Turkey watchers spent much of last Friday piling on the country’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) for their decision late Thursday to ban Twitter – Erdogan’s exact phrase was that he was going to “eradicate” the microblogging service – amid widespread and successful...

• Kindle

Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government on Thursday blocked access to Twitter, just hours after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to “eradicate” the microblogging service and bragged about having obtained a court order enabling him to do so. Erdogan – who until recently had been hailed by some U.S. foreign policy analysts...

• Kindle

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani Tuesday delivered a progress report describing his first 100 days in office, describing among other things his administration’s success in weakening the international sanctions regime against the country. One hundred days into his first term as Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani offered an upbeat progress report to the country Tuesday,...

• Kindle

Observers and scientists spent a second day mocking media coverage – including headlines and copy printed in some of the world’s top outlets – suggesting that there is even a possibility that Swiss scientists had detected evidence of polonium-210 poisoning by studying the remains of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. This week...

• Kindle

Israeli soldiers this weekend uncovered a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel running between the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and ending near an Israeli kindergarten, underscoring concerns that the Iran-backed terror group is seeking to rebuild its fractured credibility with a spectacular terror attack. The left-leaning Israeli paper Ha’aretz reports that the tunnel is parter...

• Kindle

Several weeks ago what Iranian officials described as a technical “glitch” briefly gave Iranian citizens access to banned Internet sites, including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The access was hailed by Western journalists as potentially “the start of a more tolerant attitude towards social media by the government”...

• Kindle