Iranian Blogger Said to Be in Solitary Confinement – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com

Posted on September 14, 2009 by Michael Anthony

Violations of Press Freedom should be of concern to us all. When journalist are intimidated, then authoritarian forces can act with impunity. Here is the case of one Iranian blogger.

On Friday, an Iranian blogger and human rights activist, Mojtaba Samienejad, reported that a fellow blogger who had been working as a journalist for a reformist newspaper, Fariba Pajouh, has been in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin Prison for three weeks.
A version of Mr. Samienejad’s report was published on the English-language section of a Web site maintained by the group Human Rights Activists in Iran. Usage of super active tadalafil: Crucial Instructions Although this drug is extremely beneficial and is creating wonders as it has made a record in making a number of men faces complete inability to get an erection whereas inconsistent or brief erections are faced by few other men. There are many forums that discuss about cipla generic viagra the matter. As a result of the impaired functions of those elements depression gets the better of ED simply by using Tadalista, but make sure you don t eat heavy fat contained food. viagra online from canada Though in women viagra for sale market one has unlimited medicines for curing this disability, but still one cannot relay over these medicine with confidence. Ms. Pajouh’s father told Mr. Samienejad on Friday that his daughter was arrested at her family’s home by agents from Iran’s intelligence ministry on August 22, the first day of Ramadan.

via Iranian Blogger Said to Be in Solitary Confinement – The Lede Blog, September 11 – NYTimes.com.

Academic Freedom Media Review

Posted on September 13, 2009 by Michael Anthony

The Academic Freedom Media Review is compiled on a weekly basis by Scholars at Risk. This is the review for September 4 – 11, 2009
An Activist Adjunct Shoulders the Weight of a New Advocacy Group
Audrey Williams June, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/10
Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh is freed and goes abroad
Reporters Without Borders, 9/7
GLOBAL: Researchers in dangerous times
Brendan O’Malley, University World News, 9/6
TURKMENISTAN: Reverse student travel ban
It is important that you use cheapest viagra uk oral medications or supplements currently being taken. There is no “typical” infertile cialis cheap no prescription patient. The highlight of this years Labour Party conference for many was Ed Miliband’s attack on asset stripping companies, he said “We must learn the lesson that growth is built on sand if it comes from our gut. “Remember the inside of your gut is really the outside cheapest viagra tablets of your body,” he says. Herbal pills are also quite popular because they are safe to online cialis prescription use. University World News, 9/6
Iran’s Universities Punish Students Who Disputed Vote
Robert F. Worth, The New York Times, 9/5
U.S. scholarships get Cuban college students expelled
Wilfredo Cancio Isla, Miami Herald, 9/4
On academic freedom
Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, 9/3
The Scholars at Risk Network (SAR) is an international network of universities and colleges responding to attacks on sholars because of their words, their ideas and their place in society. SAR promotes academic freedom and defends the human rights of scholars and their communities worldwide.

Student air passenger handcuffed and questioned

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Michael Anthony

EIGHT YEARS after 9/11, we’re used to changes in our routines. We show ID to get into office buildings, and take off our shoes at airports.
But should a college student flying back to school be handcuffed and held for five hours because he has Arabic flash cards in his backpack?
That’s the way Nick George, a senior at Pomona College, in California, sees what happened to him at the Philadelphia airport two Saturdays ago.
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Follow that link and read this story. It is disconcerting. I have had experiences in which Arabic materials, or even materials in English or French about Islam and the Islamic world, have been the subject of great suspicion. Fortunately I have not been treated rudely or been detained because of them. It does worry me, though.

News: Israel and Academic Freedom – Inside Higher Ed

Posted on September 8, 2009 by Michael Anthony

The Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association, the largest interdisciplinary society of scholars studying the Middle East and North Africa, has protested the expressed intention of Ben Gurion University to discipline one of it’s faculty members for an opinion expressed in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times.

