Blog archive all
27th January 2010
Not to be outdone by Egypt holding a public holiday to celebrate its police force, another regime with a grim human rights record is playing a joke on its citizens. In Tunisia, it's National Laughter Week.
Posted by Brian Whitaker, 27 January 2010.
27th January 2010
Syria has launched a new initiative to "create more space for civil society to work", according to Rami Khouri in the Lebanese Daily Star.
He discusses a conference in Damascus last weekend on “the emerging role of civil society in development”, which was addressed by First Lady Asma al-Assad and… Read more
23rd January 2010
Reading the text of Hillary Clinton's speech on internet freedom, I coudn't help thinking back to the speech George Bush made in 2003, announcing his "forward strategy of freedom" in the Middle East. Each in its own way encapsulated some of the core philosophy of the two administrations.
Both… Read more
22nd January 2010
Martin Scheinin, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, is due to begin a four-day fact-finding visit to Tunisia tomorrow.
Scheinin, a Finnish professor of international law, angered the Egyptian government last October with a highly critical report about systematic… Read more
22nd January 2010
News organisations in the Philippines are reporting that a woman who alleges she was raped has been jailed in Saudi Arabia and faces a probable flogging.
The 35-year-old Filipina went to Dammam last May to take up a job in a dental clinic. She says that three months after she started working there… Read more
21st January 2010
On Wednesday the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a session about Yemen and the transcripts are now online.
Overall, I think the committee got a pretty good picture of the "Yemen problem" – a valuable antidote to some of the rubbish that is being churned out in the American media.
The… Read more
21st January 2010
Writing in the London Review Blog, Hugh Miles discusses the mystery of Prince Bandar, the head of Saudi Arabia's National Security Council who previously spent 18 years as the kingdom's ambassador to Washington. According to Miles, the last official sighting of Prince Bandar was more than two years… Read more
20th January 2010
Four inmates and several staff were injured when a riot broke out at a women's prison in the holy city of Mecca last Friday. Predictably, the head of social affairs in Mecca described it as a “mutiny” and threatened harsh action against the instigators.
A few years ago, that would probably have… Read more
19th January 2010
The international conference on Yemen, due to be held in London on January 27, is expected to last only a couple of hours, Ivan Lewis, the Foreign Office minister responsible for the Middle East told parliament yesterday.
This does sound rather a short amount of time to spend on saving the country… Read more
19th January 2010
A 22-year-old Jordanian man has been arrested for uttering "an insult against an Arab head of state". The head of state in question was Hosni Mubarak and the incident occurred outside the Egyptian embassy in Amman during a demonstration protesting against he construction of the border wall between… Read more
ARAB ART ONLINE: Susan Hefuna: Al Sabr Gamil (Patience is Beautiful) 2007. Ink stained on wood 140 x 170 cm. More information | Click to enlarge
