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"All the Taliban," declares William Martinez, a 24-year-old barber at Le Moustache, a hair salon across the street.

"There are two types of people who use the mosque," she says, matter-of-factly. "The Arabs and the Iranians."

Many here refer to all Muslims or Middle Easterners as Turks, and seem to know next to nothing about their religious beliefs. "They pray to the god of the moon so they only gather at night," says Ms. Melendez.

The late Iraqi dictator is lauded on a mysterious satellite channel that began broadcasting on the Islamic calendar's anniversary of his 2006 execution.

The Associated Press tracked down a man in Damascus, Syria named Mohammed Jarboua, who claimed to be its chairman. The Saddam channel, he said, "didn't receive a penny from the Baathists" and is for Iraqis and other Arabs who "long for his rule." Jarboua has clearly made considerable efforts to hide where it's aired from and refuses to say who is funding it besides "people who love us."

Saddam's hanging three years ago was on the first day of Eid al-Adha, the most important holiday of the Islamic calendar. His execution — and the day it was done — remains a sore point for Saddam sympathizers still smarting over images of the defiant leader in his final moments as Shiites in the death chamber shouted curses.

a scandalous abuse of power by Facebook to arbitrarily destroy online communities built up over many months and years

Ultimately, the anti-cuts movement in the UK will need to start organising through self-hosted, open source platforms to avoid reliance upon the very corporate power structures we are aiming to challenge

Bahrain’s foreign minister says Gulf states are launching a joint military command based in Saudi Arabia to counter threats from militant jihadis and Shia Iran.

Sheikh Khalid al-Khalifa said the joint command force, which analysts say will eventually have several hundred thousand soldiers under its control, would begin military operations after a Gulf Co-operation Council summit due to take place later this month in Qatar.

“Look at the fragmentation in Iraq and the abominable situation in Syria,” Sheikh Khalid told the Financial Times in an interview. “If Afghanistan was a primary school for terrorists, then Syria and Iraq are a university for them – these are serious threats and lots of people from our country have gone and joined them.”

The demands include an immediate end to censorship and a set of reforms, which they say, are long overdue.

‘‘We are also telling the station managers to keep their hands off. We are tired of censorship and interference in our editorial work,” complains Aly El Attar, a director at the channel.

“We had a revolution a year ago but nothing has changed,” laments newscaster Iman Mansour. “We still work in a stifling and restrictive atmosphere. We are still waiting for the restructuring of editorial policies and the purging of state TV. ” She insists that the red lines remain in place: the ruling military council having now replaced Hosni Mubarak as the new line that cannot be crossed. “If a guest starts criticising the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the atmosphere in the studio becomes tense and I’m instructed by the show producers to cut the program short,” Mansour says. “On the other hand, if the guest is pro-SCAF, he or she is allowed to ramble on for as long as they like.”

El-Daif (The Guest), a new drama written by journalist Ibrahim Eissa and directed by Khalid El-Bagoury that has become both a box office and a critical hit in Egypt, while at the same time attracting controversy.

a heated discussion about religious discourse between the younger and older man. The suitor, who appears to be highly influenced by Islamic fundamentalists, keeps engaging in arguments with Yahia, which are mostly won by the wit of the latter.

El-Daif is set mainly in the house of Yahia, who in many ways echoes the character of writer Eissa, a journalist and intellectual known for his outspoken writings on religion.

Five Yemeni hip-hop dancers thought their problems had ended when the Islamist militants who had banned them from performing were defeated in the port city of Mukalla nearly three years ago by forces backed by the United Arab Emirates, says Reuters.But last month Yemeni security forces briefly detained the five members of the WaxOn band, broke their equipment and only released the dancers after they had signed a document saying they would stop dancing hip-hop in public.

