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As the number of banned websites keeps increasing in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the question on the minds of the region’s growing youthful internet-savvy population is how far the government censorship will go. Governments in the Middle East are stepping up a campaign of censorship and surveillance in an effort to prevent an estimated 33.5 million Internet users from viewing a variety of websites, whose topics range from human rights to pornography. As a result, millions of Middle Easterners are finding it harder by the day to access popular news and entertainment sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr. [or even Amazon.com in Syria] Some young internet users try to do something about it: 25-year-old student Hani Noor and his cousin created a Facebook...

The White House is at it again, censoring expert testimony on Global Warming. This time the Bush Administration cut out over half of Center for Disease Control Director Julie Gerberding’s Senate testimony on the public health effects of climate change. The White House PR machine first tried to pass the Administration’s edits off as “minor edits.” DeSmogBlog blows away that argument with a comparison between the Gerberding’s original testimony and the final version after the White House got through with it. The White House cut the original version down from 3,100 words to only 1,500, completely wiping out whole sections on health related effects due to extreme weather, air pollution-related health effect, allergic diseases, water and food-borne infectious...

EXCOM Conclusion on Children at Risk, no. 107 (Oct. 2007) [text] Human Trafficking: Update (House of Lords & House of Commons, Oct. 2007) [text] Humanitarian advocacy in Darfur: the challenge of neutrality (Humanitarian Policy Group, Oct. 2007) [text] The myth of invasion: Irregular migration from West Africa to the Maghreb and the European Union (International Migration Institute, Oct. 2007)...