Reading (12/6/2012)

• Blogger and symbol of Syrian uprising [Razan Ghazzawi] wins Front Line human rights award
• Wadah Khanfar: Syrian social media proved vital and accurate
• Can Israel survive its 45-year occupation? Nadia Hijab in Foreign Policy.
• Sawsan Gad, “We mold the collective memory of sexual assault,” Egypt Independent
• “The question then is: how many innocents is it acceptable to kill to take down one suspected terrorist?“
• Egypt secret police files shine light on murky world, BBC
• Gawker doesn’t mince words on drones: “So You’ve Decided to Whack a Raghead“
• A few months late…Jill Lepore in the New Yorker on Trayvon and the rise of the gun lobby:

Although rates of gun ownership, like rates of violent crime, are falling, the power of the gun lobby is not. Since 1980, forty-four states have passed some form of law that allows gun owners to carry concealed weapons outside their homes for personal protection. (Five additional states had these laws before 1980. Illinois is the sole holdout.) A federal ban on the possession, transfer, or manufacture of semiautomatic assault weapons, passed in 1994, was allowed to expire in 2004. In 2005, Florida passed the Stand Your Ground law, an extension of the so-called castle doctrine, exonerating from prosecution citizens who use deadly force when confronted by an assailant, even if they could have retreated safely; Stand Your Ground laws expand that protection outside the home to any place that an individual “has a right to be.” Twenty-four states have passed similar laws.

• America’s Last Prisoner of War
• Reporters without orders: Can journalism funded by private generosity compensate for the decline of the commercial kind?, Economist
• Hossam Hamalawy in the Guardian:

…In every single institution in this country there is a mini-Mubarak who needs to be overthrown. In every institution there are figures from the old state security regime who need to be overthrown. These guys are the counter-revolution. Maybe the counter-revolution isn’t clearly organised with a specific command structure, but you have to assume that everyone who belonged to the old regime and enjoyed privileges under it is going to try to defend those privileges, and much of the malaise you see around you in Egypt today is down to that.

• “The President’s Press Problem” – Amy Davidson on President Obama and the alleged White House leaks, New Yorker
• The woman who defied Saudi’s driving ban and put it on YouTube (that is, the inimitable Manal al-Sharif)
• “Syria’s Christian conundrum” – Hind Aboud Kawabat, CNN
• “Unexpected pregnancy, Morality, and the Law“:

Maybe we can assert that the woman should have the ultimate legal right to choose, but at the same time admit that right is very complicated and charged and morally fraught, that choosing something against the will of the man involved is an act of some degree of unfairness; It may be a necessary act but not an entirely unambiguous one.

• “The Curious Case of Internet Privacy” – Cory Doctorow in Technology Review
• Also, these cats: