Media in Middle East & North Africa

The government's approach to the issue of privacy is not unlike a rat hooked on heroin. It just can't get enough of our personal information.

The government promises not to look at the content of messages themselves, and restrict itself to who communicates with whom. This seems ludicrous. If two terrorist suspects are emailing each other frequently, on Facebook or anywhere itself, it's difficult to believe security services won't try to discover the content of the messages. Somewhere in the legislation – either in an amendment to RIPA or a clause of the communications data bill – there will be a power, in 'exceptional circumstances' to read content. And 'exceptional circumstances' tend to become much less exceptional than originally intended.

The famous, of course, have turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life seems slightly absurd.

for candidates like Mr. Paul, Twitter is an organizing tool rather than a glimpse behind the curtain.

the truth is, they are a brand.

The IDF say 1,166 Palestinians were killed during the conflict, of whom 709 were "terror operatives". A Palestinian rights group says the toll was 1,434, including 960 civilians, 235 fighters and 239 uniformed police.

So-called "honour killings" in Turkey have reached record levels. According to government figures, there are more than 200 a year – half of all the murders committed in the country. Now, in a sinister twist, comes the emergence of "honour suicides". The growing phenomenon has been linked to reforms to Turkey's penal code in 2005. That introduced mandatory life sentences for honour killers, whereas in the past, killers could receive a reduced sentence claiming provocation. Soon after the law was passed, the numbers of female suicides started to rocket.

"I think most of these suicide cases are forced. There are just too many of them, it's too suspicious. But they're almost impossible to investigate," said Mustafa Peker, Batman's chief prosecutor.

Most honour killings happen in the Kurdish region, a barren land ravaged by years of war and oppression. Rural communities here are ruled under a strict feudal, patriarchal system. But as Kurds have fled the fighting between separatist rebels and Turkey's government, the crime is spreading across the country into its cities and towns. According to a recent government report, there is now one honour killing a week in Istanbul."Families who move here are suddenly faced with modern, secular Turkey," said Vildan Yirmibesoglu, the head of Istanbul's department of human rights. "This clash of cultures is making the situation worse as the pressure on women to behave conservatively is become more acute. And of course there are more temptations."

"All new technologies hit this point," says Mike Butcher, editor of the new media blog Tech Crunch Europe, who has been using Twitter for almost three years. "You always have these old crusties who have been on it for a while, and then a generation of 'newbies' turn up as if it's something they have just invented." The scale of the exponential boom in Twitter's popularity, however, is "really unusual", he says. Far from killing off the site's popularity among early adopters, he argues that "the power of any network grows exponentially as the number of people using it grows." A world in which many more people are tweeting, and those tweets are fully searchable, would potentially allow a real-time search facility of "the consciousness of the planet".

Syria’s use of a kangaroo court to criminalize even the mildest forms of dissent and free speech

The console is not meant to directly compete with the latest, powerful devices like Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, or the Wii. Rather, said Zeebo CEO John F. Rizzo, it is targeted at consumers in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil and Eastern Europe who generally can't afford the latest high-end consoles, or the games published for them. In many of these countries, cell phone service is more readily available and cheaper than wired broadband.

Zeebo hopes that by improving on systems like Mega Drive and offering wireless downloads of games, it will attract the emerging middle classes of India, China and Brazil to modern video games.

I am an example of how far-reaching the effects of war could be. My grandfather on my father’s side left his home, which is now part of Israel, to pursue an education in Egypt. He wasn’t able to return and was issued a refugee document (passport). My other grandfather left for work to Saudi Arabia and was also issued a refugee document. Until today, most of my extended family, which I never knew or never met, still live in the Gaza Strip, where 70% of its 1.5 million people are refugees from ’48 and ’67. Imagine having your house destroyed, twice. I am hoping that one day I could meet them. The chances aren’t looking good.

Is the creative freedom ubiquitously expressed on the internet an ersatz expression for real change? Or is it accelerating knowledge and thereby progress?

Twitter, the latest social networking phenomenon, appears to have sparked its first libel action. And perhaps inevitably, singer Courtney Love, well known for sounding off online, is at its centre.