In less than a week, the ministry of Islamic affairs have canceled (Arabic) their decision to control the use of sound amplifiers in mosques. The newspapers say this was the result of pressure by citizens who asked the ministry to take such action. Who the hell are these citizens? How many are they? Where do they come from? No one knows. Let’s just call them The Forces of Darkness. And everything nice I said about this ministry, I take it back. Apparently, that was too much to ask from them.

Do you remember when MBC singled out the TV show The Road to Kabul after they received threats over the interent? This year also, MBC received threats after their decision to broadcast the famous Syrian director Najdat Anzour’s new series called “Al-Hour Al-Ayn” (The Beautiful Maidens).

However, this time, MBC did not single out the show. They released a statement to defend their decision to broadcast it, urging viewers to all 30 episodes before passing judgment. I’ve been following the show, and I can’t see what some people considered as denigrating Islam.

The rush of Saudis to invest in the IPO of Danah Gas in Dubai last month has raised many questions about the investing environment in the country. Abdullah Dahlan asks, “Why Saudi money is leaving the country”? I agree with him that bureaucracy is still the major obstacle in attracting investment.

It looks like this one-page Arabic website is trying to serve as a guide for blogs, and it seems restricted to Arabic blogs only. This makes me wonder if Arab bloggers in Arabic have a problem with linking to English-language Arab bloggers.

For me, when it comes to linking, I link to what I consider good content, regardless of the language used. And although some of my readers get frustrated when they follow a link to a page they can’t read, but what matters more to me is that I know for sure there are a lot of readers who can read it, and probably would enjoy it.

I mean: I don’t have any kind of language discrimination when I link. If I find something interesting, I just link to it. Yes, it is this simple. I think languages are supposed to facilitate communication between us, not the opposite.

Hoder is angry about the way the US government treat people from the Middle East. “This dosn’t matter even if you have citizenship from a country like Canada. I was born in Tehran and it’s enough for the US to treat me like a potential terrorist,” he said.

Mojahid Abdul-Meta’ali, a new columnist, has written something (Arabic) that I think would provoke some controversy in the next few days. It is no wonder that this column is published in al-Watan newspaper, a place where many debates has started and taken place in the past two years. In this column, the writer explains how and why he is a liberal, and one of the reasons he mentioned is because he hates the American policy.

Robert Scoble, the Microsoft Geek Blogger, has a good post on the need to improve search engines. He thinks that search is far from being done, and there is still much to do. He says bloggers don’t look at search critically because they love the traffic Google brings. In other words, “we’re addicts and we don’t want to turn the drug off.”