"I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever," read a tweet from “The Colbert Report”last Thursday — in what New Yorker magazine commentator Jay Caspian Kang called a “comedic sin of delivering a punch line without its setup.”

If you don’t know the Ukrainian pop star Ruslana Lyzhychko, you should. She’s known as the Britney Spears of Eastern Europe, except she doesn’t shave her head for attention, she leads political rallies, and she was recently a key figure in the Euromaidanprotests in Kiev. 

Juan Manuel Contreras, a church singer and laid-off electrical supply worker, had been honking his car horn and shouting through a megaphone out of the window for half an hour when he turned to me with a question one might only address to a newly arrived foreigner in Mexico.

The Saudi royal decree against terrorism in February 2014, and later the Interior Ministry declaration in March banning several Islamist groups, can be considered as the general framework of the new security doctrine that will govern the behavior of the Saudi government in the coming period.

The United States is “deeply disturbed” by reports of the death of prominent Chinese human rights activist Cao Shunli, detained in September for staging sit-ins at the country’s foreign ministry, the State Department said on Saturday. The news of her death came on Friday, soon after the start of a session in Geneva of the U.N. Human Rights Council, a body to which China was elected amid controversy last November.

Varenyky are Ukrainian dumplings stuffed with fruit or potatoes and topped with sour cream. Today, they became a symbol of political protest. While tens of thousands of Crimeans went to the polls on Sunday to vote — the result is almost certain to separate their peninsula from Ukraine and join Russia — others expressed their dissent by staying home to cook this most Ukrainian of foods and posting photos and videos of their dumplings to Youtube and Facebook.

Even in the easygoing, laid-back environment of modern-day Los Angeles, bringing Muslims and Jews together to talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict is viewed as playing with fire. For decades, “the Muslim-Jewish dialogue that existed in L.A. only took place at the leadership level, among a handful of left-leaning Muslim and Jewish leaders,” recalls Edina Lekovic, policy and programming director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

On Sunday, January 19, the small city of Nago in northern Okinawa re-elected their mayor. Americans especially will wonder why a local election in a far-off place should matter. Because by voting for Mayor Susumu Inamine people voted against Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the United States military. Local fishermen and farmers voted yes to their traditional way of life, no to American helicopters polluting the pristine waters of Oura Bay.