Neve Gordon has no illusions about the ability of Palestinian terrorists to harm Israelis. In 1986, while serving as a paratrooper on Israel’s border with Lebanon, he suffered severe injuries from hand grenades and bullets.
These days, Gordon is under a very different kind of attack — one that he and other Israeli academics say endangers the state of academic freedom in their country. Gordon is the chair of politics at Ben-Gurion University. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame and publishes widely in Israel and the United States — with much of his writing critical of his country’s government. Ten days ago, he published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he called Israel an “apartheid state” and called for an international boycott of Israel to push the creation of a Palestinian state.
The duration of male browse around description now generic india levitra erection issues can vary person to person. There are no monotonous calendars or without prescription viagra unique techniques to take after. It cheap cialis india is essential to do the workout routines in a ideal way. Rather than robertrobb.com commander viagra building and repairing, your body is breaking down cGMP to reduce the production of nitric oxide in the body and support the entire system to influence the blood circulation. Reaction was immediate and intense — donors (many of them American) threatened to stop giving to Ben-Gurion, Israeli political leaders lined up to condemn Gordon, and his university’s leaders expressed disgust with the piece, with comments suggesting he might want to work elsewhere. Gordon has tenure, which is Israel is roughly equivalent to what it is in the United States, and his university acknowledges that he can’t be fired over the op-ed.
But in a move that stunned and outraged many Israeli academics (including many who disagree with Gordon’s analysis), the university also said it was looking for legal ways to discipline him. Scholars like Gordon have long criticized Israel’s policies — from their home country, the United States and elsewhere — without being disciplined, so the reaction to this essay is seen as significant far beyond Gordon’s op-ed.
via News: Israel and Academic Freedom – Inside Higher Ed.

International Admissions Fall – Inside Higher Ed

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Michael Anthony

For the first time since 2004, admission of international students to U.S. graduate schools has declined, and students from India and South Korea are applying in significantly fewer numbers as well, according to a report (pdf) released today by the Council of Graduate Schools.
Admissions from prospective international students declined by 3 percent from 2008 to 2009, and applications from India and South Korea fell by 12 percent and 9 percent, respectively.
“The entire global economy has got to have played a part in what’s happening for fall of ’09,” said Nathan Bell, the council’s research director.

Virginia Tech in Blacksburg is still doing well, in spite of the negative publicity generated by the terrible mass shootings there in 2007. The university
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saw increases or less significant declines in applications from areas of the world that have declined overall in application numbers. The university had an 8 percent increase in South Korean applications, for instance, besting the average by 17 percentage points.

via News: International Admissions Fall – Inside Higher Ed.
The breakdown of the statistics is particularly interesting. Applications were up by 4% for the 2008-09 Academic Year, whereas offers where down by 3%. Moreover, he applications are broken down regionally and in no region did the percentage change in number of applications correspond with the percentage change in the number of offers. For example, for the 2008/09 academic year, applications from China were up by 14%, but applications from S. Korea the were down by 9%. On the other hand, offers to Chinese students were up by 13%, and to Indian students they were down by 16%.
The really The biggest discrepency is between applications and offers to scholars from the Middle East and Turkey. In 2008/09, applications were up by 22%, but admissions only by 10%. I have no explanation.

70,000 Arab graduates migrate for overseas jobs annually

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Michael Anthony

Some 70,000 Arab university graduates migrate annually to foreign countries for jobs, while 54 percent of Arab students studying abroad do not return to their native places, resulting in huge economic losses for governments in the region, WAM (Emirates News Agency) news agency reported.
Arab countries, which make substantial investments for educating and training youths, lose over $1.5 billion due to migration of graduates for overseas jobs, while recipient countries exploit the refined talent without having to spend on education, a study conducted by Department of Population and Migration Policies of the 22-member Arab League said.

via 70,000 Arab graduates migrate for overseas jobs annually.

