Ai: A bird needs to flutter its wings to see if it can fly After nearly two months of silence, artist Ai Weiwei, one of China’s most prominent human rights activists, is back in the spotlight. Over the past few days he’s been tweeting, and today...
Why is South Korea’s blocking the website of a company that offers tours in the North? Robin Tudge reports
Ales Bialiatski, head of Viasna, Belarus's leading human rights group, has been arrested on suspicion of "concealment of income" and tax evasion. Tatsiana Reviaka, A member of Vesna, told Human Rights House Belarus that she believed "the reason...
An extract from Becky Hogge‘s new book, asking if the web can really set us free
Beijing district police last month enforced regulations requiring café owners and other businesses to install web monitoring software. The software costs businesses around 20,000RMB (2,000 GBP), and provides public security officials the identities...
In recent weeks there’s been a big buzz about a new anti-web censorship system called Telex developed mainly by a team of scientists from the University of Michigan. Unlike proxies and VPNs which are easily blocked by censors, Telex buries the...
Liverpool John Moores university has dropped its libel case against Conservative MP Robert Halfon, who had criticised the university’s alleged commercial links with the regime of Colonel Gadaffi.
Ahmed Omed Khpulwak, a stringer working for the BBC in Afghanistan, has been killed during a Taliban raid on a TV station in Uruzgan province, southern Afghanistan. It is unclear whether Khpulwak, 25, was killed by Taliban or Nato forces responding...
Emily Badger speaks to Geoffrey R Stone on what could be the US’s single most important civil liberties issue in the age of the War on Terror
The Turkish-Armenian editor’s assassin has been imprisoned, but questions about wider plot remain. Kaya Genç reports
Olga Birukova examines the online activism that is keeping pressure on Lukashenko
Two bullet trains collided on 23 July in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, killing at least 38 people and injuring 192. In a country where people don't trust the official news media --- favouring internet posts and microblog reports instead ---...