Over the weekend, Cambodia’s opposition coalition, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), held a large rally in Phnom Penh to protest the national election commission’s ratifying of the results of this summer’s election. The national election commission—which is controlled by the long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP)—essentially said that all the results of the summer national election were valid, that Prime Minister Hun Sen’s CPP had won 68 seats in Parliament, enough to form a government, as compared to 55 for the CNRP.

Thousands of messages posted on the Internet every day in China get censored. Until now, little has been known about how the Chinese censorship machine works — except that it is comprehensive. "It probably is the largest effort ever to selectively censor human expression," says Harvard University social scientist Gary King. "They don't censor everything. There are millions of Chinese [who] talk about millions of things. But the effort to prune the Internet of certain kinds of information is unprecedented."

The video from Kafranbel, a rebel-held village in northern Syria, has been sent by e-mail to members of the United States Congress and posted repeatedly on their Web sites — often in long strings of comments about Syria that have flooded unrelated posts about health care or the openings of new constituent offices.

Pope Francis isn’t eating much today—he’s fasting and praying for Syria, and hundreds of thousands of Christians across the globe are joining him. Today, during a five-hour evening prayer service for Syria in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis challenged the tens of thousands gathered there to rethink approaches to conflict as the fighting in Syria escalates and as the United States and France contemplate a military strike.

Inspired by Egypt’s “Tamarod” (rebellion) campaign, a Tunisian petition has so far collected around 1.7 million signatures in a move to oust the current Islamist government, the group’s founder said in an interview with the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat newspaper published on Monday. The founder Mohamed Bennour said the group is determined to bring down the current government, regardless of any attempts for national dialogue between the opposition and the governing authorities.

Since the military ouster of Muslim Brotherhood-backed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi on July 3, Egypt has been in turmoil. The country is operating under emergency law, and a strict curfew is enforced from 6 AM to 9 PM, except on Fridays when civilians must be indoors by 7 PM. Over 1,000 civilians died last month during the bloody standoff between the Egyptian Army and Muslim Brotherhood members. These dangerous and violent battles pushed revolutionary youth off the streets—the original organizers who fought for democracy since January 25, 2011.

In the heat of a Cairo summer, the battle lines have been drawn. In the tense standoff, Abdelazim Fahmy, better known as Zizo Abdo, finds no room on the street for revolutionaries like himself. I met with Zizo at a downtown Cairo café called Hikayitna—Arabic for “our stories.” We’re a stone’s throw away from Tahrir Square, which has been cordoned off by the military with barbed wire, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. Soldiers man checkpoints into the square, searching bags and requesting identification.

How is social media affecting political participation in Brazil? Fábio Malini, who studies data patterns in Brazilian social media, spoke to AS/COA Online about how Twitter is changing the ways Brazilians interact with the government, as well as the role of social media in Brazil’s June protests. One of the heads of the Research Laboratory on Internet and Cyberculture (Labic) at the Federal University of Espirito Santo, Malini uses big data and data visualization to explore the evolution of social media in Brazil.