by Sara Mansour, The Daily Star, Lebanon - "I was in the airport in Beirut, and I knew I was in Lebanon because I could see a guy putting out his cigarette on the 'No Smoking' sign," says a straight-faced Mazen Abdullah. The audience chuckles in self-recognition. Abdullah was the opening act for Nemr Abou Nassar's stand-up show at Casino du Liban on Monday. Abdullah and Nassar are among an increasing number of Lebanon-based stand-up comedians who work locally.

Most Lebanese are familiar with stand-up comedy from exposure to American television and, most recently, from the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour - an Arab- and Iranian-American troupe of comics that toured the Middle East at the end of 2007.

by Wanda M. Woodward, Countercurrents, India - I confess at the onset of my letter my bias toward an egalitarian world, one in which there is a more transcendent collective consciousness; a world in which social and economic justice rest gently among the two genders, and amongst the many diverse cultures, ethnicities, and religions. Who would argue that we fall far short of this ideal in contemporary society? What concerns me is that economists, sociologists, public policy experts, and ecologists seem to have overlooked one of the most pressing issues of our time: the mutual exclusivity between capitalism and overpopulation.

by Stella Orakwue, Africasia, UK - I hear that the Jamaicans, the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation to be exact, have “lost” their entire archive of music and sound recordings. Somebody or some people have walked off with the island’s lifetime collection.

by Cindy Sui, Asia Times Online, Taiwan - "It's silly to distinguish between benshengren [native Taiwanese] and waishengren [immigrants]," said Renee Lin, 23, who comes from a family of longtime Taiwanese. "What we young people care about is finding jobs. Many of my friends who graduated from college still haven't found a job."

But the island's politics are more complicated than that.

Taiwan's relationship with arch rival China remains a key concern for many voters. So is the fear of one-party domination by the KMT, which won nearly three fourths of the seats in the legislature in January elections. Still, for many the candidates' family background and identity are key factors that will influence voters' choices.

by By Markéta Hulpachová, The Prague Post, Czech Republic - Schoolbags, satchels and leather seat covers. Each day, hundreds of these items pass through the agile hands of the seamstresses at Sněžka Náchod, a leather and textile producer in east Bohemia. Needleworkers are allegedly a dying breed in the Czech Republic, so company director Miloslav Čermák employs migrant workers from remote countries such as Moldova, Mongolia and Vietnam. However, one nationality is conspicuously absent from this spectrum.

by Ritva Liisa Snellman, Helsingin Sanomat, Sweden - The doctor arrives, sits down and introduces herself. "Hello, my name is Victoria Webster. I have a congenital defect, which is why I speak like this. I hope that it doesn't bother you."

by Tania Branigan, Randeep Ramesh, and Fred Attewill, The Guardian, UK - China today admitted that anti-government demonstrations had spread and that Chinese soldiers shot and wounded four rioters "in self defence" in Sichuan last weekend.

by Jessica Bodmann, The Daily Star, Lebanon - Lebanon has suffered a presidential vacuum since Emile Lahoud's term ended at midnight November 23, 2006. Yet despite the ongoing political crisis, most Lebanese mothers who were interviewed said they were not willing to give up their optimism.

by Dominique Soguel, Women's eNews, USA - A group of returning servicewomen recently declined to say who they'd like next as commander in chief. Instead, as the 5th year of the Iraq war was about to be marked, they offered a women's perspective on military service and its aftermath.

by Kim Zetter, Wired, USA - Lynndie England, the former Abu Ghraib guard whose face became a symbol in 2004 for everything that went wrong with the Iraq War, has blamed the media for the prisoner abuse scandal that brought shame to the military in a new interview with the German news magazine Stern (the interview is in English).

by Nomi Prins, Mother Jones, USA - Fortunately, I have no stock left in Bear (I sold it to support my writing habit), except for a retirement plan worth, well, not so much. My remaining connection is with former colleagues and friends, and people have been emailing me who I haven't heard from in a decade, as though someone had died. Bear was a corporation that underwent, like so many others, explosive growth based on overleveraging subprime and other risky securities. That, coupled with bad management of an unregulated business, is what in the end caused it to run out of cash, much as people who can't pay off their declining valued homes go into foreclosure.

By Barbara Among and Moses Mulondo, The New Vision, Uganda - Politicians have rubbished Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi's advice that African leaders should resist western democracy and only retire when the voters will.

by Anna Clarke, RH Reality Check, USA - Among the 42 million sexually active American women of reproductive age who don't want to become pregnant, 89% use contraception. It's intuitive, then, that plenty of people who oppose legal abortion aren't appalled by birth control.

by Bronwen Maddox, The Times Online, UK - The five years since the Iraq invasion have changed the United States’ view of itself — and changed the Middle East. Iraq is still in a fragile state, only half a step away from civil war and soaring violence, but it is possible to set down some of the lessons learnt.

by Rita Leistner, BBC News, UK - Canadian photojournalist Rita Leistner travelled to Baghdad in 2003 as a freelance reporter determined to get behind the front lines of the war in Iraq. Over the next 18 months she returned to the country several times capturing images of life with the troops - as well as behind the scenes in a psychiatric hospital.

by Susanne Amann, Der Spiegel, Germany - The former Fed chief's message was clear: Despite all the turbulence currently rocking the markets, there's no reason to panic. But it remains to be seen whether people will actually follow Greenspan's advice. After all, the near bankruptcy of Bear Stearns, a company as American as peanut butter and jelly, has reinforced the devastating impression that some of the world's biggest banks no longer have any clue how to steer relatively unscathed out of a seemingly never-ending loan crisis.

by Jane Macartney, Times Online, UK - The worst violence for 20 years in the deeply Buddhist Himalayan region has drawn a tough response from the Chinese Government, which is facing embarrassment as the riots threaten to tarnish its image of unity and stability only five months before it plays host to the Olympic Games.

by Dr. Yu Jie, ChinaDialogue, China - Let’s suppose climate change were tackled with a global carbon tax. This type of tax could not be based on a nation’s GDP, but would be levied on those above the threshold: the further above the threshold you were, the more you would be taxed. In this system, inequality within nations – the so-called “north within the south” – will be seen as no different to inequality between countries. In fact, nations with wide income gaps may be seen, under this system, to have more capacity than those with smaller income gaps.

by Mona Eltahawy, Mona Eltahawy Blog, USA - For this Muslim, no number of Danish cartoons or Dutch films will ever be more offensive than the seven suicide attacks that have killed at least 100 in Pakistan in the past three weeks alone. No slur is as horrible as the 600 people dying in violence in Pakistan since the start of the year.

by Penny Coleman, AlterNet, USA - I missed the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971. At the time I was married to a vet who desperately wanted to put his war behind him -- and he wanted me to help him do it. We were supposed to pretend it had never happened. It didn't work.