Hours after US officials declared that the United States may launch missile strikes against the Syrian government, pro-Assad hackers known as the Syrian Electronic Army hijacked the domain name servers of several media companies. The New York Times website was down for several hours, although the company quickly established a backup site to continue their reporting. The DNS of Twitter and Huffington Post UK were also hacked, redirecting users to a server that appeared to be hosted by the SEA.

OSN, a leading pay-TV network in the Middle East and North Africa, announced on Monday its acquisition of one of the largest providers of South Asian pay-TV content, Pehla Media & Entertainment. “The strategic acquisition allows us to broaden our appeal to another sector of the market that is of high importance in this region, so we can offer the very best services across our now much wider range of languages,” OSN CEO David Butorac told Al Arabiya.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech on August 28, the networks of the Broadcasting Board of Governors will provide special programming including live reports from Washington, DC, topical original features on human rights and civil disobedience in the United States and abroad, and interviews with key figures in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar fell out because they supported conflicting interests primarily in Egypt. Elsewhere too - Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Gaza (Hamas). But their coming together in any case was for limited tactical reasons: to stall the Arab Spring. The big asset the Qataris brought to the union, hurriedly put together, was the incomparable credibility of their TV channel, Al Jazeera. Qatar launched Al Jazeera, initially only in Arabic. Later, superior retirees from the BBC like Sir David Frost were enlisted to launch its English service.

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter uploaded this video showing the final minute of Current TV and the first five minutes of Al Jazeera America, which began broadcasting at 3 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. It’s mostly a promotional video, which hits repeatedly on two main themes: a heavy subtext of Americanness (it refers to the United States as “home”) and the not-so-subtle implication that other American TV news networks lack seriousness.

Six years of unremitting headlines on extreme violence and rampant crime has sullied Mexico’s reputation abroad. Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and his confrontational “War on Drugs” grew increasingly unpopular over the years, resulting in the 2012 election of opposition party candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, who espoused a new security strategy and vision for Mexico.

Al Jazeera now runs three television channels, including the newly-launched Al Jazeera America. The station is based in Qatar. But the kind of journalism Al Jazeera does is still a pipe-dream in that country. Northwestern University in Qatar journalism student Yara Darwish said of her countrymen, including her parents, “they actually have no clue of what journalism is. The culture in Qatar hasn’t allowed them to accept the idea of journalism. We are not a society that shares everything, that shares the news; we are a very private society.

If you’re a film buff, you may have heard of a Korean-made summer blockbuster that, strangely, hasn’t reached American shores quite yet. Starring a line-up of famous Western actors, some critics say Snowpiercer — Korea’s most expensive film ever — represents a potential cultural landmark. Based on a French comic book, it covers a dystopia of post-apocalyptic survivors who, living on a train that travels around the world, rebel against their repressive overlords.