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Putting Saddam Hussein back in the frame
When Saddam Hussein fell, we Iraqis were disoriented. For all our lives, he had always been there. His image was everywhere,’ says photographer Jamal Penjweny, whose series Saddam is Here depicts Iraqis in everyday locations covering their faces with pictures of the former dictator. ‘His image was in the cities where we live, on the walls of our schools, on our money, everywhere. Then he vanished. So taking a picture with Saddam was breaking a taboo that was created after the fall of the regime.’ Penjweny, a former shepherd, will show his work in the Iraq pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Welcome to Iraq, 1 June to 24 November).
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11 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started My Business
“My name is Stephanie St.Claire, and I am an unfunded entrepreneur. I’ve been in business for 3 years, after engaging in my own personal and tenuous renaissance (uh…divorce) and rediscovering my Divine Core Purpose. In other words, I grew a pair of ladyballs and started living the life I always wanted to while making money doing it.
But there was a LOT to learn, and some of those things weren’t covered in Who Moved My Cheese.
Throw these 4 rockstars into a blender, and you’ll have a composite sketch of me in the first three months of my business …”
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Europe Beckons to Desperate Syrians
Thousands of Middle-Class Syrians Are Trying to Get to Europe’s Northern Countries to Seek Asylum
Fares Ayyub, here in a park in Sofia, Bulgaria, fled his home in Deraa, Syria, after his mother and brother were killed by an airstrike on his house by government forces. He dodged soldiers and militia in Syria and traveled through Turkey to Bulgaria, where he has been stuck for three months.
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A Litmus Test for Kenya
“In the dark of night, Parliament passed a draconian media law that critics say amounts to a gag order on Kenya’s Fourth Estate.”
Michael Meyer, a former communications director for United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, is dean of the graduate school of media and communications at Aga Khan University in Nairobi.
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Britain Needs a First Amendment
Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer, broadcaster and the author of “From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Aftermath.” In this op-ed, he argues that both the left and right defend freedom for journalists — but only those they like.
“What we have today in Britain is a tribal view of press freedom. Both sides want to defend freedom for the journalists they like while silencing the journalists they despise. Neither side seems to understand that the moment you invite politicians or the police to determine what is and is not acceptable journalism, freedom is eroded for all of us, whatever our political beliefs.
Oh, for a British First Amendment.”
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Politics & power in Jordan’s refugee camp
A year and a half after it was first established, the dynamics of Jordan’s Za’atari Syrian refugee camp are changing with time. A city in the making? IRIN news, a humanitarian news and analysis portal, borrows the insight of anthropologist professors to explain the transformation of the second largest refugee camp in the world.
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Jordan’s Reform Agenda on Hold
Osama Al Sharif, a Jordanian political commentator and journalist, writes in Al Monitor about the reform process in Jordan, suggesting that the crisis in Syria has been a catalyst for Jordan to focus on economic, not political, reform and security.
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Google Unveils Tools to Access Web From Repressive Countries
Google Ideas, the New York City–based “think/do tank” run by the Internet search giant, is launching several new technologies designed to highlight hacker attacks around the world and help people in repressive regimes access the Internet. The new products, which are being announced on Monday at the Google Ideas Summit in New York City, represent the most substantial offerings delivered by the three-year-old Google policy unit and could be a major boon to activists and reformers in the world’s most closed and repressive societies.
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Phony balance, manufactured conflict: The media just confuses the truth
By feasting on controversy and focusing on the trivial, the media misinforms us about policy and misserves us all. Read excerpts from Thomas Patterson’s book “Informing the News”.
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The Importance of Not Being Ernest
“Mariel Hemingway gets up early, perhaps as an unconscious homage to her famous grandfather, to watch the sun rise. Each morning, while still in bed, she and her live-in boyfriend, an erstwhile stuntman and actor named Bobby Williams, begin a series of predawn exercises that consist of breathing, stretching, contemplating the things they’re grateful for and visualizing the day ahead. Hemingway then makes the bed and a pot of jasmine green tea. She fills the hummingbird feeders with organic sugar water, feeds organic soy-free meal to the brood of egg-laying hens that live in her backyard and heads back to the kitchen to prepare a smoothie.”
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20 tools and apps for digital journalists
A collection of some of the best storytelling, search and productivity tools and apps for journalists.
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The rise of the reader: journalism in the age of the open web
Katharine Viner, deputy editor of the Guardian and editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, gave the AN Smith lecture in Melbourne on Wednesday night. Here’s her speech:
“I’d like to begin with a true story.
I was recently conducting a job interview for a Guardian role, and I asked the interviewee, who had worked only in print journalism, how he thought he’d cope working in digital news. In reply he said, “Well, I’ve got a computer. I’ve been using computers for years.”
