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in title, tags, annotations or urlFreed Guantanamo detainee says U.S. behind his torture | Reuters - 0 views
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I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways -- all orchestrated by the United States government."
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he was tortured and abused by Pakistani intelligence officers in the presence of a British intelligence agent.
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Morocco on a CIA flight
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Bahraini police taking aim at reporters, teachers | McClatchy - 0 views
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After severely curbing news coverage of its crackdown on opposition groups by foreign reporters, Bahraini authorities have begun an assault on local journalists working for international news agencies — with arrests, beatings and, apparently in one instance, electric shock.
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Besides ousting the editors of the only independent daily newspaper, Al Wasat, the authorities have arrested local reporters and photographers and expelled the only resident foreign reporter, who worked for the Reuters news agency. Most foreign news reporters, including this one, have been prevented from entering Bahrain.
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The intimidation campaign appears to be focused on teachers, who report that as many as 30 elementary and secondary school teachers are taken from their classrooms at a time and driven to police stations where they are subjected to hours of verbal and physical abuse before being released.
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Egypt: Military Intensifies Clampdown on Free Expression | Human Rights Watch - 0 views
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“The decision to try Asmaa Mahfouz is a major attack on free expression and fair trials, using the same abusive laws the Mubarak government used against its critics,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The military is using her to silence potential critics, sending the message that criticizing the current military government will land them in jail.”
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The military prosecutor questioned her for over three hours about her comments on Twitter and media interviews during protests on July 23 in which she criticized the military for failing to intervene to protect protesters.
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Military courts have sentenced at least 10,000 civilians since January 2011 after unfair proceedings, Human Rights Watch said. All of them should be retried before regular civilian courts.
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First draft of the 'Başbuğ doctrine' - 0 views
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İlker Başbuğ suggested ways to build healthy relations between the military and the government, used the phrase “the people of Turkey” instead of “Turks,” stated that cultural identities should be protected and emphasized that the military has never been opposed to religion, only its abuse by politicians.
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The civilian-military relationship in Turkey is often problematic, with the powerful military frequently interfering in politics, staging coups in 1961, 1972 and 1980. The European Union has pressed Turkey to harmonize its rules with those of the EU, finding unsatisfactory the steps the government has taken thus far to decrease the military’s influence in politics.
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The pious parts of our country love their army and trust it," he said. "The army of the Turkish people is the nation itself. It comes from the nation and is for the nation." In the second part of his speech, Başbuğ looked into the fight against terrorism and emphasized that the struggle against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, was not an ethnic conflict
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Egypt: Forcibly disappeared transgender woman at risk of sexual violence and torture | Amnesty International - 0 views
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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.
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Egyptian authorities have a horrific track record of persecuting people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity
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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
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Prison for dabbing: Saudi entertainer locked up for 'inciting drug abuse' | Middle East Eye - 0 views
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The move is officially banned by the Saudi Interior Ministry’s National Drug Control Commission, which consider the move to be a reference to cannabis consumption.
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“the move is a well-known move…known to represent smoking hashish which leads to addiction.”He added that there was “no doubt” that anyone taking part in the move would be subject to questioning and punishment.The move could warrant a prison sentence, a fine or both.
How to survive gaslighting: when manipulation erases your reality | Science | The Guardian - 0 views
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What’s happening on a national level is activating and retraumatizing a lot of people who have been gaslighted in the past. The crazy-making, mind-bending, massive confusion-inducing effects of our current administration’s recklessness with the truth and disregard for verifiable facts is creating an emotional and psychological whiplash. It’s affecting people who have been subjected to abusive relationships; people who feel emotionally vulnerable and it seems to stoke a nearly unprecedented rage in those of us who can see it and feel powerless to do anything to combat it. When people in the mainstream media are being discredited, how exactly are you supposed to call this out?
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Being defiant does not make you difficult. It makes you resilient.
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the person gaslighting will never be able to respond to logic and reason – and so you have to be the one to recognize that logic and reason can’t be applied.
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The complicated legacy of Qatar's World Cup - The Washington Post - 0 views
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perhaps the biggest test case for what happens when a Middle Eastern nation intent on using oil money to enhance its influence through sports emerges on the global stage.
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Can sports help bring societal progress to a region that has long resisted change? Or are those countries rewarded with reputational prestige despite human rights abuses that they have little intention to address?
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Owing to its small population of roughly 300,000 citizens, Qatar relies heavily on migrant workers. When it won the World Cup bid, it employed a labor system called kafala. Under kafala, migrant workers, mostly seeking to leave impoverished conditions elsewhere, have to pay exorbitant recruitment fees and cannot change jobs without the consent of their employer. The system led to rampant abuses that included wage theft and unsafe working conditions, ultimately resulting in the deaths of thousands of workers. Qatar also bans homosexuality, which it defends on religious grounds.
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National security and canned sardines - Opinion - Ahram Online - 0 views
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draft laws currently being prepared by various ministries about the right to information and free circulation of information. As a society, we have come a long way on this subject since the 1960s; Military Intelligence (which today we refer to as “sovereign entities”) has loosened its grip on the media, and we have made huge progress in media freedom after the emergence of independent newspapers and satellite channels, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Nonetheless, the security mentality still controls much of freedom of publication, and I believe we need to launch a serious dialogue about the relationship between national security on the one hand and freedom of opinion and free circulation of information on the other.
