Foreign governments are calling for the immediate release of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was detained by security officials at Beijing airport on Sunday...Human rights groups say it is part of a crackdown on dissent in China following protests in the Middle East and North Africa.

No sooner did Libya's ragtag army of anti-Gadhafi insurgents retreat along the Mediterranean coast toward Benghazi than France's SSP 1 chartered a Falcon executive jet to meet with dissident leaders.

As hundreds of thousands of Egyptians in Cairo's Tahrir Square celebrated the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February, some held up mobile phones to snap photos of the crowd, others sent Twitter messages to their friends and a few wielded signs proclaiming, "Thank you, Facebook."

Foreign military interventions seldom run a smooth course; they have been particularly messy, if not counterproductive, in the vast swathe of lands stretching from the Maghreb to Indonesia.

Smart bombs, clandestine special forces operations, high-profile defections and, now, the arrival in London of a high-ranking Libyan envoy sent by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son, to negotiate the possibility of the family fleeing into exile.

While protests in Syria are increasing in size and scope, the Syrian regime does not appear to be taking chances by parsing out political reforms that could further embolden the opposition. Instead, the Syrian regime is more likely to resort to more forceful crackdowns, which is likely to highlight the growing contradictions in U.S. public diplomacy in the region.

'The Western bombardment of Gaddafi's forces in Libya has become an opportunistic public relations ploy for the US Africa Command and a new inroad for US military stronghold on the continent,' writes Horace Campbell

Inspired by the successful use of social media to fuel popular protests in Egypt and elsewhere, the intifada fan page had amassed more than 300,000 "likes" from users for its proposed May 15 uprising before disappearing Tuesday.