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Welcome to the geo-information age. Along with cyberprobes and computer worms like Stuxnet, which at least temporarily disabled Iran's centrifuges without a missile being fired or a bomb dropped, Wikileaks is redefining national security as we've known it.

Is Internet freedom an absolute, universal value like freedom of speech? If there are limits, how and by whom can they be established? Is crying fire or scaling firewalls anymore acceptable in cyberspace than in physical space? What is the impact on the discourse between nations, cultures and individuals? In this section, we gather a collage of comments from various key players from Google to Wikileaks to the US State Department along with comments by one of the most cogent analysts of the Net and the president of Turkey.

"Sami Al-Haj should never have been held so long," said secretary general Robert Menard in a statement released in Washington. "US authorities never proved that he had been involved in any kind of criminal activity. This case is yet another example o

A day after the interim PM speech on guaranteeing Fiji media freedom, Mr. Evan Hannah, the managing director of the Fiji Times was detained and confirmed to have deported out of country. AuCorp, solivakasama, Babasiga and McKenzie have their says.

This article argues that media in China today enjoys greater leeway for independent expression than popularly perceived outside that country, and analyzes vectors responsible for this transformation. It discusses Western and Chinese media models and deconstructs the view that while the West provides for free press, media in China provides no room for independent, anti-hegemonic thought streams. It establishes that while both media are subject to similar pressures and identify with a near similar set of social and ethical responsibilities which shape their discourse, the manner in which the two construct discourses are different, and, this manifest difference, rooted in dissimilar cultural, historical and audience realities has resulted in misconceptions regarding Chinese media. To reinforce this argument, the article analyzes articles from the Shanghai Daily, and demonstrates how, much like its Western counterparts, it too represents different sides of the debate even on issues sensitive to the state such as democracy and Tibet, albeit in a uniquely Chinese way. The article examines vectors responsible for transformation of Chinese media in the post liberalization phase, especially the Internet, and the concomitant changes they have brought in media practice. The article emphasizes the need to culturally contextualize media analyses.

"The paper revisits participation and decentralization in relation to local clientelism, arguing that they share the personalization of links between residents and the state and the local possibility to adapt state policies. The line between decentralization-participation on the one hand, and clientelism on the other, is therefore easily blurred. The paper then argues that clientelism is not per se anti-democratic, some forms allow for local and immediate accountability of politicians. However, in most cases, it contributes to fragment or sedate local organizations or social movements and it prevents contestation of existing policies and dominant power structures. The paper thus challenges the idea that the promotion of decentralization and participatory institutions intrinsically leads to more democratic forms of government."