Global Voices Online

Stories

Kuwait Blog Rounds Up

Bader · 23:26

Kuwait has been buzzing lately with religion and political talk. With the harsh events in Paksitan with the earth quake. Like Faith sending her thoughts and prayers to the survivors of the Asian earthquake and wonders about the current natural disasters have any religious end of time feelings. These events also has Misguided questioning what is the reason for all of these disasters, is there a reason for all of these disasters? Is God testing the humanity's compassion? Kuwait Tranny wants to know what the hypocritial religious scholars have to say about the disasters in Pakistan? Is God punishing the muslims there like what happened to the sinners in USA with Katrina.

Following with this hypocrisy Elegance breaks down a religious poster grammatically, theologically and politically that pledges it allegiance to Egyptian Husani Mubarak as a leader that is supported by God.

Ayya places her opinion on the current rise of the divorce rate in Kuwait how it is related to Islamic Shariya law's not catching up with the current global trends of a dual income house hold. Since the wife may not be allowed to work but still needed to present financial support she has to resort to her inheritance or personal family income as a money line.

McArabian introduces the Kuwaiti blogging community to GeoCaches and had us going on a little treasure hunt with our GPS devices trying to find the cache located somewhere in Kuwait.

The poltical activity this past week has been around Sheik Salem Al-Ali press release on his dissatisfaction of the current heads of the Kuwait government last week. Kuwait has been buzzing with rumors and speculation on what is going to happen next in the line of succession as Amir of Kuwait.

BooJam talks about the differences of living in Kuwait compared to the UK and the joys he has living here with the sunny skies compared to the grey clouds of England. The low gas price, and the customer trust, and the overall safety.

As you recall last week there was an online campaign started to boycott the current racist shows on Ramadan TV. Well, in only 1 week a
major Kuwaiti newspaper had the logo with an article supporting it on their front page.

2 comments · »»

South Asian blog roundup

Rezwan · 08:25

Bangladesh:

- Rifat of ‘Close your eyes and try to see' discusses premarital sex in the context of Bangladesh.

- Shappir of ‘Bring your own Shisha' recollects the story of Joseph/Yusuf/Yosef, the prophet of three religions to uphold the virtue of forgiveness.

- Razib of ‘Me, myself and Bangladesh' links to a report that Designers from Bangladesh are using khadi for designing bridal sarees and suits. What more they are fast becoming popular in India.

- Sadiq tells about the golden rules of various religions in his blog “Inspirations and Creative Thoughts”.

- Salam of ‘Salam Dhaka' comments that the current Bangladeshi government is not doing good for poor people.

India:

- Selva of ‘The Scientific Indian' tells how an American outsourced his life to India.

- Madman blogs his lunch in an Italian restaurant. Yummy!

- Rajesh Jain of ‘Emergic' quotes two gems on ‘Digital divide' and ‘Computers and Education'.

- Shaksi of ‘To each its own' thinks of the Parsi community in India as a role model for the rest of the Indians.

Maldives:

- Ahmed has had it with the elderly people.

Nepal:

- International Nepal Solidarity Network reports that the identity and movement of all Indian and Nepalese nationals crossing the Indo-Nepal border will be recorded from November 1 by border security forces of both the countries.

- Dinesh of ‘United We Blog' remarks that the Nepali political parties want democracy, but the King talks election. This draws an interesting debate.

- Laetitia-Marie of ‘Karma Sonam Gurung' reports that the national human rights commission in Nepal accused both Maoists and security forces of failing to protect child rights as per national and international laws in a recent report.

- Binita Shrestha blogs from New York and brings to us all about court reporting.

Pakistan:

-Mudassir of ‘Pakistani perspective' links to some online credit card donations for Pakistan's earthquake relief.

- ‘The Glasshouse' posts some heartbreaking facts about the recent Quake. He also takes a critical look at Pakistani leadership dealing with the disaster.

- Shirazi of ‘Light Within' links to some Pakistani bloggers response to the quake. Maria posts roundups of media responses to the quake.

-Metroblogging Lahore has lots of info and links of the quake.

- Pakistani Bloggers like Sepoy of ‘Chapati Mystery' are taking personal initiatives to raise money for the victims.

Sri Lanka:

- Marisa Wikramanayake discusses the question of whether there is such a thing as a just war?

- Via ‘Lanka Citizen' the voice of the ordinary public warns the politicians for accountability.

- Shandy, a British expatriate writes about his travel in many beautiful destinations in Sri Lanka, with lots of pictures.

- Kate Baumgartner posts some beautiful pictures from Sri Lanka.

0 comments · »»

Indonesian blogs: Top blogs, taxpayer, reshuffling and acquisitions

Enda Nasution · 02:54

Top 100 Indonesian blogs

Indonesian blogosphere buzzing yesterday when Priyadi release his list of top 100 Indonesian blogs. Sorted by how many blogs/pages links to your blog, Priyadi showed 100 most popular Indonesian blogs from 460 blogs that he compiled.

The list is not perfect but it's a start. He estimated there are 10,000 Indonesian blogs on Internet and planning to make a more comprehensive list based on larger Indonesian blogs database

Other Indonesian bloggers followed with their version of the list shortly, sorted by other methods.

Increase the number of Indonesian taxpayer

Love letters from Indonesian Directorate General of Taxation are hot. Many Indonesian, somewhat rather confused, received this “love letters”, a notification of Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), or NPWP in Bahasa Indonesia, while have no idea what to do about it due to the lack of information on this matter.

Apparently this is a part of effort to reach a target to increase the number of Indonesian taxpayer from 2 million people to 10 million by 31st October.

Yes, with 240 millions population, it is rather surprising only less than 1% of us are paying tax. Therefore, the government has every rights to try to increase tax paying citizens, and many Indonesian are more than willing to pay if only that the staff of Directorate General of Taxation was not notoriously known to often pocketed the tax money themselves.

Hopefully, this effort to increase tax paying citizens has a positive consequences where more Indonesian will pay more intention and demand more government accountability.

Cabinet reshuffling, acquisitions and Google Inc.

Yosef Ardi at Indonesia Today has a round up (in English) of situation confronted by Indonesian political parties regarding cabinet reshuffling, demand voiced by many public element due to disappointment of economic ministries under President SBY administration.

He also named 2005 as the Malaysia's year of acquisitions with so many Malaysian companies acquired Indonesian companies, just like 2004 and 2003 was for Singapore albeit with totally different reaction and sentiment from Indonesian.

And as noted by Jalan Sutera, a columnist over at Bloomberg posed an interesting question, “Would You Rather Own Google or Indonesia?” citing the fact that in April, Google Inc. surpassed Indonesia’s entire stock market in value.

As I said, interesting hypothetical question, but in the real world the first thing that come to mind is the phrase dotcom bubble. The savvy long term investor will choose Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, an archipelago of some 18,000 islands with rich natural resources –including oil — (even tough currently kind of mismanaged) that make the world’s powerful nations salivate over the 7 years old Internet search engine.

And yes, the article suggested the same thing in the end.

1 comment · »»