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Women on Front Lines & Behind the Lens
“Stephanie Sinclair has mostly happy memories of her childhood in Miami, where she grew up encouraged by her parents to be carefree, confident and defiant. It was there, in an elementary school broadcast arts program, that she requested to be a camera operator, offering the first inkling of what she would do with her life.
Today, she is one of National Geographic’s conflict photojournalists, one of about a dozen women among the magazine’s 60 freelance photographers.”
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Close encounters of the Arab kind
Have you ever heard of Alif the Unseen, computer hacker and recipient of an ancient scroll written by mythological spirits?
Or Ajwan, a teenager on an intergalactic quest to save her son from the clutches of those who wish to convert him into a super-warrior?
Probably you haven’t. Possibly you should have. Introducing the rapidly evolving face of Arabic science fiction literature.
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Desert Island Discs: Jim Al-Khalili interview
Desert Island Discs is a radio programme presented by Krisy Young and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In this episode, Kirsty Young’s castaway is the physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili.
He’s spent his adult life studying sub-atomic particles – and trying to explain them to the rest of us. He fell in love with physics when he was a teenager growing up in Iraq. With an Iraqi father and English mother, the Baghdad he spent his early years in was cosmopolitan and vibrant but, once Saddam Hussein came to power, his parents realised the family would have to flee, and he has lived and worked in Britain for the past 30 years.
Jim is the author of the book Pathfinders; The Golden Age of Arabic Science, among others.
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The Fugitive
The Foreign Policy writes this piece on an Iraqi former Abu Ghraib prisoner who has turned to Syria for jihad.
“Waiting for the tram in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep, Abu Omar is on his way to the mall. No groceries today — his shopping list includes a Turkish-made tablet computer and a small GPS navigation device loaded with digital maps of the Middle East.”
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How to win the next Mideast war – over water
Russell Sticklor is a research analyst at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit and nonpartisan international security think tank. In this opinion piece at the Christian Science Monitor, he writes about the water crisis looming in the Middle East and North Africa region.
“The Middle East and North Africa – the world’s most water-scarce region – will soon face a severe water crisis. That could create an even greater challenge than today’s upheavals. More attention must be paid to the problem. Conservation, communication, education, and technology can help.”
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Facebook Users in the Mideast and North Africa: 28 Million Daily
As digital media penetration in the MENA region grows at such a fast pace, it is interesting to view this evolution within the global context. This Wall Street Journal article reveals striking facts and figures on this topic.
“The figures in the region mirror the global trend of people using Facebook, but the advertising-dollars are yet to catch up despite overall growth in digital spending, according to Jonathan Labin, head of Facebook in the Middle East, Africa and Pakistan.”
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Review: ‘The Lowland,’ by Jhumpa Lahiri
Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, the Indian American author, strikes again with a new novel, The Lowland. This Washington Post review features her ability in “steadily building one of the most powerful body of work on immigrants and their children”, an important aspect of her writings.
“Her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, when she was only 33. Her first novel, “The Namesake,” was made into a film directed by Mira Nair. And now her somber new novel, “The Lowland,” arrives in the United States already shortlisted for Britain’s Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, an extraordinary double boost it hardly needs to find an eager audience here in her adopted country. Her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, when she was only 33. Her first novel, “The Namesake,” was made into a film directed by Mira Nair. And now her somber new novel, “The Lowland,” arrives in the United States already shortlisted for Britain’s Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, an extraordinary double boost it hardly needs to find an eager audience here in her adopted country.”
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Controlling Access to Online Information in Jordan: the Role of ISPs
In autocratic counties such as Jordan with no system built to ensure accountability, models of control over internet access may range from legislative measures enforced by the government to informal techniques exercised by the private sector.
Formal censorship techniques are exercised through a legislated framework for law enforcement to block websites, and fine journalists, bloggers, editors-in-chief, and owners of online content. The design of the legal framework relieves Jordan from local and international pressure given that it is only applying the rule of law put forward by an elected parliament. In this blog Reem Almasri talks about the informal techniques the country have used, and still use, to control access to information in cooperation with the private sector, especially internet service providers.
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Why is Albert Camus Still a Stranger in His Native Algeria?
On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist Albert Camus, the Smithsonian reporter returns to his birthplace, Algeria, in search for signs of his legacy. In this well-written article, he shares his findings, among which is a striking forgetfulness of one of the greatest writers of his time.
“Camus is regarded as a giant of French literature, but it was his North African birthplace that most shaped his life and his art. In a 1936 essay, composed during a bout of homesickness in Prague, he wrote of pining for “my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean…the summer evenings that I love so much, so gentle in the green light and full of young and beautiful women.” Camus set his two most famous works, the novels The Stranger and The Plague, in Algeria, and his perception of existence, a joyful sensuality combined with a recognition of man’s loneliness in an indifferent universe, was formed here.”
