Global Voices Online

Chinese media guru Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei links to Youtube footage of Chinese president Hu Jintao being heckled at the White House late last week.

“Are you nuts man?,” asks one reader. “You are going to get blocked.”

Bill Gates is visiting Vietnam. Sadgopan, an IT industry veteran, finds lots of excitement in Vietnam for this. He finds strong pro-US sentiment among the people. The blogger also shares some thoughts on Vietnam as a offshore service location.

Luke Distelhorst reports that Ulaanbaatar's governor's office is finally cleaning up the capital for Mongolia's 800th anniversary.

Singapore blogger Lancerlord links to a short video made by Malaysian students that pokes fun at some Singapore-Malaysia issues.

Nanyaar has a chronology of events around the death of an Indian student in Armenia while Onnik Krikorian has a few updates and more photos.

As they occasionally do, a web2.0 war of words has broken out. When Eduardo Arcos typed in the domain wordpress.es he was redirected (ES) to the weblog of the Ferca Network (ES), a Spanish web company run by David Carrero. Walter of HTML Life defends David (ES) saying that he has good intentions, but Arcos follows up saying the best gesture would be offer the domain to the open source WordPress community (ES) instead of using it for a proprietary company.

Ben Paarmann reports on Kazakhstan's Iran policy.

Anarchistian writes on the connection between one's beliefs and being accepted by other Armenians.

Sean Guillory reports on one day's news out of Russia's capital: “Soldiers' Mothers, HIV/AIDS NGOs Under Attack & Anti-Fascist Murdered in Moscow.”

W. Shedd of The Accidental Russophile writes about the demographic situation in Russia.

The beatroot writes that Polish conservatives have joined forces with liberals to fight against GM crops.

According to one Russian historian, about 200,000 people were sent to camps for telling jokes in Stalin's time. The beatroot doesn't find Communist jokes funny: according to him, “the jokes were the serious antidote to the very funny horror of reality.”

Jessica of Life in Moldova writes about gang crime and the corrupt police in a small town in Moldova.

Pestiside.hu reports on how the opposition is taking its defeat in the general elections.

Iryna of TOL's Belarus Blog writes about “public repentance” taking place in Belarus now: “Students, who spent 10 to 15 days in prison after being arrested on the Square or during the March 25th demonstrations, are being forced to declare publicly that their legal participation in peaceful protests against election falsifications was wrong and that they would never do anything like it again. The “repentance” is being staged in front of the entire class which, in turn, must condemn their classmates for their wrongdoings against the state.”

TOL's Belarus Blog considers the EU's introduction of entry bans for 30 Belarusian officials slightly more than a symbolic move: it “won’t bring about a revolution, but in situations like that it will help to provide publicity to Belarusian situation, serve as a reminder to the public — those guys are not welcome in civilized democratic countries because they fooled 10 million people.”

Edward Lucas, the central and east European correspondent of The Economist, has been invited to an unlikely conference on “integration of Belarus into the world media landscape” in Minsk, sponsored by the Belarusian government, but he doubts he'll be granted a Belarusian visa.

It's Friday and Boz has his now infamous poll numbers from across Latin America including a now tighter race in Mexico.

Luís Afonso Assumpção lists his 40 “corruption nominees” from Lula da Silva's Workers Party.

Explaining that Venezuela has already left and that Bolivia is thinking of following, Miguel Buitrago says that most of the achievements of The Andean Community (CAN) are only observable on paper. Movimiento 13 de Abril, quotes Chavez (ES) in his announcement at the Community's recent summit in Paraguay: “CAN serves the elites and multi-nationals, but does not serve the indigenous, blacks, whites, or poor people. It doesn't serve our population and not only does it not serve them, it negatively affects them.” Professor Steven Taylor says that “Chávez may actually have a point (not something I am prone to writing) when he says that the organization is ‘fatally wounded.'” Daniel Duquenal, however, calls the decision “utter nonsense, a gesture just for the glory of Chavez, a diplomatic and economic move that will only benefit Chavez and his trading partners, but not Venezuelans who will surely hurt as hundred of thousand of jobs could be lost.” EGG Blog remembers the Venezuelan “Andean Passport,” (ES) a legacy of Chavez's former support of the community and wonders what will become of them now. Loosely related is a rare English post by Movimiento Boliviano por la Soberanía y la Integración solidaria de los pueblos arguing against an “association agreement” between the EU and CAN.

In The Argentine Metropolis describes a meal at an Argentine oxymoron: the vegan restaurant. “This was not penance for eating steak; this was a celebration of fresh ingredients, the yang to steak's ying.”

Geoffrey Philp views Bob Marley through the lens of philosophies ranging from Joseph Campbell's to Caroline Myss'.

With just 5% of uncounted votes remaining Un Lobo en Peru takes a brief break from the election madness to describe the blooper-filled pageant which sends Fiorella Viñas to the Miss Universe contest as Peru's representative.

Alice Backer rounds up Haiti-related news stories that have caught her attention lately.

“So what else is going on, this fiercely hot Thursday?” writes JT at the Caribbean Beat Weblog. He finds West Indies, the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, and some soul-searching on the part of Caribbean heads of state.

At the Pan Collective, Francine offers an brief treatise on the French creole language.

There's an ongoing debate in the Indian Blogosphere about doing book reviews. Amardeep collates various opinions on the issue and presents his own take on the case.

SerendipityYouCity provides an update on the situation in Nepal by publishing a mail from a director of a boarding school -”It’s 2 o’clock in the morning and curfew has started again in Kathmandu until 8 o’clock this evening. We just finished a round of picking up as many street kids as we can and getting them into shelters.”

