The Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) has no choice but to change from being a tool for advancing state propaganda to a public service broadcaster, in a bid to operate within the pillars of democracy.

A little more than a week after journalists at Southern Weekly, one of China’s most daring newspapers, clashed with propaganda authorities in southern China’s Guangdong province over alleged censorship of a New Year’s editorial, China watchers are still trying to suss out what the conflict — which inspired anti-censorship protests both online and in the streets — means for the future of media in China.

The Department of Defense has not institutionalized public diplomacy-like activities throughout its components, belying both hopes that it would internalize these broader concerns into its everyday activities, and fears that the Department's great scale would overwhelm all other US public diplomacy. But the evolving, post Goldwater-Nichols role of the combatant commands and SOCOM did encourage those particular organizations to develop and consolidate a program that looks very much like public diplomacy.

Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, directs the military's elite commando units — the Navy's SEALs and Army's Delta Force — in counterterrorism missions...Key to its propaganda efforts is a collection of websites known as the Trans Regional Web Initiative aimed at foreign audiences. USA TODAY first reported on its existence in 2008, and it appears to have expanded.

Iran, which already has a firewall blocking many Western websites, says it's restricting access to Google's email service and search engine. A government deputy minister announced the ban Sunday on state television, the BBC reported. The restriction follow protests in the Muslim world, including some in Iran, against an anti-Islamic film posted on Google's video-sharing site YouTube.

Citing “strong resentment from the local Chinese community,” the Chinese government has asked the city of Corvallis to force a Taiwanese-American businessman to remove a mural advocating independence for Taiwan and Tibet from his downtown building.

Since their launch in 2004, the Beijing-backed Confucius Institutes have been no strangers to controversy. While their defenders liken them to the Chinese equivalents of the Goethe Institute, the Alliance Francaise and the British Council, their critics have christened them fonts of espionage and propaganda – charges which, though salacious, are still unsubstantiated