Hamas is having a hard time these days. Animosity with the military regime in Cairo has led to the closure of Gaza’s vital smuggling tunnels. According to Monocle, the tunnels act as a vital supply route and Hamas says the current impasse is costing the Gaza economy about $230 million a month.

This week’s curator for the @Ireland Twitter account, Conor Neylan, will accompany Ireland’s President, Michael D Higgins, on his historical Irish State visit to Britain. The @Ireland Twitter account is managed by Irish Central since we took over WorldIrish.com.

Let’s hand it to the U.S. government: At least this disastrous attempt to overthrow the Castro brothers did not almost lead to nuclear annihilation. But its impact on activists around the world who use digital tools to organize against repressive regimes feels devastating enough.
 

The revelation that a US government-funded program set up a cellphone-based social network in Cuba is likely to pose new challenges for independent bloggers and exile groups that work to increase access to technology.

The United States discreetly supported the creation of a website and SMS service that was, basically, a Cuban version of Twitter, the Associated Press reported Thursday. ZunZuneo, as it was called, permitted Cubans to broadcast short text messages to each other. At its peak, ZunZuneo had 40,000 users.

For years, American outreach to Cuba came in many forms: mafiosos, poison-drenched wetsuits, toxic cigars. But today we learned of a new tactic in the campaign to undercut the Castro regime: a stealth effort by the U.S. government's humanitarian aid agency to create a Cuban version of Twitter.

"I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever," read a tweet from “The Colbert Report”last Thursday — in what New Yorker magazine commentator Jay Caspian Kang called a “comedic sin of delivering a punch line without its setup.”

Having recently returned from the International Studies Association (ISA) conference in Toronto, I wanted to share some thoughts with the PD community, and particularly the scholars who for some reason or other couldn’t attend.