Imprisoned in China and with close family members forbidden to leave the country, the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, an empty chair representing his absence at the prize ceremony here. Noting Mr. Liu’s absence, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, said to a standing ovation: “This fact alone shows that the award was necessary and appropriate.”...

U.S. Embassy Cables: Use our interactive guide to discover what has been revealed in the leak of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Mouse over the map below to find key stories and a selection of original documents by country, subject or people. Click on red dots for latest stories…

Violent protests, ignited by preliminary presidential election results that were widely considered suspect, shut down this troubled country on Wednesday and threatened the fragile stability that has held since the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake. Businesses and schools were shuttered, streets emptied of traffic and the international airport closed. Angry protesters set fire to the party headquarters of President René Préval’s chosen successor, and many hundreds marched on the electoral council offices, where United Nations peacekeeping troops repelled them with tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades...

The new year is looking brighter in at least one respect. Thursday, color authority Pantone plans to announce that its color of the year for 2011 is an intense pink it calls "honeysuckle."...

Restaurant and bar owners in China have been summoned to local police stations and warned against allowing large gatherings on Friday. Some lawyers, writers and academics have been stopped at airports from boarding their flights; others have been forcibly taken to the countryside. Known activists are under house arrest. And today, several foreign media Web sites and television stations were blocked. Chinese police have said they were taking these actions to guard against a threat to national security. The threat, apparently, is the 54-year-old bespectacled intellectual Liu Xiaobo, currently serving an 11-year prison sentence in China's northern Liaoning province for the crime of "inciting subversion of state power." Liu in October was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Since neither Liu nor any of his family members are being allowed to leave China to attend Friday's ceremony in Oslo, the Nobel committee organizers said he will be represented by an empty chair...

Garry Trudeau on The Colbert Report, Monday, December 6, 2010...

Garry Trudeau has criticized many people and institutions in the 40 years since he first started drawing Doonesbury, the Pulitzer-Prize winning comic strip. But his latest cause is a personal one: he has come to the defense of two of his more colorful characters who’ve been banished from a Connecticut college campus...

”Doonesbury” has a centerfold, and it’s not Boopsie. If you pick up the latest collection of comic strips by Garry Trudeau, you will be impressed by its heft — at nearly 11 pounds, it is not the floppy little compilation that fits neatly atop the toilet tank. The new 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective (Andrews McMeel, $100) gives this venerable comic the luxe treatment. Not just a coffee-table book, it could come with legs and be a coffee table...

Not since the invention of bacon and eggs has the collision of fowl and swine tasted so good. A game called Angry Birds is dominating the best-selling-applications charts for Apple's iPhone with a simple, whimsical premise: Players turn different species of scowling birds into projectiles with which to crush a collection of grunting pigs scattered around various ramshackle structures. More than 12 million copies of Angry Birds have been sold since it went on sale late last year, most of them 99-cent downloads for iPhones and iPod touches, according to Rovio Mobile Ltd., the Finnish company that created the game...