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Additional Restrictions on Internet Freedom |n Jordan
“After government’s green light to block websites under very dubious “ethical” reasons, the Jordanian government approved today the new Publications Law, which gives authorities more power to control and censor the Internet in Jordan, Issa Mahasneh reports.
The Jordanian council of ministers approved today a new law amending the Publications and Press Law of 1998, making the new law, if approved by lawmakers, one of the biggest threats to Internet Freedom in Jordan.
“The draft law was needed to regulate work of electronic sites, make them accountable under the penal code and oblige the ones interested in covering Jordan’s internal and external affairs to register and get license like the print press”, our state-run news agency reported, although news websites were already included in the Press Law and classified as press publications in a 2010 Supreme Court decision, a decision met with fierce opposition from journalist, media organizations and, of course, by Jordan Open Source Association.”
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The Emergence of a New Labor Movement in Jordan
“Perhaps most dramatic of all is the increase in labor protests, strikes and similar actions. In 2011 alone, Jordan Labor Watch, an initiative of the Amman-based Phenix Center for Economics and Informatics Studies, documented over 800 labor actions. The labor front began to heat up in 2006, but really did so with the Arab revolts, which have forced the regime to cede greater public space to political dissent. The scale of labor action is unprecedented, with workers from every sector, with the exception of security forces, engaged in some sort of protest. Teachers, bank tellers, imams, phosphate and potassium workers, university employees, journalists, taxi drivers, nurses and doctors at state-run hospitals — the list goes on. Some of the labor actions also advance a political agenda that coincides to a large degree with that of the pro-reform protests.”
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Report: Media as a Key Witness and Political Pawns
Upheaval in the Arab World. Media as a key witness and political pawns. Reporters without Borders Report 2011.
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OP-ED COLUMNIST: Showtime at the Apollo
Could 2012 be a race between two powerful victims yearning to be lonely at the top?
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Investigative video news channel to launch on YouTube
US Center for Investigative Reporting receives $800k in Knight Foundation funding to create ‘hub for high-quality investigative videos’
The channel will feature videos from major broadcasters – including NPR, ABC and the New York Times – and will also seek contributions from freelance video journalists and independent filmmakers around the world.
The CIR said in a release that journalists would be trained in audience engagement and other best practices for online video. Revenue from the channel will be used to subsidise public interest journalism projects.
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NPR: Revolutionary Road Trip
SPECIAL SERIES
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Revolutionary Road Trip
After last year’s revolutions, the North African states of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt are rewriting the rules that govern their politics, economies and societies. NPR takes a Revolutionary Road Trip across the region to see how these countries are remaking themselves. -
THE TOPPLING: How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war
“Propaganda has been a staple of warfare for ages, but the notion of creating events on the battlefield, as opposed to repackaging real ones after the fact, is a modern development. It expresses a media theory developed by, among others, Walter Lippmann, who after the First World War identified the components of wartime mythmaking as “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality.” As he put it, “Men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities [and] in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.”
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Middle East brain drain shows signs of reversing
“From Libya to Lebanon there is a “reverse brain drain” among young workers, with individuals returning from abroad. Others have decided not to leave in the first place.”
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Photos: In Southern Turkey, Syrian Refugees Wait Out the War
In Southern Turkey, Syrian Refugees Wait Out the War
In a tent encampment in Turkey, 6,500 Syrians are waiting out, or simply taking a respite from, the war being fought just beyond the nearby border.
Take a look at these photos:
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One Year of Hope
“When I was in secondary school in Aleppo, one of the required English texts was an abridged version of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Back then, I sat at an old wooden bench with two girls — who were once my best friends, but now we barely speak — and together we read dusty words about a revolution steeped in blood and sacrifice in a place that seemed so far away in time and space from our isolated lives.
The story of two places, rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, was also the story of our Syria. When we read Dickens, we could not imagine similar scenes unfolding in Syria during our lifetime. In 2011, scenes of protests and funerals, torture and murder, international press conferences and presidential interviews, were recorded not on the pages of a novel but in videos and photographs, in tweets and Facebook statuses, transferred via Skype and YouTube. Over two centuries later we would write the same story: the story of a revolution.”
