As elsewhere, readers and leaders in Israel were waiting on Sunday for the WikiLeaks shoe to drop. Israel is included in a long list of countries that received a heads up from the U.S. about possible diplomatic embarrassment ahead.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday afternoon he didn't expect Israel to be the center of attention, although the American tip didn't specifically indicate what would be exposed. Netanyahu said there was always an "information gap" between what was said in public and private but that in Israel's case the gap wasn't "too big." That remains to be seen.

Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are in the market for some fancy new war toys, and the United States is more than willing to beef up the militaries of its Arab allies in the Persian Gulf as Washington weighs the possibility of a showdown with Iran.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which operates under the Pentagon, last week announced that the two Arab gulf states had requested long-range missiles to help counter "major regional threats."

The proposed deal comes on the heels of a recent $60-billion U.S. arms sale to neighboring Saudi Arabia.

"Saudi Arabia and the UAE have already made very large purchases of what is typically considered a classic defensive system," Kenneth Wise, an expert with the Dubai-based B'huth research center, told Babylon & Beyond. "But I always say you can kill someone with a shield."

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah held a news conference in August  blaming Israel for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. His evidence — footage from Israeli drones — was dismissed in Israel as a mishmash of unrelated incidents in an attempt to deflect the increasing heat from the U.N. tribunal investigating Hariri's death.

The announcement may not have helped with the tribunal, but Nasrallah's appearance did shed light on an old incident and has forced the Israeli army to finally acknowledge something that has been a bit of an open secret.

In 1997, an Israeli commando operation in south Lebanon was over before it began when an elite force walked into an ambush in Ansariya. Eleven commandos and an army doctor were killed in an ill-fated operation that became known as the "Shayetet disaster," for the "Shayetet 13" naval commando unit, which was also involved in the deadly raid on a Gaza aid flotilla this May.

Consider yourselves warned: registering "sex-positive" anything in Libya is a bad idea.

Earlier this week, sex and tech writer Violet Blue took to her blog to announce the Libyan government had seized her URL shortening service vb.ly, "the Internet's first and only sex-positive URL shortener."

Cute little .ly domain names have been all the rage for a while now, but many casual users of similar URL-shortening services like bit.ly and ow.ly may not know that the .ly stands for Libya, or, as it's formally known, the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

Vb.ly was intended as a "tolerant" service for sharing NSFW [not safe for work, i.e. porn] links, but did not actually provide graphic content (Unless you count the picture of Blue drinking a beer in a halter top on the homepage, which apparently the Libyan authorities did.)

Opposition activists linked to Iran's "green movement" have launched a new satellite TV channel, RASA TV, from Belgium as an alternative news source for discontented Iranians at home and abroad.

Ebrahim Nabavi, one of the channel's organizers, is a well-known satirist and former political prisoner currently living in Europe. He told Radio Free Europe that the aim of the channel, which is also available online, is to break the government's monopoly on the flow of information.

"During the last year, Iran's state TV never broadcast any [objective] news about the green movement, and what it did broadcast was lies," Nabavi said. "Censorship and distortion of the news in Iran led us to establish a new media to collect news from inside Iran and then broadcast it back into the country again."

Lebanon could be the next country in the Middle East to suspend certain BlackBerry smart phone services over security concerns if the government cannot reach a compromise with the Canada-based manufacturer, Research In Motion (RIM).

Concerns stem from BlackBerry's famously tight encryption, which prevents state intelligence agencies and even RIM itself from accessing user data easily.

"Let me say that what we ask for in Lebanon will be no different than what the U.S. has asked for in the past and continues to ask for," Imad Hoballah, chair of the government's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, told Babylon & Beyond.

"RIM has made concessions to the U.S., the UK, Russia and eventually they have to give in to some of the countries depending on the business propositions made. We would be happy with whatever information they have made available to the U.S.," he added.

Right-leaning Israeli politicians like to refer to Jerusalem as their "undivided capital." But iPhone users here and around the world found recently that the storied, disputed city had been split in two.

In the smart phone's weather application, the listing for "Jerusalem" disappeared earlier this month and was replaced by "West Jerusalem" and "East Jerusalem."

