In The News

Many Wary of Faith-Based TV

Reem Nafie November 18, 2005
Agaphy TV is funded by donations from Copts living around the world, with most of the money coming from the US. Station supervisor, Bishop Boutros hopes it will provide a link to the church for Copts living abroad or far from places of worship. Yet Agaphy TV must tread carefully; Christian satellite channels based outside the country have offended Egyptian Muslims by broadcasting programs...

America’s Future is Stuck Overseas

Stuart Anderson November 16, 2005
The numbers are better, but not good. Since hitting a low in 2002, post September 11, the number of foreign graduate students enrolled in the United States has been improving, albeit slowly. The importance of these international students to American technological and economic superiority cannot be understated, as former US immigration official Stuart Anderson writes. Foreign graduates...

Other Nations Hope to Loosen U.S. Grip on Internet

Victoria Shannon November 15, 2005
In countless contexts and from every corner of the world, the internet is hailed as a revolutionary force, breaking down traditional barriers of class and nation with an inexorable flow of information. As its accessibility increases, the internet becomes more and more a tool of democracy and international cooperation. But this leveling playing field cannot smooth over an underlying reality: the...

South Korea Locked in Movie Quota War

Barbara Demick November 2, 2005
The South Korean film industry is taking on Hollywood in a heated conflict over the number of foreign films that can be shown every year in South Korea. Filmmakers in South Korea are up in arms in response to what they consider inappropriate pressure to open the South Korean market to Hollywood productions. The issue centers on a government quota that requires South Korean films to be shown in...

Romancing the Globe

Ibsen Martinez November 1, 2005
Approximately 2 billion people around the world tune in on a regular basis to watch Latin American soap operas known as “telenovelas.” While Hollywood and the US television industry are often seen as the defining forces of cultural globalization, the success of telenovelas is a global phenomenon that is being celebrated as “reverse cultural imperialism.” The plotlines of telenovelas usually...

Attracting the Adults

Hicham Safieddine October 28, 2005
As the threat of terrorism, too often conflated with Islam itself, continues to dominate Western consciousness, it is instructive to note instances in which US, and Arab culture overlap. One such instance is the Arab television network MBC’s plan to popularize the classic US cartoon The Simpsons in Egypt. The idea of marketing The Simpsons to an Egyptian audience presupposes a certain shared...

Top Advisory Panel Warns of an Erosion of the U.S. Competitive Edge in Science

William J. Broad October 13, 2005
Is the US losing the ability to compete globally in the areas of science and technology? Experts convened on October 12 under the auspices of the National Academies, the nation’s premier science advisory body, to answer this pressing question. Sponsored by a bipartisan group in Congress, the panel announced that without a substantial effort to address the issue, the US “could soon loose its...