Syria, Yemen (And Beyond): Switching From West to East

The scene at the "victory party" outside of the Al Nahda party headquarters in Tunisia

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2216 GMT: A protest in the Damascus suburb of Zamalka tonight:

And a march from the Al-Rifai mosque in Kafarsouseh:

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Iran Feature: How Google Reader's "Tweak" May Cut Iranian Access (Perez)

The law of unintended consequences... When a company as large and as important as Google makes changes, seemingly minor tweaks can have massive repercussions. While most people in the West may have to deal with a slightly different interface (for better or for worse), the consequences elsewhere may be far more profound.

Tech Crunch writer Sarah Perez writes that in Iran, new changes to Google's RSS reader may cut Iranian dissidents off from a major line of communication, one that the government of Iran has yet to shut down.

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Tunisia (and Beyond) Opinion: Can West Stop Worrying and Accept the Islamist Movements? (Karon)

http://bit.ly/tKIEyN

Time Magazine's Tony Karon asks whether, as Tunisia and Libya enter this next phase of this pro-democracy movement, the West will be able to accept that Islam is not fundamentally at odds with democracy.

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Tunisia's election and Libya's celebration of the overthrow of Col. Muammar Gaddafi won't have made for a happy weekend among those fevered heads in Washington who believe the West is locked in an existential struggle with political Islam: If anything, the Islamist tones of the Libyan celebrations, coupled with the Islamist victory in the Tunisian polls will have evoked the collapsing dominoes of Vietnam-era anti-communist metaphor.

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Occupy Wall Street (& Beyond): LiveStream from Clashes at Occupy Oakland

UPDATE 1537 GMT: A slightly different view of the incident. The video starts with a police officer, via megaphone or sound system, telling the protesters that if they do not disperse they will be arrested. One could ask why that is necessarily? The protesters appear to be in a penned-off street, with the police on the other side of the barricades.

After a few seconds, the tear gas is fired, along with flash grenades. A few protesters appear to hold their ground. Towards the front of the pack, on the right hand side, a man who may already be leaving, is apparently hit my a flash grenade, or shrapnel of some kind, and falls backwards, in the direction that the majority of the crowd is moving. When protesters notice that he is injured, they move forward to help, or remove him, and a police officer, who first aims a weapon (tear gas gun?) at the crowd, throws at least 1 flash grenade into the crowd:

UPDATE 1507 GMT: This narrated video appears to show a police officer throwing a flash grenade into a crowd of people in Oakland as they try to help a wounded protester. While the video starts after the tear gas has been fired, and after the protester was initially wounded, it is clear that the crowd was helping the protester, and did not pose an immediate threat to the wall of police standing nearby:

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EA on the Road: The "Internet and Democratic Change" Conference in Stockholm

I will be in Stockholm from Tuesday to Thursday for the "Internet and Democratic Change" conference, organised by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The programme features journalists, hacktivists, and social media activists, many of whom have been valued sources for EA and its readers on issues from Iran to Bahrain to Tunisia to Syria.

The conference, which begans at 0800 GMT on Wednesday, can be seen via Webcast here on EA. It can also be followed on Twitter via the hashtag #net4change.

While I am on the road, James Miller will be holding the EA fort. Updates may be limited, however, and we thank readers for bringing in information and ideas via the Comments section.

Syria, Yemen (And Beyond): Two Cities Burning in Two Countries

Houses burn after they were lit on fire, reportedly by regime supporters, in Ahlbit in Syria's Idlib Province on Monday

See also Syria Video Special: Homs is Still Burning
Yemen Feature: Drones & the Killing of an American Teenager
Monday's Tunisia, Libya, Syria (and Beyond) LiveBlog: Election, Liberation, Protest

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1920 GMT: A couple of the protest videos from Syria tonight --- the Ghouta and Qosour districts of Homs:

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The Latest from Iran (25 October): No Gratitude for CNN

See also Iran Video Interview: Ahmadinejad Puts Out His Standard Lines to CNN's Zakaria
The Latest from Iran (24 October): How To Instantly Become an Iranian Citizen

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1845 GMT: All-Is-Well Alert. In an interview with the Swiss newspaper NZZ, Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani has said that everyone in Iran has access to the Internet, and there are daily papers from all political camps.

1835 GMT: No Gratitude for CNN. Back to where we began this morning, with Iran State TV's attack on CNN and Fareed Zakaria....

It appears the cause for the assault was not Zakaria's interview of the President but an accompanying piece he did about life in Tehran. Zakaria was positive about many aspects of life in a Tehran of "order" and "cleanliness" (somehow missing Tehran's extraordinary levels of air pollution and minimising the significance of its crowded roads), but State TV claimed he had spoken of a "dark and gloomy" city. Specifically, he "tried to prove U.S. claims that Iran is under pressure because of the sanctions. In order to do so he resorted to lies".

Indeed, Zakaria, while ignoring issues such as unemployment and inflation, did hone in on sanctions. He said Iranians blamed the regime in part for the situation and indicated that the Western measures had strengthened the grip of the Revolutionary Guards on the economy:

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US Feature: The "I am an American" Project

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Cynthia Weber set out on a journey across post-9/11 America in search of a deeper understanding of what it means to be a US American today. The outcome is 13 short documentary films and an alternative "I am an American" public service announcement, giving voice to ordinary citizens for whom the terrorist attacks of 2001 --- and their lingering aftermath --- live on in collective memory.

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Yemen Feature: Drones & the Killing of an American Teenager (Greenwald)

Salon's Glenn Greenwald explores the moral and legal issues surrounding the use of drone strikes against militants by the United states. As the US draws down the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of drones is the newest iteration of the "War on Terror", and Anwar Awlaki's 16 year old son is one of it's most recent collateral casualties:

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Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people. News reports, based on government sources, originally claimed that Awlaki’s son was 21 years old and an Al Qaeda fighter (needless to say, as Terrorist often means: “anyone killed by the U.S.”), but a birth certificate published by The Washington Post proved that he was born only 16 years ago in Denver. As The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote: “Looking at his birth certificate, one wonders what those assertions say either about the the quality of the government’s evidence — or the honesty of its claims — and about our own capacity for self-deception.”

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Syria Video Special: Homs is Still Burning

On Friday we documented the Syrian military assault on Homs, a city of 1.2 million civilians. The noose has been tightening for weeks, as the Syrian military first laid siege to Al Rastan, and many of the other suburbs, but what has happened since Friday can only be described as the slow destruction of the third largest city in Syria.

The siege did not end on Friday. On Saturday, the Syrian military rolled tanks into the center of the city, intimidating residents and making many arrests. But on Sunday, and again today, the artillery and tank shells once again ripped through the streets and exploded over the rooftops.

We don't wish to give the impression that the syrian military's brutal tactics are limited to Homs, but the city has become a symbol, of sorts, of what the Assad regime is capable of, the lengths they are willing to go to to cling to power.

Below is a collection of videos from Monday, Sunday, and Friday. If the media is unwilling to catalog the attack on the city of Homs, then EA will gladly follow the story:

This is just a small sampling of the videos that we have seen.

See Also, Syria Video Essay: The Military Assault on Homs

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Monday

Deir Bielbe, Homs. Before the tank fires, you can hear children scream, and nearby gunfire:

Deir Bielbe, Homs. Gunfire and explosions can be heard, while several of the buildings and vehicles appear to have been destroyed by shelling. Some protesters point out the spent ammunition on the ground. At the end of the video, a tank can be seen rolling through the streets:

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