Iran Snapshot: Why Luxury Car Sales Do Not Mean an All-Is-Well Economy (The Economist)

Cars have become even less affordable for the poor. But middle-class Iranians buy them as investments as cash savings lose value because of inflation and the currency collapse. Iranians with government links are making a mint. At the end of 2011, after a run on the currency, officials fixed the exchange rate at 12,260 rials to the dollars to help importers. Three months ago this was cut to 24,368 rials. But only importers with government connections can get cheap dollars. They buy cars across the Persian Gulf, then sell them at home at the unofficial exchange rate of 37,000 rials.

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Bahrain Opinion: "How The Police Recruit Radicals" (The Economist)

Claimed footage of police beating protester after funeral of a political prisoner, 3 October 2012

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Bahrain’s Western-backed government has been trumpeting its reforms. British barristers have helped advise on new legal codes, while former police chiefs from London and Miami have been advising Bahrain’s growing police force, whose bosses prefer to bring Sunnis from overseas (including Pakistan) into its ranks rather than recruit from among local Shias.

The punishment of peaceful activists is making Bahrain’s opposition more radical.

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Syria Snapshot: The Checkpoints of Defiance in Hama (The Economist)

Hama Anti-Regime Protest, 1 July 2011The city of Hama is both defiant and fearful. Boys with wooden sticks man makeshift checkpoints. Burned-out government cars, rubbish bins, gates, piles of bricks to street-lamps unscrewed at the base and carefully laid across the road have been used to create blockades to prevent the security forces from re-entering the city. Even satellite dishes, with the name of Al-Dounia, a pro-regime channel, scribbled over with Al-Jazeera, have been used. The streets are eerily quiet; shop shutters are locked and the roads are almost empty of cars. No sign of the Assad regime remains. Pictures of the president, Bashar Assad, have been torn down and a plinth where a statue of his father, Hafez, once towers stands empty. Outside the city, the government's forces wait.

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Tunisia LiveBlog: Will President Ben Ali "Go the Way of Romania's Ceausescu"?

2215 GMT: Video has been posted claiming to be of a night-time protest in Hammamet in northeastern Tunisia, with a teenager killed by the police.

And this picture claims to be of riot police in Cite Ettadhamen near the capital.

2150 GMT: Reuters reports that hundreds of youths defied the 8 p.m. curfew in Tunis, setting fire to a bank and throwing stones at police, who responded with tear gas.

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China and Blogging: Breaching the Great Firewall? (The Economist)

China’s military mouthpiece, the Liberation Army Daily, is not a fan of microblogging. On October 19th it said Twitter had caused chaos during Iran’s political turmoil last year, and gave warning that such instant information-sharing tools posed “hidden dangers” to national security. Having blocked access to Twitter, however, China is encouraging home-grown versions. Both the government and its critics have become avid users.

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