Iranian Atomic Urgency
• Defense Minister Ehud Barak sat down with the Washington Post for a wide-ranging Q&A dealing with Sinai terror, the Arab Spring, Iran, and peace with the Palestinians. Here, Barak talks about Assad, but the same logic applies to Iran:
Yes, Bashar al-Assad is living proof of the paralysis that sometimes takes over the world, even when there is no need for any further proof that something totally unacceptable that costs human life is happening.
• The Christian Science Monitor sums up the latest round of nuclear talks in just 16 words.
But, aside from far more detailed explanations of positions, there was little evidence of new flexibility.
Arab Spring Winter
• While Hamas prematurely celebrates a Muslim Brotherhood victory in Egypt, The Media Line finds that many ordinary Gazans don’t expect their lives to change:
Qatadah responded very quickly with a more cautious, less optimistic analysis. “I don’t see how celebrating a victory that isn’t yet final is useful. Yes, we should wait. I’m against both Morsi and Shafiq. Neither of them will end Gaza’s siege. You will see: nothing will change for Gaza and I truly wish people here would wake up.”
• Egyptian officials say they’ll announce election results after investigating fraud claims on both sides. More on the morass at the Wall St. Journal.
• My heart just bleeds for Bashar Assad’s media advisor. I haven’t found the original Russia Today interview online about Big Media’s war against her misunderstood boss, but CNN picked up on it, and even added its own rejoinder:
“Inciting sectarian wars, fabricating facts about what’s happening in our country,” Bouthaina Shaaban told Russia Today, a government-supported television news channel, in an interview on Tuesday. “There are many people who believe what has been put on the news and it affects them very negatively. Unfortunately the media war, throughout history, could be very damaging and very effective.”
Shaaban alluded to reports from international news organizations that the Syrian government has sharply limited access to the country by foreign journalists, citing those claims as examples of misinformation. “It is not true that we don’t give access to foreign journalists,” she said . . . .
With rare exceptions, CNN’s repeated and continuing requests to travel and report freely inside Syria have been declined.
• Worth reading from The Scotsman: Hezbollah Slow to Warm to Arab Spring.
• McClatchy News: The number of Syrian refugees steadily increases:
Just how many Syrians the fighting has displaced is unknown. The United Nations estimated at the end of May that at least 500,000 had fled their homes, and the number is surely higher now, given the increase in violence as the rebels press to push the military out of towns.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Neo-Nazis post videos on YouTube to exploit Google Adsense and share revenues from advertisers. According to The Guardian:
Revenue-sharing agreements under Google’s Adsense programme allow YouTube members posting non-copyrighted videos to benefit from ads that appearin a panel to the right of the videos.
Some of the ad revenue is paid to the video owner and extremist groups have used this aspect of Google’s business model to generate funding. When it was alerted to this, Google deleted the videos – but there is no indication it has put in place any protections to prevent a repetition.
(Image of Barak via Flickr/Secretary of Defense)
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
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