Many, including myself, are disheartened by the assassination of Salmaan Taseer. He had emerged, specifically through Twitter, as somewhat of a laissez-faire secularist. I want to stress this “Twitter” angle. Given the lack of a civil society where dialogue and discourse can transcend class boundaries, Taseer found a way to circumvent “drawing room politics” where men and women gathered on uncomfortable and ostentatious furniture to discuss “the people”. I am quite willing to bet that his strident defense of secularist, pluralist policies emerged because of the feedback loop that Twitter provided. As a subscriber to his feed for a while, I witnessed numerous exchanges with reporters, authors, business-owners, students where he asserted, and was pushed back on, not only government policy but a liberal world-view which needed defense or it needed affirmation. He was abandoned by his own party and largely by the provincial government after his defense of Asiya Bibi. The Zardari regime found it best to not challenge the Islamist parties and their reticence only exacerbated the loneliness of the Taseer and Sherry Rahman position – that the Blasphemy Laws were targeting religious minorities.

Last weekend the secure https protocol became unavailable in the country and in the days that followed many bloggers and net activists were locked out of their personal accounts. Sofiene Chourabi, blogger and journalist for Al-Tariq al-Jadid magazine was one of the first to notice the ‘hack’ attempts last week.

“My personal account on the Facebook, including around 4200 friends, was exposed to failed hacking attempt last Friday, but I quickly recovered it after an unidentified person had taken control of it,” he told Al Jazeera. This first attempt failed, but a second last Monday was successful as Chourabi lost access to both his Gmail and Facebook accounts.

Another activist and critic of the Government who suffered the same fate is Azyz Amami, a member of the local Pirate Party. Amami had used a secondary email address to register at Gmail and Facebook which allowed him to regain access, but not before the authorities found the login information to his four blogs and deleted all content.

Amami said he thinks that the Government’s hacking and phishing attempts are more widespread, and that those reported thus far represent just the tip of the iceberg since many people fear repercussions from the Government. Only hours after stating his concerns in public on Thursday he was arrested, and he wasn’t the only one.

Slim Amamou and Slah Eddine Kchouk, both graduate students and members of the Pirate Party of Tunisia like Amami, were also arrested by the authorities. In addition several other activists and bloggers were arrested and taken in for questioning, without any specifics being released on the reasons of their arrests.

The near-zero gravity of Earth orbit may do serious harm to the male and female reproductive systems, the University of Kansas Medical Center biologist has discovered.

Sperm counts drop. Egg-producing ovary cells waste away.
At least that’s been the case among the laboratory and space-traveling rodents that Tash has studied.

What prolonged exposure to microgravity does to an astronaut’s fertility remains a big unknown. But Tash’s hypothesis isn’t reassuring: Long-term spaceflight renders people “reproductively compromised.”

“We have a lot of tantalizing data that require more rigorous investigation,” Tash said. “It’s unfortunate that we’re discovering this just as the shuttle program is winding down.”

Tash will have an experiment with mice on board in February for one of the final space shuttle flights.