Middle East & North Africa

In August, Google introduced a new, if rather obscure, security feature to its Chrome web browser, designed to be triggered only under extreme circumstances.

If you were talking to Google's servers using the web's secure "https" protocol, your browser makes a number of checks to ensure that you are really talking to Google's servers. Like an overly obsessive bouncer, the new code double-checks the identity of any supposed Google site against a Chrome-only list of valid Google identities hardwired into the browser.

Ali Ferzat likes to work through the night. His attackers knew that. Masked men grabbed Syria's most famous cartoonist as he set out for home from his office near Damascus' central Umayyad Square at around 5 a.m. on Thursday, and bundled him into a van. A few hours later, he lay in a bloody heap with a bag over his head on an airport road some 19 miles (30 kilometers) out of town.

New York, August 25, 2011--Charges against prominent Omani journalist and filmmaker Youssef al-Haj should be dropped immediately, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.  Al-Haj's trial over an article he wrote that allegedly accused the Ministry of Justice of corruption began on August 14 but was postponed until this Sunday. At the August 14 hearing, the judge ordered that the newspaper that published al-Haj's story, Al-Zaman, not print any details of the case, local human rights activists told CPJ. 

New York, August 24, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the news that U.S. journalist Matthew VanDyke escaped with several inmates from Abu Salim prison in Tripoli today. VanDyke's mother told CPJ that he called her with the news of his escape and that he is safe and in good spirits. He also told his mother that he had been kept in solitary confinement for much of his imprisonment. It was not clear whether the prison was now controlled by rebels.