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The number you need to know on Syria
“I’ll start with a simple number: 20,000. Granted it’s rounded up a little—from 19,738. Rounding up works well on the page, but also belittles its subject. It gives us a solid number to latch on to, for the media to print, for the memory to hold. But 19,738 is the exact count of lives that have been lost so far in the war in Syria, according to a volunteer, nonprofit group called Syria Tracker. And when it comes to this conflict, every little number, every single life, counts.”
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Mobile Technology Transforming Classrooms, Empowering Young Women in Jordan
“Technology in classrooms often seems like an add-on, an extra luxury for developed education systems. But, as Edith Saldivar explains in today’s Digital Diversity, IT can help students all over the world learn in entirely new ways. The company Edith works for, Qualcomm, has been helping students in Jordan use IT to transform their education – in particular young women. This work is carried out through their Wireless Reach™ initiative, a program that brings wireless technology to underserved communities globally. To date, Wireless Reach has 64 projects in 27 countries. Edith explains the surprising effects it has had in Jordan’s schools, below.”
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Election laws: Voting rights, voting wrongs
FLORIDA’S state primary is a month away, the presidential election is four months off and the Palm Beach County League of Women Voters (LWV) is busy. During the lunch rush at JFK Medical Centre on a recent Tuesday afternoon, several volunteers fanned out across the cafeteria, registration forms in hand. This was the first of three hospital-based voter-registration drives planned for the week, and it followed an event on July 4th that yielded 23 new registrations.
The Independence Day event was, however, the group’s first of the summer. Corinne Miller, the volunteer in charge of the JFK drive, says that by this stage in previous elections the LWV had already completed up to 30 drives. This time their efforts have been disrupted by a row over a law that went into effect last year, requiring all completed voter-registration forms to be submitted to the electoral authorities within 48 hours or risk a fine. Dennis Baxley, the Florida representative who sponsored the original bill, said the law was intended to encourage those registering to turn in the forms promptly, and to “minimise opportunities for mischief”. A federal judge disagreed, striking down the 48-hour rule on May 31st as excessive. But a degree of damage has already been done.
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Supporting stability, abetting repression
Supporting stability, abetting repression
BY TOBIAS HAGMANNBERKELEY, CALIFORNIA — Next time I travel to Ethiopia, I may be arrested as a terrorist. Why? Because I have published articles about Ethiopian politics.
I wrote a policy report on Ethiopia’s difficulties with federalism. I gave a talk in which I questioned Ethiopia’s May 2010 elections, in which the ruling EPRDF party (Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front) won 545 out of 547 seats in the Parliament. As part of my ongoing research on mass violence in the Somali territories, I interviewed members of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, a separatist rebel group in eastern Ethiopia that the government has designated as a terrorist organization.
In the eyes of the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, my work is tantamount to subversion. Not only do his officials have zero tolerance for criticism, they consider people who either talk to or write about the opposition as abetting terrorists.
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The influential Syrian general who could bear Assad no more
“The Tlass family were once acolytes of the Assad dynasty, but as the regime crackdown targeted their fellow Sunni clansmen, they hatched a plan to flee to Paris. Julian Borger, Martin Chulov and Kim Willsher report on what the escape of Manaf Tlass reveals about the strategy of the ‘Friends of Syria'”
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Egypt entrepreneurs fear for future
As politicians and economists start drawing up plans to bring Egypt’s economy back from the brink, the country’s small business owners say they are unlikely to reap benefits any time soon.
The election of a new president, Mohammed Morsi,has put the country on a firmer footing on the path to establishing civil democratic rule.
But changes to the cabinet and delays on rewriting the constitution have kept the economic situation uncertain.
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Saudi Arabian women defy ban on driving
“Women in Saudi Arabia have been arrested and jailed for defying a ban on driving. Now they want men to join them in the passenger seat as they get behind the wheel.”
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Amid Iraq violence, journalists struggle government control
Car-bomb attacks killed dozens in Iraq today, a reminder of the dangers that continue to lurk in the country. Local journalists are struggling with government restrictions on covering their country.
