Media in Middle East & North Africa

Assad said in an e-mail to me that although Israel was “doing everything possible to undermine the prospects for peace,” he was still very interested in closing the deal. “We have to wait a little while to see how things will evolve and how the situation will change,” Assad said. “We still believe that we need to conclude a serious dialogue to lead us to peace.”

“Syria is eager to engage with the West,” he said, “an eagerness that was never perceived by the Bush White House. Anything is possible, as long as peace is being pursued.”

Iran is a crucial factor motivating each side.

A mammoth project is also underway to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays. "In the new media environment, readers want short and punchy coverage, while the interactive possibilities of Twitter promise to transform th," the online media guru Jeff Jarvis said in a tweet yesterday, before reaching his 140-character limit, which includes spaces. According to subsequent reports, he is thinking about going to the theatre tonight, but it is raining :(.

Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by", eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original.

The cartoon was published Wednesday in newspapers and on the Internet.

بواسطة عبدالمنعم عبدالعظيم -- الاقصر, on 02-04-2009 15:25 بلد وعايزيين تولوعوها هناك قواعد ثابته فى القانون اسمها النظام العام والاداب العامة من يحيد عنها يحاكم ودولتنا بنص الدستور اسلامية تسمح بالتسامح مع الاديان السماوية لانها جزء من ايمان المسلم بالله وملائكته ورسله اما الديانات التى هناك تاكيد انها من صنع الصهيونية والماسونية والاستعمار فهى مرفوضة صبفا لقواعد النظام العام فليس من الحرية ان اخرج الى الشارع عاريا وليس من الحرية ايضا ان افسح لديانة مشبوهة الفرصة للاحتفال ةالدعوة والتبشير فالمفروض ان يكون هناك حد بين الحرية والفوضى

Many such dissenters have, indeed, made great use of the Web. In Ukraine young activists relied on new–media technologies to mobilize supporters during the Orange Revolution. Colombian protesters used Facebook to organize massive rallies against FARC, the leftist guerrillas. The shocking and powerful pictures that surfaced from Burma during the 2007 anti–government protests—many of them shot by local bloggers with cell phones—quickly traveled around the globe. Democratic activists in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe used the Web to track vote rigging in last year’s elections and used mobile phones to take photos of election results that were temporarily displayed outside the voting booths (later, a useful proof of the irregularities). Plenty of other examples—from Iran, Egypt, Russia, Belarus, and, above all, China—attest to the growing importance of technology in facilitating dissent.

But drawing conclusions about the democratizing nature of the Internet may still be premature. The major challenge in understanding the relationship between democracy and the Internet— aside from developing good measures of democratic improvement—has been to distinguish cause and effect. That is always hard, but it is especially difficult in this case because the grandiose promise of technological determinism—the idealistic belief in the Internet’s transformative power—has often blinded even the most sober analysts.

investing in new media infrastructure might also embolden the conservatives, nationalists, and extremists, posing an even greater challenge to democratization. A brief look at the emerging cyber–nationalism in Russia and China provides a taste of things to come.

approximately 128 individuals have been arrested and sentenced to death for nothing more than being LGBT. And according to Iraqi-LGBT, executions are scheduled this week to start in "batches of 20."

Since the U.S. invasion, the death penalty in Iraq has soared to levels that not even Texas approaches.

If the Iraq government hopes to become part of the family of nations, it must respect the rights of all segements of its population, including all homosexual persons (who do not choose their sexual orientation).  To merit international respect, the government must behave justly and refrain from persecuting LGBT persons.   The world is watching Iraq as it develops into a true democracy that respects human rights. Posted by Stephen Harris