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The Regression of Human Rights in the Middle East
Huffington Post Blog
By Rana F. SweisWith a high death toll in Syria, intensified sectarian strife across the region and a sharp rise in conservatism, it’s easy to forget why the Arab Spring actually began.
From autocratic regimes to deteriorating press freedoms to consistent corruption, the Middle East was, for the most part, decaying.
The past decades in the Middle East saw a decline not only in literacy and culture — Arabs comprise almost five percent of the world’s population, but publish just 1.1 percent of its books, according to the U.N.’s 2003 Arab Human Development Report – but it is also the consistent regression in human rights.
When Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in December 2010, it was in protest against injustice, harassment and humiliation. In Egypt, 28-year-old Khalid Said died while in police custody. It was the brutality and abuse inflicted upon him that inspired many to take to the streets. Even in Turkey, an economically prosperous country, it was aggression against protestors that prompted outrage across the country.
Even so, human rights issues have taken a back seat as the region continues to face unprecedented change. Despite protests waning, divisions plaguing opposition movements and violence intensifying, one of the biggest challenges facing the Middle East today is the declining state of human rights and the silence of so many democratic governments across the world.
From Qatar to Tunisia, artists such as poets, musicians, bloggers have been imprisoned since the revolutions.
“The willingness of new governments to respect rights will determine whether those uprisings give birth to genuine democracy or simply spawn authoritarianism in new forms,” noted Human Rights Watch in its 2013 world report on challenges for rights after the Arab Spring.
“Turning a blind eye to repression may be politically convenient but it does enormous damage to the quests for rights-respecting democracies.”
Dozens of social media users have been jailed in the Gulf for posting comments on Twitter.
“I see freedom of expression as a release valve: people have those thoughts, people have those concerns, they want to articulate them and when a government takes an approach (such as jailing dissidents), what you’re really doing is forcing those concerns and debate internally, it doesn’t go away,” said Ross LaJeunesse, global head of Google’s Freedom Expression project.
After 16 years of free and unfettered access to the Internet, Jordan blocked nearly 300 news websites this month and enforced an amended press law to regulate online content. And still despite the uplifting of a public assembly law, speech related crimes or simply participating in protests could send you to State Security Court, a special body that has jurisdiction over crimes considered harmful to Jordan’s internal and external security — involving drugs, terrorism, weapons, espionage and treason.
In Egypt, 20 organizations announced the decline in the status of human rights in Egypt since Morsi took office last year — police beatings, torture, military trials and lack of accountability.
Earlier this year, an Egyptian prosecutor charged Bassem Yousef, a comedian whose satire brings relief to many Arabs bombarded by constant images of war and violence, of maligning president Mohammad Morsi.
Morsi’s office claimed the show was, “circulating false news likely to disturb public peace and public security and affect the administration.”
For many decades, Arabs were denied a platform for expression and in turn they were plagued by internal fear and self-censorship. There is no doubt, after the Arab Spring, an internal barrier of fear was lifted.
I see this during labor strikes and protests, in art exhibitions and plays that tend to push previous boundaries but where it will all end remains unclear.
Western democracies continue to send a message to people in the Middle East: Security and stability trumps human rights issues. But if there is any lesson to be learned from the Arab Spring, it is indeed that human rights is security.
This post is part of a collaboration between The Huffington Post and The Aspen Institute, in which a variety of thinkers, writers and experts will explore the most pressing issues of our time. For more posts from this partnership, click here. For more information on The Aspen Institute, click here.
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TALK: Khaled Hosseini on How the Iraq War Hurt Afghanistan
The famous author of The Kite Runner speaks about his life as an author and his luck. This is a good, short interview that speaks volume. Worth reading.
“Incredible. Even publishing was banking on an Iraq invasion?
You expect to be rejected, but what upset me about it was what it meant for Afghanistan. That was a foreshadowing of what happened — that Iraq would overshadow the campaign and absorb military resources. I landed in Kabul the day before Shock and Awe in Iraq, and you could all but hear the collective groan.”
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Letter from Damascus (2006): Captured on Film
An important feature in the New Yorker written in 2006. Lawerence Wright goes off into the secret world of filmmaking in Syria to discover more about the society that at the time had limited press freedoms. It is fascinating to read it and assess that with events taking place there now.
“Although many foreign critics have portrayed Mohammed and other Syrian directors as symbols of artistic victimization, he defiantly rejects that role. “Do you want me to play the hero?” he asked. “Do you want me to repeat two hundred times each day that my films are forbidden? This is my society. I belong to this world. I am not a victim.”
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A Score or More of Languages in Your Pocket
Apps so far or even google translate does not do an accurate job in translating from Arabic to English or vice versa. Will there be something more accurate that can be created on the horizon?
“The more a translation app is used, the more it learns to statistically make correct associations with sounds, text and meaning. The latest translation apps incorporate voice-recognition software so you can speak as well as type in the word or phrase you want translated and then get both a text and audio response.”
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