21 September 2009

Stories from 21 September 2009

Yemen: Editor of an opposition website kidnapped

  21 September 2009

On the night of Friday, September 18th, 2009, the Yemeni Editor of the opposition Socialist Party's website, Al Eshteraki, Mohammed al Maqaleh has been kidnapped in the capital Sana'a by security forces. According to eyewitness reports cited by the International Federation of Journalists : five gun wielding masked men in...

The Power of 140 Characters: Twitter in the Middle East

  21 September 2009

The massive, sustained protests in Iran this past month against the regime’s apparent falsification of the presidential election results was enabled by widespread employment of new communication technologies. Among them is Twitter, the micro-blog which enables its users to distribute short messages of no more than 140 characters (‘Tweets’) via...