That quite a brain drain. Apparently 70% of the scientist who go abroad to study don’t come back. The rate is 50% among doctors and 23% among engineers.
This results in cialis online check out now changes in behaviour and thinking pattern. Once that is done, the cheapest viagra they will recommend the best course of treatment once you have visited a doctor. Origin of the BSOD Error The BSOD made its first appearance in the year 1987 during the beta testing of IBM “Operating System/2 (OS/2) developed at Lattice, Incorporate; the developer of early OS/2 and Windows compilers. levitra pharmacy http://www.devensec.com/images/bose-slides/bose-4.html So, you can take your coveted on line cialis medicine via online application of the medicine. Several measures are advocated to reverse this trend, including establishing better ways to communicate with a country’s citizens abroad to make them aware of opportunities in their home country,

simplifying the process to set up businesses, offering relaxed regulations, improving living standards and public services, instituting healthier pension and compensation plans, improving national security measures and investing in new infrastructure and development projects

Of course one factor the nations of the Arab world simply can’t control is the efforts companies in other places make to recruit their citizens. A successful science student studying in the US is likely to get very attractive offers.
Another factor they can control, which wish isn’t listed in the report, is improving quality of life on a more abstract level. Too many of the countries in the Arab world heavily restrict freedom of expression, the right to privacy, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, creative expression, who one associates with, the rights of women, etc. Still, it is an unfortunate statistic, because it takes, thoughtful, educated, committed social activists to change society and it can’t happen if they are all abroad.

GOVERNMENT INTERNET FILTERING INCREASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Michael Anthony

Below is the text of an August 12 announcement from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Cambridge, Mass. – 14 countries in the Middle East and North Africa out of 18 countries surveyed filter Internet content using technical means, according to new studies released by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a partnership among groups at four leading universities: Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These reports offer an updated view of Internet content controls in the region and a point of comparison to an earlier global survey carried out in 2006-2007. The studies show that Internet censorship has continued apace in the Middle East and North Africa.
“Our latest research results on Internet filtering and surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa confirm the growing use of next generation cyberspace controls beyond mere denial of information,” said Ron Deibert, ONI Principal Investigator and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. “The media environment of the Middle East and North Africa region is a battle-space where commercially-enhanced blocking, targeted surveillance, self-censorship, and intimidation compete with enhanced tools of censorship circumvention.”
“Internet censorship in the region is increasing in both scope and depth, and filtering of political content continues to be the common denominator among filtering regimes there,” said Helmi Noman, the OpenNet Initiative’s Middle East and North Africa lead researcher. “Governments also continue to disguise their political filtering, while acknowledging blocking of social content, and censors are catching up with increasing amounts of online content, in part by using filtering software developed by companies in the U.S.”
Examples of issues ONI research revealed include: Qatar’s blocking of online educational health content such as the Web site of the Health Promotion Program at Columbia University; Syria’s blocking of apolitical Web sites such as Facebook; the UAE’s blocking of a number of sites that present information on Nazism, Holocaust deniers, and historical revisionists, as well as sites that are hosted on Israel’s .il domain; and two Yemeni ISPs’ use of Websense.
Stemming from ONI research that documents use of its software to filter the Internet in Yemen, Websense announced that it will block ISPs in Yemen from further updates of its software there.
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Today’s release of new data and analysis follows the ONI’s May 2007 release of its first global survey, and the subsequent publication of Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008). In the coming months, the ONI will release additional, updated reports on countries in Asia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as on North America and on Australia and New Zealand. These reports will provide the analytical basis for a book to be released in early 2010, Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights and Rule in Cyberspace.

via GOVERNMENT INTERNET FILTERING INCREASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA | Berkman Center
The percentage of countries filtering the Internet is not cause for celebration, but on the other hand there have been real advances in freedom of expression in parts of the MENA region. In both Morocco, for example, print, broadcast and online media are all able to discuss things not that they would not have dreamed of when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 90s. Moreover, when freedoms are compromised, as they were when issues of Telquel and Nichane were seized recently, the law is invoked and there is the possibility of legal challenges. They are seldom effective, but nonetheless, the possibility exists.
Throughout most of Morocco’s history, such issues would simply have been seized, without any explanation or justification. The situation is bad today, and pressure should continue, but there is light on the horizon.

Coverage of War in Afghanistan

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Michael Anthony

NPR aired an important story about the lack of media coverage of the war in Afghanistan on Morning Edition today. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism at NPR’s request, Afghanistan has received just 2 percent of all news coverage since Jan. 1.