London, Lanka and Drums on identity as being born to Sri Lankan parents but being brought up in the UK.

transcurrents.com on “The Sri Lankan army is suspected by residents of Puthur in Jaffna of being responsible for the deaths of five Tamil civilians from the area.”

In a post titled “UDPS is Congolese Political Gold”, UDPS Liege writes (FR) “we are the depositaries of democracy in our country. […] UDPS has not agreed to any alliances with the political parties that use our name. […] The real UDPS is preparing for a final assault on June 30 to fight those who have hijacked power in our country: CIAT [International Committee in Support of the Transition], CEI [Electoral Council], MONUC, Government and Parliament.”

Kalyan finds a bus painted with the logo of Firefox (the browser) in Karnataka.

With screenshots and a statement from Microsoft, the Asiapundit blogger counters the assumption of some that the MSN Spaces blog of illegally-detained Beijing or Bust blogger Wu Hao's sister Nina has been blocked:

“There was an outage of the service for those who were using China Telecom's ISP service - but there was no outage for users of CMC and other ISPs. Further, the problem with China Telecom has now been resolved. The above screen shot was taken minutes ago in Shanghai without a proxy.”

“Hao Wu is still imprisoned without charge ,” he continues. “Tomorrow, he will have been detained for a full two months.”

With a prediction of diplomatic repercussions carrying over well into 2006, AngryChineseBlogger looks at the root causes, location and total cost of damages incurred during violent anti-Japanese protests in many cities across China in early 2005.

Friend Gram at Holidarity shows us how the One China policy affects even food reviews in mainland China's English-language media.

Richard and readers at The Peking Duck add to the discussion on Chinese president Hu Jintao's heckler at the White House yesterday:

“I admire this woman's courage though I don't in any way admire her organization. I don't see anything wrong with the way she was handled, though there's something definitely wrong with the screening process that let her get so close to Hu in the first place. To applaud her as a hero seems a bit much to me,” writes Richard.

Mikhak (Persian), an Iran based blogger & journalist, writes that Ahmadinejad does not act as President of all Iranians. He just continues his radical propaganda and counts on his followers. He adds that Ahmadinejad acts as a candidate for presidential election rather than a President for the whole country.

Congo Watch has a report on the ongoing sexual violence in the DRC - some horrific stories.

South African blog, AfriCAN HOUSEIT reports on more political manoverings in Cape Town which will ultimately impact negatively on the lives of ordinary citizens in area of service provision..”.Read the names and stories of those affected by lack of service delivery on this blog from housing riots and peacefull demonstrations, fraud and corruption, shack fires sewage and electricity - all those things that affect the human habitat in Cape Town;”

Weblog Ethiopia reports on yet another bomb blast, this time in the border region of Jijiga, Gedo. He wonders what the government has to gain (if they are responsble for the bomb) from this action. “Nobody wins from instability in Ethiopia, not even some in the opposition who are calling for a new round of civil unrest (from the safety of Washington, D.C.) knowing full well what will happen”

Naijablog posts on the increased use of herbal medicines (Chinese and indigenous) in Nigeria where several companies have started to acquire licensing for their products.

African Shirts reports on a day of news reports by the BBC on Nigerian. From the Niger Delta militants bombing, to debt repayment and finally a review of one of London's most well known Nigerian resturants “Obalende Suya”

Zimbabwe blog Enough is Enough publishes an interview with a Harare citizen on life in Zimbabwe two days after the recent independence day.

Kenyan blog, The Shipwright Returns writes that the center of the Anglican Church is now in the global south…“If the new Christendom had a world capital based on the location of its believers, it would be somewhere south of the Sahara.”

Zimbabwean Blogger, The Bearded Man reports that the government plans to take back land from some 2000 black farmers who have failed to farm and hand the land back to the white farmers...”In a major policy reversal and the clearest admission yet by the Harare government that its controversial land redistribution programme failed, Mutasa said that the government had asked the white-member Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) to submit names of applicants to receive land repossessed from blacks.”

Nicholas Laughlin posts the seventh instalment of Imaginary Roads, a series of writings on Guyana.

UDPS Liege announces (FR) a peaceful protest to take place Monday, April 24, 2006 in Kinshasa. The Belgium-based opposition party blog explains that UDPS is “determined to receive a favorable response to its memoranda to UN Secretary General Koffi Annan dated November 5, 2005 and March 22 of this year.” UDPS calls for the relevant authorities to guarantee the security of protesters.

Cameroonian blog, Scribbles from the Den asks why Cameroonian doctors are leaving the country to work in Europe. The reasons are explained in an interview with one doctor now living in the UK.

Was Chinese president Hu Jintao set up for face loss in his visit to the United States this week? The EastSouthWestNorth blogger posts photos and translates an analysis which recounts Hu's stop at the White House yesterday and suggests why that might be so:

“During the speech, there was a female protestor. She was able to yell aloud for two minutes and fifteen seconds without any special agent stopping her. This was a rare occurrence. When the police came to take her away, they did not depart through the rear (where there is a passageway for the special agents). Instead, she was taken away in front of the entire assembly against White House and Secret Services regulations. These two aspects showed that the Americans may have deliberately planned this to tell the world that there is freedom of speech in America and to remind Hu Jintao about his problems inside China.”

At Volume of Interactions blogger Aizudding is asking the Malaysian government to reconsider its promise of keeping oil prices subsidised for the consumer until the end of the year. The blogger says that the money spent in keeping the oil prices from going up is better spent in developing alternatives that would ease the dependence on oil.