The United Arab Emirates has said it will stop individuals and small businesses from using Research In Motion Ltd.'s highly secured BlackBerry corporate-email services. The restriction, effective May 1, applies only to individuals and businesses with fewer than 20 subscriptions...

The empowerment of Arab publics through months of uprisings and popular protests is driving a structural change in the texture of regional politics which has only begun to unfold. Whether or not regimes fall, or real democracy emerges, every political player in the region who hopes to remain competitive will have to be more responsive to the concerns and demands of the mobilized public.

But the biennial...has long been one of the oddities of the rapidly growing Middle Eastern art scene: a relatively freewheeling survey of recent work from around the region and around the world, underwritten by one of the most culturally ambitious but conservatively Islamic of the seven states that make up the United Arab Emirates.

Despite continuing criticism of the European Union over its delayed response to the turmoil in the Arab world, Poland’s foreign minister said this week that the crisis provided an opportunity for the bloc to help that region on a road toward democracy.

The Arab Spring is in its third month, and some already express concern about its next phase. In Tunisia things are moving too slowly. In Egypt, the moment of the revolution has been replaced by the routines of national politics, and the revolutionaries are frustrated.

[Ambassador J Adam] Ereli was deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Qatar from 2000 to 2003 and at the beginning of the press roundtable he said: “When I left Doha in 2003 there were few publications, so it’s nice to see how much is happening in Qatar”.

The user's online handle is Abumubarak, and the forum where he spends hours at a time is not a gaming site or a forum about celebrity gossip, but one of the dozens of hard-line Islamist sites where commenters post news articles, terrorist propaganda, and their own opinions on the subject of jihad.

The Israel Foreign Ministry is speaking Arabic, on Facebook. The Facebook page which was launched in early January, entitled "Israel speaks Arabic" in Arabic, was opened by the Foreign Ministry's Media and Public Affairs Department and is devoted exclusively to Arabic-speaking audiences.