The suspension of Egyptian gas supply to Israel has lighted a fire under the feet of Israeli officials, businessmen and shareholders trying to assess how events in Egypt will affect Israel's energy economy.

Initial assessments that it is in Egypt's interests to keep the lucrative gas deals with Israel may prove right when the dust settles. But the shake-up in Egypt is a wake-up call for Israel, too.

Minister of National Infrastructures Uzi Landau urged hastened development of the Tamar gas field Sunday. Meanwhile, Israel can increase quantities from its southern reserve and may have to compensate for the loss of Egyptian gas by using more coal and oil-based fuels to produce electricity.

Israel was hoping to move away from such dirtier energy sources for various reasons, including a pledge to reduce greenhouse emissions. Recently the government approved a national plan to develop technologies to reduce global use of oil in transportation. Global dependence on oil and the countries that produce it is bad for both the environment and economic stability, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

But industries and economies still rely on fossil fuels. Increasing costs and depleting reserves are driving new technologies that, well, scrape the bottom of the barrel to produce energy.

And surprise (OK, maybe not to geologists) -- Israel is sitting on a potential fortune.

Israel's quest for cleaner energy sources just got muddied, with the explosion in a pipeline supplying natural gas from Egypt. The explosion occured at a measuring station in Arish and damaged the line supplying Jordan. The line supplying Israel was shut down at first as a precaution. This proved wise as it turned out that the fire overheated the pipe and compromised the entire supply line. It will take several days to cool and for the supply to resume.

The Merhav group, the Israeli partner in the EMG consortium that exports Egyptian gas to Israel, said Saturday it could take up to a week. According to news reports, Israel buys about $10 million worth of gas a week from Egypt in many long-term deals. Meanwhile, it's been reported that Egyptian businessman Hussein Salem, who owns 28% of EMG, has fled to Dubai- with $500 million.

Israel produces about 45% of its electricity from natural gas that comes from two main sources: 60% domestically from a reserve off Israel's southern shore, and from 40% from Egypt. Israel was hoping to get about 70% of its electricity from gas by the end of the decade, for environmental reasons as well as economic. Its southern field has reserves thought to be enough to last until the end of 2013 but could be depleted a year sooner if Egyptian supply isn't resumed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held consultations Saturday morning with the ministries of national infrastructures and defense.  Israel is prepared for such a situation, Netanyahu said, and has the immediate possibility to switch to alternative energy and gas sources. National infrastructures minister Uzi Landau said that in coming days, the electric company could use gas, coal and even diesel if necessary to run its power plants. In the long run, extra costs could make their way down to the citizens, warn observers.

The Knesset's economics committee, the parliamentary body that oversees the issue, is scheduled to address related concerns Sunday. Committee chair Carmel Shama Hacohen told media Israel must take these scenarios into consideration, as well as possible terrorist threats to gas fields, exploration and energy facilities too. Security measures have been stepped up around all relevant facilities, now more clearly than ever a matter of strategic importance.

 Israel has large gas sources of its own — potentially, at least.

Foreign telecommunications companies are helping to provide Egyptians with Internet access over fixed phone lines after the Cairo government's shutdown of online and cellular services.

French Data Network of Paris announced on its website Monday that it had activated old and little-used dial-up options for those cut off from their usual mobile networks. The Egyptian government has shut down most of the country's Internet access in an attempt to thwart coordination of protests against the authoritarian regime of President Hosni Mubarak.

The Geneva-based Internet Society estimates that at least 90%  of Internet networks in Egypt are out of service.

Some foreign mobile phone service providers, including Vodafone Group and France Telecom, have restored coverage after initially complying with Cairo government orders to suspend service.

Also, the two Egyptian Internet sites used most often by the opposition Muslim Brotherhood, Ikhwanonline and Egypt Window, were being updated regularly, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported.

Despite the official attempts at isolating the protesters, demonstrations have been mounting and leaders of the coalescing opposition have managed to get the word out that a million-man rally is planned for Cairo on Tuesday.

Google's Wael Ghonim reported missing in Egypt

Beijing authorities blocks Internet searches for 'Egypt'

As protests continue, Al Jazeera's role debated

Egypt Internet, social media users find some relief, Cairo blogger says

-- Carol J. Williams

Photo: A protester takes a picture with his cell phone in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Credit: Ben Curtis / Associated Press.

Despite the Egyptian government's attempts to control the flow of information out of Egypt by intermittently cutting off Internet access, blocking phone lines and cracking down on media outlets, protesters on the ground and supporters abroad are combining efforts online to provide a ground's-eye view of the unfolding protest movement.

The above video of a group of protesters in Cairo was posted without comment Saturday. Within hours, a commenter had provided an accurate translation of the slogans being chanted:

"Leave, leave, Mubarak! Tel Aviv is waiting for you! Gamal, tell your father, the Egyptian people hate you! We've had enough! They've raised the price of sugar and oil; they've wrecked our homes. Raise your voice, people of Egypt! We can't even find beans!"

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.