063 people worldwide. But Ahmadinejad views himself as a leader in the Arab and Muslim worlds. And, in these regions, surveys show significant sectors of the population believe that the US and Israel launched the 9/11 attacks to meet their own geopolitical goals. In Jordan, 31 per cent of those polled by PIPA believe Israel was behind the attacks, while only 11 per cent blame it on al-Qaeda. Likewise, 43 per cent of Egyptians blame Israel, and 12 per centthink the US was responsible, while only 16 per cent think al-Qaeda brought down the towers. A 2006 poll from Scrippsnews says 36 per cent of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that US government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried or launched the attacksthemselves.

Ahmadinejad is speaking to a significant global constituency. There is little evidence to suggest that they include "the majority of the American people, as well as most nations and politicians around the world", as the Iranian leader said in his UN speech. But the 9/11 "conspiracy theories" are not a fringe phenomenon either.

bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary.

Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.

“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.” The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.

The broad experience of these programmes during the 1990s suggests that externally funded democracy-promotion projects are very good at creating institutions and structures, but less successful at producing sustainable, vibrant and engaged democratic constituencies and civil societies. In other words, they helped create a lot of NGOs, but not civil society.

oreign funding of civil-society groups led to a backlash against not only NGOs, but the very ideas of democracy and civil society. The ex-post-facto justification for the Iraq war as a form of democracy-promotion coupled with the perceptions of Washington’s “shadowy guiding hand” in the “colour revolutions” in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004) intensified scepticism toward democracy and civil society in (among others) Russia, China, and Nigeria.

A project that has human goals at its nominal centre yet focuses on tools and technologies always runs the risk of technological determinism and indeed fetishism. Moreover, the prior history of “toolbox” approaches to political change (albeit before an era when the internet was widespread) enjoins caution over making the discovery and spread of successful technologies the key to achieving improvements in governance, development and human rights.It may be also that these technology-centred approaches tend to encourage a context-free and amnesiac attitude that ignores the experiences even of the very recent past. In any event, the extraordinary events in the middle east and north Africa fuel the liberation technologists’ euphoria.

Liao Liang's mission in the Kenyan capital is hardly confidential: As a senior editor of the China Global Television Network (CGTN), a subsidiary of Chinese state television, his task is that of shining a positive light on his country's ambitious activities -- particularly those in Africa, where China's reputation has suffered as its footprint has grown.

"It's an apartheid system," he says, with the Chinese at the top, then the whites, then the blacks and at the very bottom are the Kenyans. "We have to let the Chinese go first in the restrooms and we're only allowed to eat in the cafeteria after 1 p.m., after they have eaten. They treat us like their inferiors." Sometimes, James M. says, he only receives half of his contractual editor's salary of 2,000 euros per month. He says he is penalized 2,000 shillings - around 17 euros - for every mistake in his stories, including typos.

CGTN journalists aren't just there to ward off criticism of China's expansion in Africa but also to break the West's media dominance. The broadcaster has a similar mission in Africa as Russia's state broadcaster RT does in Europe.

Levels of trust in news on social media, search engines, and messaging apps is consistently lower than audience trust in information in the news media more generally.

Many of the same people who lack trust in news encountered via digital media companies – who tend to be older, less educated, and less politically interested – also express less trust in the news regardless of whether found on platforms or through more traditional offline modes.

Many of the most common reasons people say they use platforms have little to do with news.

After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.

Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.

Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.

In public speeches, President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has repeatedly scolded families for having more than two children, calling the population crisis a national security issue that has hindered progress on development goals.

More than one billion people already live in Africa. By 2050, the populations of at least 26 African countries are expected to double.

rising temperatures increasingly threaten the country’s food and water supplies

the most severe and sustained political upheaval ever faced by the Islamist regime in Iran. Waves of protests, led mostly by women, broke out immediately, sending some two-million people into the streets of 160 cities and small towns, inspiring extraordinary international support. The Twitter hashtag #MahsaAmini broke the world record of 284 million tweets, and the UN Human Rights Commission voted on November 24 to investigate the regime’s deadly repression, which has claimed five-hundred lives and put thousands of people under arrest and eleven hundred on trial.

This is neither a “feminist revolution” per se, nor simply the revolt of generation Z, nor merely a protest against the mandatory hijab. This is a movement to reclaim life, a struggle to liberate free and dignified existence from an internal colonization. As the primary objects of this colonization, women have become the major protagonists of the liberation movement.

Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic has been a battlefield between hard-line Islamists who wished to enforce theocracy in the form of clerical rule (velayat-e faqih), and those who believed in popular will and emphasized the republican tenets of the constitution.

a sample of 8000 respondents (men and women) from 16 Arab countries

97% of respondents expressing psychological stress (to varying degrees) as a result of the war on Gaza. 84% expressed a sense of great psychological stress.

54% of respondents relied on television, compared to 43% who relied on the internet