According to a poll, three fourths of Georgians are calling for a fence-mending with Russia and want a more peaceful North Caucasus, a prominent Georgian political scientist told a Tbilisi round table on Thursday.

The notion of scientists from Israel meeting in Jordan with counterparts from countries such as Iran, Bahrain, Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey seems like something out of a fantasy novel. Yet such meetings have been occurring - most recently in November last year - for about 15 years, as a conglomerate of Middle East countries hammers out the details of a major scientific project to benefit scientists from across the region.

Protesters buoyed by the release of Wael Ghonim, a cyber activist and Google executive, are holding mass demonstrations against the rule of Hosni Mubarak for a 15th day in Cairo.

Eleven Tufts students with the New Initiative for Middle East Peace (NIMEP) spent two weeks in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq on a fact-finding mission in January. Participants met with several local leaders, including Kurdistan's regional president Massoud Barzani.

Cries for President Hosni Mubarak's ouster in Egypt are being echoed in Jordan with antigovernment protests and a "day of rage" planned for Syria this Friday. But in the Palestinian territories, it's the silence that is most notable.

Those who said that 'winds of change' were blowing through the Middle East were right. The past few weeks have seen a stunning series of political shifts in response to widespread discontent and popular opposition that once went unacknowledged.

As the number of young people in South Africa increases and access to the Internet improves, so too will access to the kind of resistance we’re witnessing in Egypt and Tunisia, writes guest blogger Khadija Patel.

Al-Jazeera's broadcasting has been disrupted across the Arab region, said the Doha-based channel which has run round-the-clock coverage of the mass protests in Egypt for the past eight days.