CAIRO — A delay in landmark parliamentary elections scheduled for Monday is looking more likely as Egypt enters its sixth day of unrest and anti-military protests across the country continue to grow. Interior Minister Mansour el-Essawy asked the military council to push the elections back saying he could not secure elections, according to the Arabic satellite television station al-Jazeera. The ministry oversees the nation’s hated riot police at the forefront in the violent crackdown on protesters that has left at least 35 dead and more than 3,000 wounded. Read full article > >

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Egypt elections likely to be delayed

Most U.S. consumers recognize Rosetta Stone by the bright yellow boxes of software at shopping mall kiosks that help you master such languages as Arabic, Italian and Tagalog — for a hefty price. That reputation once helped propel the Arlington-based firm. Now it may be eroding its business. The company finds itself in the midst of a bumpy transition as shoppers cut back on expensive purchases in a sluggish economy and opt for software that’s delivered online rather than by disk. Read full article > >

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Rosetta Stone’s CEO steps down amid a bumpy transition

Most U.S. consumers recognize Rosetta Stone by the bright yellow boxes of software at shopping mall kiosks that help you master such languages as Arabic, Italian and Tagalog — for a hefty price. That reputation once helped propel the Arlington-based firm. Now it may be eroding its business. The company finds itself in the midst of a bumpy transition as shoppers cut back on expensive purchases in a sluggish economy and opt for software that’s delivered online rather than by disk. Read full article > >

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Rosetta Stone’s CEO steps down amid a bumpy transition

I really enjoyed this interview on Fresh Air. The subjects are two ex-CIA operatives who fell in love, married, and subsequently left. It’s got Hollywood written all over it. But that aside, I thought this was an interesting bit: Mr. BAER: You can’t collect intelligence on ephemera of a Tunisian vendor lighting himself on fire and sparking a revote. We were vaguely aware and have been aware for a long time that if food prices continued to go up, demographic problems and the rest of it, it’s eventually going to crack. But, you know, the way it did crack and how quickly, you just – it’s a matter of intuition and you cannot write up into which and send it to the White House in intelligence reports. It just doesn’t wash.  GROSS: Do you think that the CIA has good intelligence on the countries that have had uprisings? I know that you say it’s hard to have information on ephemera, and like one of events that you couldn’t predict, but several former CIA agents have complained that we don’t have enough on the ground operatives who speak the languages in these countries.  Mr. BAER: Well, let me put it this way, Egyptian Arabic is peculiar, a peculiar accent, and it’s difficult to learn especially, you know, the familiar Arabic. And it would take an officer two years of studying Arabic, three years on the ground mastering Arabic, and about 10 years to get a grasp of a society like Egypt. That’s ideally what happens. You know, it’s very difficult for someone to devote a career of 20 years on a single country like Egypt, especially when you’ve got two wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has just sucked resources and people and mainly in support of the military and these two countries. So the CIA is truly – the bench strength is very very thin. And you can see whats happened at this expertise – it’s just been drawn away by these two wars and, you know, how you get it back, it’ll take years. This made me think about how I construe “intelligence.” I don’t think about an intuitive, inexact science based on all that is knowable. I take as my assumption that all things are knowable, and if the outcome isn’t predicted with certainty, the intelligence must be bad. That’s a crude rendering. But the point is that I think about intelligence almost as magic. It’s a statement on how we overate the powers of technology and information. Sometimes you really don’t know. I also really appreciated this elaboration on what, specifically, goes into putting an agent on the ground. We always here this vague talk about not enough people speaking Arabic on the ground, but rarely do we get a detailed sense of why. Good stuff.

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What We Mean by ‘Intelligence’

Press in the Arabic-speaking world noted the start of the Iranian President’s visit with varying degrees of support and scepticism.

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Media split on Ahmadinejad’s arrival in Beirut

Painting, jazz and poetry in a trialogue between David Breskin, Nels Cline and Ed Ruscha ” Dirty Baby ,” a music project joining guitarist and composer Nels Cline (of Wilco fame) and poet David Breskin, “recontextualizes” American artist Ed Ruscha’s “censor strips” (artworks that depict the black marks used to censor documents). The resulting album and art book represents an aural and visual conversation between the three men and a load of talented musicians. Dirty Baby the album drops 12 October 2010, but people in L.A. will be treated to a spectacular release party on 7 October 2010 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as part of the Angel City Jazz Festival. Cline will perform, Breskin will recite poems Ruscha will project images, and after the concert all three will sign the beautifully-packaged “Dirty Baby” CD and art book of the same name (published by Prestel and distributed by Steidl). The book, the size and shape of an LP, pairs gorgeous reproductions of Ruscha’s images with Breskin’s ghazals (a tightly-structured, ancient Arabic form) and includes the four-CD set, two of which are the slow, twangy Jazz improvisations by Cline. (Due out in November, you can order the book now from Amazon .) When you buy the CDs, they come between two booklets, each containing 33 images of Ruscha’s work, Silhouettes and Cityscapes. Another booklet includes images of the sessions, liner notes and the 66 poems by David Breskin. The L.A. show will be held at LACMA’s Bing Theater , and while admission to the event is free it’s highly recommended to RSVP to info [at] angelcityjazz [dot] com.

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Dirty Baby

Israeli scientists believe they have identified why Arabic is particularly hard to learn to read.

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Why reading Arabic is particularly hard for brain.