A congressional debate over how best to promote Internet freedom abroad is about to run into budget politics. A little-known provision in both Senate and House stopgap plans would strip the State Department of some of its funding for technology that breaks through Internet censors.

If you're wondering whether this a joke -- it indeed is. But it also isn't. The Global Times is not in the business of emulating The Onion, the popular online spoof newspaper, but in the serious business of exercising Chinese soft power by providing its take on news around the world.

The dashboard tallies the daily number of tweets about developments in each listed country (the site is currently tracking Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain) and shows the average number of such tweets per minute for each country.

If America wants to strengthen its relationship with the Arab world, connecting with the next generation of Arab leaders is key. As President Obama's special representative to Muslim communities, Farah Pandith, once explained, "These youth are keen to be connected to others, to share ideas and to take part in building stronger communities."

Recent developments in the Arab world have shown signs that the so-called “demonstration effect” has been working. That is, Egyptians watching the uprising in Tunisia against President Ben Ali on al Jazeera Television were inspired to copy it...

Journalists in Turkey marched in protest on Friday after police arrested 10 reporters and writers, detentions that prompted the European Commission to warn the EU candidate country over its democratic credentials.

As a democratic revolution led by tech-empowered young people sweeps the Arab world, Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, shares a profoundly optimistic view of what’s happening in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and beyond — at this powerful moment when people realized they could step out of their houses and ask for change.

As the Cold War was ending in the late 1980s and early '90s, Western nations, confident of a lasting peace, began to neglect the tools that had sustained them in the ideological war against communism. In the US, institutions of public diplomacy and strategic communications were disbanded...