Bahrain, Divided — A crackdown by the ruling Sunni government on Shi’ite protesters is eroding the social fabric of the island kingdom, finds Karen Leigh in Manama. “It’s like there’s an invisible shield between us,” one man says.
He’s No Chicken —China blogger ‘Peking Duck,’ also known as Richard Burger, blasts the Global …
Revolution, Interrupted — Two months after the uprising, the Egyptian revolution is having trouble figuring out what to do next. Abigail Hauslohner explains why its old friend, the army, may be getting in the way.
Fatwas and Facebook— In a Tom Friedman-esque essay for Newsweek, Niall Ferguson argues that social media help …
It’s a spring ritual. Each year, the U.S. publishes its report on China’s human-rights record the previous year—and then China presents its findings on America’s own performance in the same realm. Both countries, as might be expected, find plenty wrong with each other. Indeed, instead of highlighting the actual human-rights …
The Chinese authorities are interviewing detained artist and activist Ai Weiwei for “economic crimes,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday. The comments, at a regularly scheduled afternoon press conference, are the first official acknowledgment that Ai, who was detained on Sunday while trying to fly to Hong Kong, is under …
The domestic media silence surrounding the detention of Ai Weiwei was broken today by a Communist Party-run newspaper, which declared that the Chinese artist and activist “will be judged by history, but he will pay a price for his special choice.” The strident tone of today’s article, which was published in the Chinese and …
This map, created by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Hong Kong-based concern group, shows people who have been detained or disappeared in China since February. It was published on Mar. 31 and includes only cases confirmed by CHRD. It does not include the case of Ai Weiwei, the artist and activist who vanished this weekend. For more
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There Will Be Blood— In a dispatch from Kabul, John Wendle explains how the actions of one extremist preacher in Florida sparked violence in Afghanistan; Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reconstructs last week’s attack on a U.N. compound and the subsequent murder of seven U.N. workers.
Missing Persons — To the list of …
Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and political activist who was detained Sunday at the Beijing airport while trying to fly to Hong Kong, has been blocked from leaving the country before. He was prevented from flying to South Korea in December, shortly before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Ai has …
Today, over supper in Hong Kong’s Western District, I picked up a copy of HK Magazine, an English-language alternative weekly. As I happily slurped my noodles, I stumbled on a particularly eye-catching piece of news. It was a story about Victoria Habour, the sweep of sea that separates the southern tip of the Kowloon Peninsula from Hong …
For Beijing, managing perceptions of the country’s military modernization program is no easy task. On one hand, it is important for China’s leaders to show, both to citizens at home and potential rivals abroad, that they are cultivating a capable and powerful fighting force. At the same time, too enthusiastic a display of armed …
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In this clip from CNN, Kristie Lu Stout interviews Isaac Mao, a pioneering blogger, about Internet censorship in China. The video pretty much speaks for itself, though I’d like to draw out one simple but important point.
More than a month after an online call for anti-government protests in major Chinese cities, a crackdown on dissent continues. On Friday writer Ran Yunfei, who has been in police custody since February 19, was formally arrested on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power,” the advocacy group Human Rights in China …
Orator-in-Chief — Obama’s Libya speech was long on doctrine, but short on details, writes Michael Crowley on Swampland; On Global Spin, Tony Karon explains how the president aligned American and Arab goals.
Sizing Up Social Media — A new study, ‘Who Says What to Whom on Twitter,’ shows that a mere 20,000 Twitter users steal almost …
