Wednesday, August 20, 2008 
From NPR:
An Iranian-American scholar who had been jailed for months in Iran has been freed on bail.
Haleh Esfandiari is director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
In December, she was on the way to the Tehran airport after visiting her mother, when she was seized by masked men […]
Filed under: NEWS, POLITICS
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Hot on the heels of the Hoder blog shutdown, I noticed this story on the CIA’s alleged edits to Ahmadinejad’s Wikipedia entry, discovered by the WikiScanner, which matches up edits with their IP addresses. Questions of ethics, editing, censorship, and free speech aside, what did the CIA actually change? From the BBC article linked above:
On […]
Filed under: FREE SPEECH, INTERNET, POLITICS
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Hossein Derakhshan’s blog, Hoder.com was shut down on Friday by his host, Hosting Matters, over allegations of defamation brought by the lawyers of Mehdi Khalaji, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). WINEP’s advisory board includes neo-conservative poster boy Richard Perle, and until 2001 counted Paul Wolfowitz as a member of […]
Filed under: BLOGS, FREE SPEECH, INTERNET, IRANIAN MEDIA, POLITICS
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Two Kurdish journalists are sentenced to death in Iran. (Here’s a Reporters Without Borders petition and a Mideast Youth campaign to end censorship against Kurds)…
In a nod to the Middle Ages, Iran holds public hangings of “thugs”…
The U.S. House of Representatives hates Iranian nuclear development almost as much as genocide in Darfur…
NIAC convinces Hollywood […]
Filed under: HUMAN RIGHTS, NEWS, POLITICS
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The latest Abjeez video, for the song “Demokrasi,” went live on YouTube this Saturday, and like their other videos, it’s pretty brilliant. Demokrasi has the sisters posing as TV reporters - they sing the entire song with vapid news-anchor faces, and at the bottom of the screen, the scrolling news ticker is a translation of […]
Filed under: MUSIC, POLITICS, VIDEOS
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When I lived in Egypt, I was always told that the way to spark a revolution was not through expanding democratic institutions, establishing grassroots political parties, or weakening Mubarak’s totalitarian regime. Rather, revolution would come with a reduction of wheat subsidies by the US, which would result in an increase to the price of bread. […]
Filed under: NEWS, POLITICS, VIDEOS
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In 1979, Iran witnessed the creation of an unpopular government based purely on popular discontent. In 2007, another group of people - Solidarity Iran - are seemingly attempting to ferment similar change by using popular discontent in order to create a government in Iran based on their own wishes. Never, except for possibly once in […]
Filed under: HISTORY, POLITICS
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