Both Israelis, who dominate the west part of the city, and Palestinians, the majority in the east, claim Jerusalem as their capital. Israel annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 Middle East War, though Palestinians (and most of the international community) never accepted it.

The debate over how, or whether, to divide Jerusalem is still one of the thorniest issues in Mideast peace talks.

Perhaps frustrated with the lack of progress in the peace process, iPhone engineers apparently decided to impose their own mini-version of a two-state solution by partitioning the city and, in essence, forcing users to pick sides.

Arabic, spoken by about 280-million people worldwide, will finally appear in domain names and Web addresses, a development that "represents a milestone in Internet history," said Tarek Kamel, Egypt's minister of communications.

Internet users so far only have been able to use Latin suffixes in their Web addresses, a format that has been an obstacle worldwide for millions of people unfamiliar with Latin letters. Introducing Arabic to domain languages in coming weeks is expected to spur Internet use among those in Egypt and the Middle East, who will have a variety of addresses in Arabic characters from which to choose.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will be the first to take advantage of the International Domain Names after the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers approved their proposals for IDN country-code top level domains (IDN ccTLD) late in 2009.

Aseel Shaar, Nor Arda and Aseel Abu Leil are 14-year-old ninth-graders at the United Nations-run Askar Girls School in Nablus, a West Bank city. The trio is headed to California to exhibit their invention, an electronic cane for the blind, at a science fair.

The wooden cane, which has sensors that produce different sounds when the person using it approaches foreign objects on a road, will be shown in May at Intel's Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose.

"We wanted to do something to help blind people avoid obstacles in their way," Shaar said. "We came up with the idea in October to present it at the Palestinian Science and Technology Exhibition."

[Updated at 8:47 a.m.: An earlier version of this post's headline said YouTube commenters were reacting. The comments were made on Hebrew news sites in response to reports about the blocking of the YouTube videos.]

Noah Flug will no doubt be glad to see Adolf Hitler parodies gone from YouTube. A year ago, the chairman of the Center Organization of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, sent a letter to YouTube, demanding a clip be removed. The offense in question, actually, was an Israeli addition to the growing collection of spoof-clips based on that one scene from the 2004 film "Der Untergang" ("The Downfall"), depicting Hitler's last days in the bunker.

The Hebrew subtitles show the Fuhrer fuming about parking in Tel Aviv, a sentiment widely shared by residents. The parking rant was one of a series of Israeli-made parodies that had Hitler blowing his stack at a whole range of standing gripes in Israel, from having to shell out for too many weddings to soldiers enjoying cushy desk jobs, Jerusalem hangouts closing too early and the infamous traffic jams leading to Israel's only ski-site.

And of course there's one responding to the Holocaust survivors' complaint too. Really, fumes Hitler, that was 70 years ago already. "I thought the Jewish people had a sense of humor, that this is how they survived for 5,000 years."

Syria has gone on the offensive since Israeli allegations that Damascus smuggled long-range Scud missiles to the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon surfaced last week, but it hasn't helped stem speculation about what it could mean for the prospects of regional war or Syria's newly patched-up relationship with the United States.

If the claims are true, Scud missiles would represent a significant upgrade from the Katyushas and other short-range rockets Hezbollah has used in the past, posing a threat to all major Israeli cities.

The Syrian Embassy in Washington released a statement Thursday accusing Israel of waging a "disinformation campaign" in order to sour Syrian-American relations, justify a possible Israeli offensive and distract world attention from its own weapons stockpiling.

A beautiful girl with a checkered past and the poor delivery boy who loves her – it could be any soap opera on one of hundreds of Arabic channels, but it's not. "Shankaboot" is a digital experiment in storytelling made for the Web, and its success could usher in a new genre of serial drama in the Arab world.

"In the first 10 episodes, we are introducing lovely, interesting characters that young people can identify with," producer Katia Saleh told The Times. "Down the line, [we'll] introduce other topics that would appeal to Arab youth and are not brought up in the mainstream media, something appropriate for the Web."

"Shankaboot," which was shot in Beirut and produced by Saleh's Batoota Films in association with the BBC World Service and with the support of local organizations, bills itself as the first online Arabic drama in the tradition of lonelygirl15 and KateModern, but with a distinctively local flavor.