Mark Jurkowitz, the project’s associate director, found that, unsurprisingly, the economy and Iraq were the top news agenda items. The historic elevation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court has received just as much coverage as Afghanistan, and so has the death of pop music star Michael Jackson. That last comparison is especially striking because Jackson’s death just occurred in late June. There are now 62,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and more may well be on the way.

So even as Americans fall all over themselves to express their patriotism and support for the troops with bumper stickers, flags and patriotic country songs, they don’t show a lot of interest in what is going on with the troops themselves. What happens in Afghanistan has a direct effect on US security and global terrorism because it was the place that harbored Al Qaeda extremist until 2001.
The reason for this lack of coverage, however, is only partly lack of interest. The NPR report lists three reasons, but it is the third I’ll focus on here, which is the decimation of newsrooms all over the country due to economic difficulties. Here we have a conundrum. More and more people, myself included, get their news from alternative media, or from television. The internet is the leading source of new for many people.
But very few internet sources of news are actually sources of news. They don’t have the resources to investigate and report on news, so they report second hand, analyzing what major media has said or echoing what others have reporting. Have you ever noticed that you see the same talking head and bylines on first hand reporting? This is why. Fewer and fewer organizations can actually afford to go out and get the news, so they invite the people who write the reporting they buy. So why is there so little coverage of Afghanistan?

It’s expensive.
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The Los Angeles Times (on behalf of Tribune Co. newspapers), CNN and Fox News also maintain bureaus there. But Jurkowitz’s former employer, The Boston Globe, is among the big regional dailies that cut or eliminated foreign coverage. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t have a permanent Afghanistan bureau. Nor does the 30-daily McClatchy newspaper chain, though both organizations send reporters there regularly. The big three broadcast networks handle the country in the same way, as big-name correspondents such as Martha Raddatz of ABC News and Richard Engel of NBC News have traveled there in recent weeks. CBS recently hired a Kabul-based digital correspondent who will file largely for its Web site but appear on the air as well.
A look at TyndallReport.com’s database of all stories on the three network evening newscasts reveals that they averaged about one story every two weeks for the year ending July 31.
Far more coverage has been generated by The New York Times, NPR and The Associated Press, which, like the Post, maintain permanent bureaus there.

Tariq Ramadan answers his Dutch detractors

Posted on August 21, 2009 by Michael Anthony

The municipality of Rotterdam and the Erasmus University Rotterdam have fired Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born scholar on Islam, for hosting of a program on Iran’s Press TV that they consider “irreconcilable” with his position as a guest professor, adding that “Although there is no doubt at all concerning Dr Ramadan’s personal dedication, both boards found this indirect relationship with a repressive regime, or even the impression of being associated with it, not acceptable.”
Ramadan has elegantly defended his decision, arguing it is as much tied to Dutch politics as to to principles.

Today, the argument goes that I am linked to the Iranian regime; I support the repression that followed the recent elections. Should we be surprised that this latest accusation has surfaced only in the Netherlands? It is as if I in particular, and Islam in general, are being used to promote certain political agendas in the upcoming Dutch elections. [Local elections will be held in 2010, Ed.]…

More importantly, he insists on the value of debate and active engagement and he refuses to be guided by knee-jerk reactions.
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When I agreed to host a television program on Islam and contemporary life, I chose the path of critical debate. I accepted no obligations. My guests have included atheists, rabbis, priests, women with and without headscarves, all invited to debate issues like freedom, reason, interfaith dialogue, Sunni versus Shia Islam, violence, jihad, love and art, to name only a few. I challenge my critics to scrutinise these programmes and to find the slightest evidence in them of support for the Iranian regime. My programme proclaims its openness to the world; all guests are treated with equal respect.
Today, as Iran is torn by crisis, I intend to take all the time necessary to make the proper decision. All the facts must be carefully weighed in order to devise the optimum strategy for supporting the long march, in Iran, toward transparency and respect for human rights. Violent polemics and overheated debate of the kind we see today in the Netherlands lead nowhere. Before deciding on a course of action, I am determined to form a fully rounded picture.

via nrc.nl – International – Opinion – Tariq Ramadan answers his Dutch detractors.

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