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In New Libya, Lots Of Guns & Calls For Shariah
Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is taking a Revolutionary Road Trip across North Africa to see how the countries that staged revolutions last year are remaking themselves. Steve and his team are traveling some 2,000 miles from Tunisia’s ancient city of Carthage, across the deserts of Libya and on to Egypt’s megacity of Cairo. In the Libyan towns of Benghazi and Derna, he talks to Islamists about their desire to see a new Libya ruled by Shariah law.
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The Deported
If you find your way through the door of the Juan Bosco Shelter in Nogales, just across the border in Sonora, Mexico, it’s because you’ve got nowhere else to go. You’ll find a bed here, your own slot in one of the 30 trilevel wooden frames that line the walls. Chances are, you need the rest. And Juan Bosco provides. You can sleep now and figure things out in the morning.
The shelter has three cardinal rules: (1) Keep it clean. (2) Care for others. (3) “You can’t talk about polleros here,” says a young man named José, using slang for guides who for a few thousand dollars bring immigrants over the border. “There are cameras and they hear the sounds.” Most of the people settling into the bunks tonight were just deported. They aren’t talking much, anyway.
José once slept at this shelter when he had nowhere else to go. He was one of the nearly 55,000 people a year, 150 a day, that the Mexican government says are pushed off buses into Nogales by American authorities. Now José sleeps here every night because its owners have allowed him free board in exchange for work. “The shelter is like a family,” he tells the new arrivals. “There are 3,000 people who come through here a month and we’re all equal.”
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“Processing Delay” by Elliott Abrams
Summer 2012. Israel’s elections have been delayed until late next year by the formation of a new coalition government. The “Arab Spring” is producing Muslim Brotherhood victories, Salafi gains, chaos in Syria, disorder in Egypt, tremors in Jordan. Iran’s nuclear program moves steadily forward despite tougher sanctions and ongoing negotiations between Iran and the world’s major powers. In the United States, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney begin to face off in the upcoming presidential election.
Amid these developments, the so-called “peace process” will enter its 46th year on June 10. For it was on that day in 1967 that a cease-fire in the Six-Day War was declared, leaving Israel in possession of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem but divided over what to do with its newfound gains.
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Egypt “Brother Number One”
“Egypt is on the cusp of its first real experiment in Islamist governance. If the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi comes out on top in the upcoming presidential runoff election, scheduled for June 16 and 17, the venerable Islamist movement will have won control of both Egypt’s presidency and its parliament, and it will have a very real chance to implement its agenda of market-driven economic recovery, gradual Islamization, and the reassertion of Egypt’s regional role.”
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“Terrorists? Us?” Owen Bennett-Jones
“The story of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, also known as the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK), is all about the way image management can enable a diehard enemy to become a cherished ally. The MEK is currently campaigning to be officially delisted in the US as a terrorist organisation. Once off the list it will be free to make use of its support on Capitol Hill in order to become America’s most favoured, and no doubt best funded, Iranian opposition group.”
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Turkey Diary Elif Batuman
“In 2010, I moved from California, where I had lived for 11 years, to Turkey, where I had never stayed longer than a month or two. I had been offered a job as writer in residence at a private university in the forest on the northern edge of Istanbul. When I got there, I found out that the university had no writer in residence programme. It didn’t even have a writing programme. There was just me. The two living beings I saw with the most regularity were a campus groundsman, who always seemed to be standing in the bushes when I left the house, and an obese one-eyed black cat, who used to come in through my bedroom window. It had one green eye and one empty socket, and the minute it saw me with its single eye, it would start running from room to room, uttering piercing meows and crashing into the furniture. There was a lot of furniture, which had come with the apartment.”
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Syria “Diary” by Layla Al-Zubaidi
“Welcome to Assad’s Syria,’ the signpost at the Lebanese-Syrian border still says, letting the visitor know who owns the country. The ceasefire had just been announced, but few Syrians I knew held out much hope that three hundred UN observers could keep an eye on the whole army. The journey from Beirut to Damascus by shared taxi takes less than three hours. For years I’ve come this way to visit the Syrian side of my family. It was clear that things had changed. Political talk among the passengers used to be limited to hushed complaints about the border police. The taxi drivers would stick a packet of Marlboros and a banknote into the pocket of the customs officers to speed things up. Occasionally they’d mumble an Arab proverb: ‘If you want the grapes, don’t upset the gardener.’
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