Middle East & North Africa

In the February 10 edition of the International Herald Tribune, Canadian-Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari, himself imprisoned in Iran for 118 days, urges Ayatollah Khamenei to release his jailed colleagues.

Jordan’s Court of Cassation, the country’s highest judicial authority, issued an opinion last week stating that Web sites can be classified as “publications” and recommending that the Press and Publications Law be extended to online news sites and other electronic media. This decision, while not yet the law of the land, sets a legal precedent…

Ministers and officials representing some 20 Western and Arab governments and international financial institutions declared themselves “friends of Yemen” during last week’s closed-door meeting in London to address threats posed by Al-Qaeda in Yemen, according to news reports. Participants, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, offered assurances that the international community, in addition…

It has been almost nine months since I arrived in the United States. I can’t believe how fast life is moving and how different my family’s days are now are from the old days—that was a beautiful time. Everything is changing now. There’s no simplicity for us anymore.

“When people want to live, destiny must surely respond. Darknesss will disappear, chains will certainly break!”Journalist Taoufik Ben Brik, 49, spurred admiration among his relatives and lawyers at a Tunis appeals court on Saturday when he chanted these two verses by Abou El Kacem Chebbi, Tunisia’s most well-known poet. This unexpected recitation of Chebbi’s verses,…

Today, more than year after landing in the United States to receive medical treatment for severe injuries sustained while reporting in Baghdad, Jehad Ali boarded a plane at the Detroit Wayne County Airport en route to Beirut.

The relentless crackdown on the press in Iran is, well, relentless. In the last few days we have received word that 11 more journalists have been arrested, including former CPJ International Press Freedom Award winner Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, at left. There are 23 other journalists already in prison in Iran, according to the global census CPJ…

My country’s international airport—as some may not know—has become the scene of the Tunisian regime’s score-settling with its opponents. Opponents are no longer banned from traveling; this is a move to promote the idea that they are “free.” However, if they do travel, they face difficulties at the airport, port, or border crossing in question.

Did you miss it? Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the United Nation General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. President Barack Obama, as he was leaving for Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, declared December 10 Human Rights Day. To help mark it, his national security advisor, the retired Marine General James L. Jones, at…

We are all stuck in the middle of nowhere. Millions in Iraq and millions outside it face an ambiguous future. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled Iraq under Saddam’s regime, which lasted for almost 40 years, but since the led-American invasion in 2003 that number has exceeded 4 million, according to United Nations estimates.