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Information is vital for the democratic process; if the people don’t know what’s happening and if the actions of government officials and public figures are concealed and secret, then the citizenry would not be able to participate in events in their society.
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Availability of information also allows the citizenry to oversee state agencies, and thus effectively contribute to curbing corruption and abuse of power. This makes free information flow vital to raising the efficiency of the government apparatus and improving its performance
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How citizen video journalists in Egypt are 'pushing at traditional journalism' - Egypt Business Directory: Web - 1 views
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Members of the collective see themselves as performing an essential storytelling role: providing coverage of police brutality and filling a media "vacuum". "There isn't a free media," founder member Omar Hamilton told me during a visit to the collective's workspace in Cairo. "We have to step in where we can to provide alternative narratives, to provide what we would see as the truth that's not being presented."
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"There's nothing you can really do about it except run at the right time. Which is just after everyone else but not before it's too late,"
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we needed a space to work out of and to host a library of revolutionary material and to archive everything we can, including mobile phone footage and news-quality material
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THE DAILY STAR :: Culture :: Art :: Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat named journalist of the year - 0 views
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Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat was named journalist of the year at the 2011 Prize for Press Freedom for his defense of press freedom. “This year we are honoring a courageous journalist who has been the victim of brutal repression by an obsolete government,” Reporters Without Borders secretary general Jean-François Julliard said. Reporters Without Borders awarded the prize along with the French newspaper Le Monde. “Ali Farzat fully deserves this award. His cartoons target the abuses of a desperate regime with its back to the wall and encourage Syrians to demand their rights and to express themselves freely.”
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“I dedicate this award to the martyrs, to those who have been injured and to those who struggle for freedom. May thanks be given to all those who have turned the Arab Spring into a victory over darkness and repression.”
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This October, Farzat received the Sakharov prize from the European parliament, which is awarded to campaigners for freedom.
Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Era: Critique of an Emerging Phenomenon - www.jadaliyya.com - Readability - 0 views
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how the young enacted their citizenship in the digital age as a way to both confront power and imagine a different future
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While the economic benefits of globalization had bypassed the Middle East’s young generation, the information revolution did not (at least not to the urban centres). The children submerged in the information technology of the 1990s onwards are today’s youth.
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El-Sharnouby analysed Egyptian news sources since the turn of twenty-first the century to examine how the government sought to accommodate the "youth bulge." The Mubarak government conceived of youth as prone to laziness and passivity. Moreover, El-Sharnouby highlights that many scholars erroneously thought that disenfranchised youth would turn either to drug abuse or religious extremism. It therefore came as a surprise to them when scores of the “problematic,” “apathetic” and “lazy” youth were the main actors and agents of dissent in the January 25 revolution
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The Muslim Brotherhood Following Mubarak's Footsteps Human Rights NGOs and Parties express their solidarity with journalists and media professionals against attempts of a new authoritarian domination | Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies - 0 views
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a direct response to the attempts by the Freedom and Justice party to dominate public journalism institutions through the appointment of a new group of editors in chief for national newspapers using abusive and unprofessional standards which are seen as a continuation of the same restrictions and practices as those followed during the Mubarak era.
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threats by the Minister of Investment to withdrawal broadcasting licenses from private television stations
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support for the relative gains in freedoms attained after a long struggle that began prior to the Revolution, especially in the field of journalism and media. This struggle was bolstered by the courage of many journalists and media professionals throughout the revolution and beyond
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BBC News - Wars, public outrage and policy options in Syria - 0 views
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We've heard these pleas before. The BBC reports regularly from inside Syria, as do several American papers, and although coverage of the Syrian war is not wall-to-wall on American networks, it gets regular, consistent attention. So where is the public outrage about a war so chaotic and dangerous that even the UN has stopped keeping track of the death toll? Have we all become numb to the pain of others?
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The world inevitably tires of complex, long conflicts where there are no clear answers about how to end the violence. This cartoon in the New Yorker is a harsh but perhaps accurate look at how the collective conscience deals with the relentless stream of bad news from Syria.
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Spare a thought for the North Koreans, too. A UN report out last week, too horrific even to read, compares the abuses committee by the government to Nazi Germany. I have yet to see much outrage or calls for action
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Bridges TV, News Online, Advertisment, Bridges Blog, Bridges Yahoo Group, Global Forum, Faith, Television, Education, Videos, Features, Shows, Testimonials, Weekly Poll - 0 views
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This appears to be the most tragic of domestic violence incidents and, although statistics suggest that more than three fatal cases of domestic violence occur every day in the US, no one here could ever imagine that this may happen to our beloved colleague. Several times each day in America, a woman is abused or assaulted. Domestic violence is a behavior that knows no boundaries of religion, race, ethnicity, or social status, and occurs in every community.
Jury acquits defendants in Politkovskaya murder - International Herald Tribune - 0 views
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in the killing of investigative journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya.
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Politkovskaya's probing reports on atrocities in Chechnya and abuses by Russian authorities angered the Kremlin but won her international acclaim
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"We're glad," said defense lawyer Murad Musayev. "This is something that happens rarely in Russia. This is what I call justice."