Free Republic

Having lived almost all my life in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I've always wanted to see the West and why clerics in Iran dislike its values and lifestyle so much. Before I came to Toronto as an immigrant in December 2000, I was working as a tech journalist in one the so-called reformist papers in Iran. A daily column named "Internet" with a simple, straight-forward language had attracted a lot of readers whose emails were making my yahoo email account full every day. The pleasure of helping people discover new things and cross new borders is the most satisfying...

THE LONG ROAD HOME There’s no daylight savings time in Kuwait. On August 22, 2003 the sun rose at 0520. I stood on a concrete barrier, facing east as the sky turned from gray to orange. An impossibly huge crimson sun broke through the horizon, silhouetting the large gantry cranes and casting long shadows behind the towering cement factory. It became smaller and brighter as it rose above the haze, its brilliance outshining the long flames flickering atop the oil refinery stacks. I could feel its warm rays kissing my face. It was pleasant for the moment, but before too...

Courtesy of C-SPAN (they do have some uses), here are some great, well-organized resources FReepers can use to keep informed, as well as to research and post information: TV / RADIO / WEBSITES / WEBLOGS NEWSPAPERS / MAGAZINES WHITE HOUSE / EXECUTIVE BRANCH RESOURCES CONGRESSIONAL RESOURCES JUDICIARY RESOURCES STATE / LOCAL GOVERNMENT RESOURCES THINK TANK / PAC / POLICY ORGANIZATIONS RESOURCES (RNC, DNC, and huge list of others) INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENT RESOURCES (British Parliament and more) WAR WITH IRAQ RESOURCES AMERICAN PRESIDENTS

On April 19, Hossein Derakhshan, a young Iranian living in Toronto, got an alarming e-mail from a friend of his in Tehran. The friend, Sina Montallebi, wrote that he had been summoned to appear before the religious police. The next day, Mr. Montallebi became the first person in history to be jailed for the crime of keeping a Weblog. "They did it to frighten people," says Mr. Derakhshan, who came to Canada two years ago. The story of the Internet and the mullahs is a fascinating study in how technology can subvert even the most repressive of regimes. In the...

David Warren comes out and says something that’s been my privately held belief for quite some time: 'Salam Pax' Plays Americans for Fools in Iraq . What we can know, just by reading his blog, is that this Salam is up to no good. He is spreading "inside views" of the new Iraq, not only to the blogosphere, but directly among the journalists still encamped at the Meridian (formerly Palestine, formerly Meridian) hotel. Not the "embeds" who've gone home after remarkable learning experiences, but those "hacks" not yet transferred to the next breaking news story, and so still kicking around...

APRIL 24, 2003Hartford Paper Tells Employee to Kill BlogUPDATED: Must Journalists Give Up Personal Sites? By Carl Sullivan NEW YORK -- Updated at 5:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, April 25 What you do on your own time is your business, unless you're a journalist. In that case, certain restrictions seem to apply, though these rules are debatable, and they're not uniform. The Internet only complicates matters, as a recent decision by Hartford (Conn.) Courant Editor Brian Toolan illustrates. Toolan recently told Courant Travel Editor Denis Horgan that he could no longer publish commentary on his Web log, DenisHorgan.com. Horgan is...

The U.S. and British military won't have the Russian secret services to contend with in Iraq anymore, at least not on the Net. Early last week, the Russian military analysis Web site, Iraqwar.ru, discontinued its daily "Russian military intel update." The three-week-old, daily feature - was it real-world intelligence useful to the Iraqis or merely the product of a fertile imagination? - claimed to be based on leaks from senior Russian intelligence officials. It offered detailed predictions about coalition troop movements many hours or even days in advance. It also quoted "intercepted" U.S. radio traffic, toted casualties on both sides...

Everyone's favourite search engine now owns the world's most popular blogging tool. With its purchase of Pyra Labs, Google now runs Blogger and with it the weblogs of hundreds of thousands of opinionated net users. The story of the buyout was, appropriately enough, broken on a weblog by journalist Dan Gillmor, shortly followed by an 'official' announcement on his personal blog from Prya Labs co-founder Evan Williams. Then the blogs and technology news sites went wild, making this the net news story of the week, if not the month. Not journalism We should not get carried away by all this.Ridiculous...

What Now? Developments, encouraging and otherwise by Michael Kelly  .....   HE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HAS GONE MAD," announced a headline in The Times of London on January 15. This was at first glance worrisome, but at second less so, because the article turned out to be not a news report but an opinion column. It was the opinion, specifically, of John le Carré that "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more...

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be...

QUICK LINKS: HOME | NEWS | OPINION | RIGHTPAGES | CHAT | WHAT'S NEW townhall.comJohn Leo (back to story)May 6, 2002Mass media beware: the bloggersOne vote here in favor of the blogging revolution. Bloggers (from the words "Web log") write personal online diaries and commentaries. The best bloggers weigh in on social and political issues, report nuggets of information that the national media miss or suppress, and provide links to other bloggers with something sharp to say. Subjects that the mainstream press is skittish about (e.g., the link between abortion and breast cancer, or the mini-race riot that occurred...