On her graduation day at the prestigious Kennedy School at Harvard, Yang Jia’s dean called her “China’s soft power”. A decade later, Yang, 49, has probably become more than that — in a country which has the largest population of the disabled in the world, visually impaired Yang is now its symbol of hope.

There are so many stigmas attached to Israel at the moment. Without making this blog sound at all like a propaganda-fuelled promo piece for the nation, I was delighted to find out that Tel Aviv is nothing like most foreigners expect it to be.

The wildly successful viral video campaign to raise global awareness of a brutal Central Africa rebel leader is attracting criticism from Ugandans, some who said Friday that the 30-minute video misrepresents the complicated history of Africa's longest-running conflict.

Other campaigns have used videos and social media to get their message out (consider the Enough Project's campaign against Congolese militias who fund their wars by controlling the trade in "Blood Minerals" such as coltan). But it takes more than having a message worth hearing...

A few nights ago, a video from advocacy group Invisible Children hit the web. Called Kony 2012, it is an attempt to tell the world the story of war criminal Joseph Kony, so that the viewer might feel the burn of injustice and work to put his reign of terror to an end.

Peres deserves credit for his forward-thinking, but his proposition stands on shaky grounds. If, to borrow that second headline (from The Washington Post), Facebook presents a new extra-governmental route to diplomacy, the governments should stay out of the way and let the people speak. But that isn't how it works in certain parts of the world.

The world's nations achieved a U.N. goal of cutting in half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water five years ahead of the 2015 target...The water target was one of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty that government leaders, nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations have been working to achieve, with varying success.

We are facing a young generation that's exposed to a lot of misinformation...We didn't go there to garner support for government policy, but to present a different side of the conflict, and to tell them directly that by calling for boycott of Israel they won't bring hope for peace.