Street clashes broke out across the Persian Gulf region on Monday as demonstrators in Iran, Bahrain and Yemen sought to capitalize on the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and swept into the streets, where they were met by riot police.

The tumult in a region normally kept tranquil under the heavy-handed security of conservative Gulf regimes underscored the widening reverberations of new pro-democracy movements in the Middle East, though the protesters’ numbers have been small …

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Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, has resigned from his post, handing over power to the armed forces.

Omar Suleiman, the vice-president, announced in a televised address that the president was “waiving” his office, and had handed over authority to the Supreme Council of the armed forces.

Suleiman’s short statement was received with a roar of approval and by celebratory chanting and flag-waving from a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, as well by pro-democracy …

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Hundreds of Thousands of pro-democracy Egyptians are expected to march onto the streets of Cairo and other cities on Friday, in what could become the largest—and some fear the most violent—protests thus far, as the demonstrators’ wishes for the ouster of president Hosni Mubarak were dashed on Thursday.

In a 17-minute address televised to the nation, Mubarak told jubilant crowds, who expected an end to his 30-year authoritarian rule, that he transferred some of this authorities …

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Despite the damp autumn weather, at 2:25 pm on October 25 some 50,000 Icelandic women and their supporters—nearly one-sixth of Iceland’s population—left their jobs or homes and marched down the main street in Reykjavik. The walkout, called Women Strike Back, was a call for “women’s freedom from male violence and the closing of the gender pay gap.” Official statistics show that Icelandic women earn 65.65 percent of men’s average wages. And, as one right-wing city councilwoman …

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Reporting from Washington — The Republican-led House failed to pass an extension of expiring sections of the Patriot Act on Tuesday, an unexpected setback for GOP leaders that shows the difficulty they face in controlling their majority and its “tea party”-inspired members.

Time is short: Key provisions of the terrorist surveillance law expire at the end of the month. A coalition of veteran conservative Republicans and new GOP lawmakers joined many Democrats in blocking passage of …

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Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have poured into Cairo’s Tahrir Square for the latest protest calling for Hosni Mubarak’s government to step down.

Correspondents say it is the biggest demonstration since the protests began on 25 January.

It comes despite the government’s announcement of its plans for a peaceful transfer of power.

President Mubarak has said he will stay until elections in September.

In Tahrir Square, attempts by the army to check the identity cards of those joining the …

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CAIRO — Several thousand demonstrators marched on the Egyptian Parliament for the first time and masses crammed into Tahrir Square on Tuesday to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in a revolt buoyed by the broadcast of an emotional television interview with a young Google executive conducted hours after his release from secret detention.

The executive, Wael Ghonim, had been a quiet force behind the YouTube and Facebook promotion of the protests, but became a …

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By John Nichols

As a new era of media mergers and acquisitions unfolds—in the aftermath of the federal approval of the Comcast/NBCU deal—AOL’s $315-million purchase of Huffington Post ought not come as a surprise.

Media companies, old and new, are rethinking and repositioning in order to grab pieces of a future that will be more digital and less analog, more dynamic and less ponderous, more opinonated and less obsessed with a balance that never was achieved. But …

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In cyberspace they call it “getting pwned”. That’s what happened to the American tech-security company HBGary Federal when it tried to infiltrate the so-called hacktivist network known as Anonymous.

In an interview over the weekend Aaron Barr, chief executive of the Washington-based company, said his firm had successfully infiltrated the shadowy collective behind a series of recent pro-WikiLeaks cyber protests.

Anonymous’s revenge was swift and brutal. Using sophisticated hacking techniques, the group managed to deface HBGary’s website, …

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I’ve used this space to make all sorts of important HuffPost announcements: new sections, new additions to the HuffPost team, new HuffPost features and new apps. But none of them can hold a candle to what we are announcing today.

When Kenny Lerer and I launched The Huffington Post on May 9, 2005, we would have been hard-pressed to imagine this moment. The Huffington Post has already been growing at a prodigious rate. But my New …

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