More than a month and a half into the crisis in Madagascar, confusion grows crescendo as the power struggle between the president and a former mayor vying for the presidency extends, leaving many wondering when the political stalemate will end. Additionally, the media wars have gotten so contentious...

People in Fiji are slowly coming to grips with the fact the nation’s Rugby sevens team could not defend its World Cup title because it was beaten by upstart Kenya in the quarter-finals. In a very unconventional Rugby sevens World Cup played this year in Dubai, Wales emerged as the winner after the...

Below is a partial translation of a post (RUS) on health care in Russia - a caustic “unsent letter” to the Russian president, written by LJ user sobe-panek on Feb. 22. The post has made it into the Top 30 at Yandex Blogs portal and was picked up by some Russian media. […] There is ...

“The Bahamian economy is very likely to crash, and hard. And soon”: Nicolette Bethel makes a prediction....

Starting December 24th, the Alpha Blogger website called for people to nominate 1-3 blog entries written in 2008 that had affected them the most. Mid-term results were announced on January 16th, and voting was open until February 18th. The blog entries that received the most votes won the Alpha Blog...

  On Tuesday January 13th I visited Ai Weiwei at his home on the outskirts of Beijing. We talked for a bit over an hour while he ate breakfast. Despite having designed the Birds' Nest Olympic Stadium, Ai became a vocal critic of China's handling of the Olympics. He has written actively about the Ya...

When China's first Premier Zhou Enlai was asked in the mid-20th century for his opinion on the historical significance of the 1789 French Revolution, he is said to have replied: "It's too soon to tell." I've started to give the same answer when people ask me about Charter 08. I...

Jeffrey Rosen has a great article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend titled Google's Gatekeepers. In it he deals with the question of whether we are becoming too overly dependent on a few big web companies like Google - and whether it's wise over the long run for us to trust their team of (...

On Thursday this past week, Beijing-based lawyer-blogger Liu Xiaoyuan won Deutsche Welle's annual prize for the Best Chinese Blog. Then on Friday he discovered that the parallel blog he keeps at Sohu.com had been taken down. Fortunately, being a famous blogger, he was able to call an editor at Sohu ...

An interview with me, talking about the role of multinational companies in Chinese Internet censorship, followed by a great exchange with Danwei.org's Jeremy Goldkorn, aired on On The Media last Friday. I was traveling and so I've only just listened to it. It's online here: You can read the transcri...