Communication. Community. Commerce. These words share ancient Latin linguistic roots, and they all indicate some sort of coming together. War has been described variously as a breakdown of one or all of them.  The mainstream media typically portray the Middle East as a desert of war, but scattered ...

Female bloggers from across the Middle East joined hands in marking the International Women's Day with posts reflecting on the occasion and celebrating the lives and achievements of women who have touched them. In Saudi Arabia, American Bedu admits that while many women in the kingdom may not ev...

This weekend the Syrian blogosphere warmed up for a new confrontation. A group of bloggers launched a campaign against the spread of blogs advancing LGBT rights, and the response came quick. LGBT is controversial everywhere, but within a society that is conservative in its majority, the topic gets m...

Egyptian women are trapped between who they are and who they are expected to be; they are required to live up to the expectations of their parents, families, colleagues, and later on, their husbands and children. In their attempt to meet those expectations, some of them feel that they lose touch wit...

The Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) hopes to achieve a monetary union, with a common currency, by 2010. Bloggers from the region, which groups Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, debate the merits of the union and more importantly what name they want for their new curren...

“Before the boom, people would travel to South East Asia to get their sin fix and bring back AIDS. The only difference being the prostitutes are here, and all the nefarious enablers that goes with it. A great shame,” according to a UAE national, writes Secret Dubai Diary , which is block...

My colleagues over at the Doing Business Blog report on the second annual Reformers’ Club awards, which took place last week in New York. In attendance were representatives of the top ten reformer countries: Egypt, Croatia, Ghana, FYR Macedonia, Georgia, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, China, and B...

With the price of oil at its record highs, it can be hard to imagine that key exporters thereof, six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates) may currently be facing economic problems of any kind. The signs of prosperity seems t...

In Tunisia recently for a workshop with business journalists on corporate governance issues, I witnessed a generational divide that gives me hope.  The key moment in the training came in a debate between an older journalist writing for a state-owned newspaper and younger journalists writing for we...

A recent broadcast by Mosaic News discusses the effect of the U.S. credit crisis on the Middle East, especially Egypt.   This is the first time I’d seen Mosaic News, which is produced by Link TV (intended for educational use only) and posted on YouTube.  The news broadcast reports: “The credi...