Manal and Alaa's bit bucket

Melting polar ice caps or changing migratory patterns of birds a little too abstract?  How does Black Death grab you?Technorati Tags: plague, environment, global warming

will erode faith in the judiciary.

Thanks to reader SP for sending this along. “Try topping this, Gamal,” SP comments.Martial arts black belt, Harvard graduate, jewellery designer, businesswoman. Her father may be a brutal dictator, but the official list of Gulnara Karimova’s achievements is as long as your arm.Now the glamorous daughter of the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, has added [...]

Yesterday, I’m sure everyone has heard, 28 fruitpickers, mostly Syrian Kurds, were killed in a precision Israeli airstrike. The Israelis thought the building where the farmers were loading trucks with fruit was a Hizballah weapons cache. Watching Al-Jazeera cut between scenes of carnage and IDF video of the attack last night, I was reminded of [...]

I’d promised myself not to make this a personal blog, but friends and family have been curious about Kyrgyzstan, so I’m including a link to some photos, and to a New York Times story that, coincidentally, ran while I was there. Also some scattered notes, adapted from an email to a friend:The first thing a [...]

I’d promised myself not to make this a personal blog, but friends and family have been curious about Kyrgyzstan, so I’m including a link to some photos, and to a New York Times story that, coincidentally, ran while I was there. Also some scattered notes, adapted from an email to a friend:The first thing a [...]

Amnesty has launched a brilliant campaign to foil Internet censorship. I’ve joined. If you have a Web site or a blog, so should you. Here’s how.Technorati Tags: online censorship, Amnesty, Irrepressible, censorship

The wolves are circling around U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Great. Hope they eat him. But the swing in sentiment against him makes me tired. Back when most Americans polled thought the war Iraq was a swell idea and sat around the dinner table cursing the French, Rumsfeld was a hero and was even [...]

First a confession: I’m a few steps behind. Here in Cairo, a blissful step removed from the U.S. news cycle (but, I like to think, a few steps closer to the events that shape it), I missed this. Only today’s BBC online story alerted me.The Pentagon’s new 20-year plan seems sensible enough from the Post’s [...]

File this under “Join the Queue to See Hamas Fall.”And as a new stage in the game of brinksmanship that will probably end in Hamas’ climbing down from its old rhetoric. This will probably happen faster if they’re allowed to do so without losing face.Hamas had some success on a fundraising tour of the Gulf. [...]

Dictators of the region take note: You don’t need an official press to get propaganda on the front page. You can do it without the expense of serving a city-block full of journalists tea six times a day.Technorati Tags: Bush, Libby, United States, Iraq

I feel I should clarify that that IAEA memo was a brilliantly executed April Fool’s Day hoax sent out by Greenpeace. Don’t call the number listed.

This is interesting…Technorati Tags: IAEA, energy, nuclear energy

Many thanks to Petroushka for alerting me to what has to be my favorite quote of the year so far: “We will not allow the seizure of power under the guise of presidential elections.” —Stepan Sukhorenko, head of the KGB secret service in Belarus, as reported in The Times, March 17, 2006. Technorati Tags: Belarus, elections

Kudos to the OpenNet Initiative for putting together a fantastic tool that lets you compare search results from Google.com and the now famously censored Google.cn. Check out their sample searches in English and Chinese, and analysis from geniuses Ethan Zuckerman, Nart Villeneuve, and Rebecca MacKinnon.Technorati Tags: Google, China, Censorship, Internet

This is priceless…

My friend Nart Villeneuve adds some science to the media furour over censorship on Google.cn: http://ice.citizenlab.org/?p=178.

This was forwarded to me (I don’t read CounterPunch), but I think it’s worth posting in its entirety: January 13, 2006How the FBI Spied on Edward SaidBy DAVID PRICECounterPunch The FBI has a long, ignoble tradition of monitoring and harassing America’s top intellectuals. While people ranging from Albert Einstein, William Carlos Williams to Martin Luther King [...]

I originally posted this a few days after the 2004 election in the United States, but it’s still true today: As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s [...]

It was a lovely and a strange Christmas Eve. Lovely for the feast Petroushka cooked. Strange for the conversation. A friend who served in the U.S. special forces in Afghanistan and Iraq only to get out and very publicly criticize the Bush administration came in from Beirut, where he’s been learning Arabic and French in [...]

So Ayman Nour was finally sentenced to five years in prison today for falsifying signatures to register the Ghad Party. Most of my friends went to the trial. I pled work commitments and stayed away. Really, the only reason for me to go would have been sheer voyeurism. Shoot, the Washington Post called me today [...]