“The police said it was a religious sin,”

Since AQAP was driven out, Mukalla has been largely peaceful compared to the rest of Yemen, which has been devastated by nearly four years of fighting between the Saudi-led coalition and the Iran-aligned Houthis.

analysis by BuzzFeed News shows the number of shares on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites of the most-read stories about Syria in the past two months were a 10th of what they were just over a year ago

“I work so hard to try and post videos, but no one cares. I don’t know what to say. They just see the article or report, and just say: ‘Oh, that’s really sad.’ And after that they turn the internet off and go and live their lives.”

Once the footage is online people like Ethar El-Katatney, executive producer of AJ+, pick it up, and try to work out how they can tell the next story from Syria.“All of the footage I am looking at today looks the same as the footage I saw a year ago and it’s the same dust, and blood, and screaming, and hospital rooms and hospital floors,” El-Katatney told BuzzFeed News. “It has become normalized.”

A study released last week by 416Labs, a Toronto-based consulting and research firm, supports the view that mainstream U.S. newspapers consistently portray Palestine in a more negative light than Israel, privilege Israeli sources, and omit key facts helpful to understanding the Israeli occupation, including those expressed by Palestinian sources.

Since 1967, use of the word “occupation” has declined by 85% in the Israeli dataset of headlines, and by 65% in the Palestinian dataset;Since 1967, mentions of Palestinian refugees have declined by an overall 93%;Israeli sources are nearly 250% more likely to be quoted as Palestinians;The number of headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestine;Words connoting violence such as “terror” appear three times as much as the word “occupation” in the Palestinian dataset;Explicit recognition that Israeli settlements and settlers are illegal rarely appears in both datasets;Since 1967, mentions of “East Jerusalem,” distinguishing that part of the city occupied by Israel in 1967 from the rest of the city, appeared only a total of 132 times;The Los Angeles Times has portrayed Palestinians most negatively, followed by The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and lastly The New York Times;Coverage of the conflict has reduced dramatically in the second half of the fifty-year period.

in “Permission to Narrate,” Edward Said pointed out that even as Palestinians were supported by the legality, legitimacy, and authority of international law, resolutions, and consensus, which is the case until this day, U.S. policymakers and media outlets simply refused to “make connections, draw conclusions, [and] state the simple facts.” This refusal remains a mainstay of U.S. media and politics, including a rejection of the central truth that the Palestinian narrative “stems directly from the story of their existence in and displacement from Palestine.”

This time of year, the offices of TV production companies are usually bustling with stars conducting meetings in preparation for the upcoming Ramadan television season (which falls in May this year)

The local television scene is rife with talk about the implications of recent developments in the field, which entail an effective halt in almost all TV drama production

What we’re witnessing this year is not a marketing crisis, or a weakness in screenplays, or any of the other issues that have ailed the drama industry in the past; rather, the very existence of the industry is under unprecedented threat. The number of series being produced has plummeted, and is expected to amount to 18 series at most, the majority of which are  to be produced by Synergy, the production house owned by Tamer Morsy, head of the intelligence-affiliated Egyptian Media Group (EMG). It is the newest step in the state’s ongoing bid to monopolize all forms of media and artistic production in Egypt.

Attalah is the chief editor of Egypt’s only independent media outlet, with 124,000 followers on Twitter and 241,000 on Facebook. But Mada Masr isn’t alone. It’s among a growing number of independent Arabic digital outlets that are emerging as fresh sources of news in a region where tyrants and oligarchs have for decades controlled the media.

Some, like Al Jumhuriya (The Republic) and Syria Untold, are run by exiled Syrian intellectuals from Germany, Turkey and Lebanon. Others, like Daraj (Stairs) — with 135,000 followers on Facebook — are providing pan-Arab coverage from Lebanon, where most traditional newspapers are party-affiliated. Still others, like 7iber (pronounced “hiber,” and meaning Ink) and Sowt (Voice), are offering nuanced coverage to readers in Jordan despite the threat of censorship. 7iber has 120,000 followers on Twitter and 341,000 on Facebook.

grief, limited resources and threat of censorship haven’t dissuaded these outlets from revolutionizing Arabic-language journalism