Global Voices Online

Even though the France VS South Korea Match is considered a boring one, there are still 60 plus comments in dissidentdave's match description post in the Marmot's hole. One of the comments goes like this: Dave, I’m korean as well and I admitted i think at least twice in different comment sections. oh well, too bad for the french. you are right, if it happened to koreans, i media/fanbased riot would have broken loose.

Liz Henry has a great introduction to the Chilean women behind the entertaining and informative Club de Lulu (ES). Then, a follow-up with links to the contributors' individual blogs.

“Beijing-2008″ is a huge painting by Liu Yi (刘溢), exhibited in New York in March. Inside the picture, there are 5 women playing ma-joh (2008 Beijing Olympic game). One of the political interpretations by jxhill is that the 5 women are U.S (middle), Taiwan (left near the wall), japan (backward towards the audience), Russia (upside down on right) and China (standing, outside the game) (zh).

AfghaniDan, a US soldier in Afghanistan, talks about his experience & daily life in this country. The blogger
writes “the gardens in the governor's compound give you a good idea of how different life is for the power brokers in Afghanistan, much like anywhere else for that matter. People may be living in dirt outside, but inside the pink walls, life is good”.

There have been much reports about the tradition of cat eating in southern China. What is new this time is that netizen has organized animal rights protest against such tradition. ESWN has a full translation of the recent development.

Ecuadorean blogger Cristhian Caiza Niama, writing from Germany, shows evidence that his visiting compatriots haven't stopped celebrating their team's advancement to the second round.

Afghan Warrior discusses the Afghan government's plan to recruit tribal militias and argues that it is the wrong direction for Afghanistan.

ESWN translates a post about Zhengzhou University riot. At its worst, almost 10,000 people were rioting. The cause of the riot was that the school lowered the status of the university diploma and did not refund tuition fees to fourth-year students as contracted.

Luke Distelhorst has photos of a recent trip to Omnogovi, Mongolia, where he went to help install equipment for a radio station.

Onnik Krikorian carries a roundup of discussions in the Armenian blogosphere.

Leila of neweurasia rounds up the week on their Russian language Kazakhstan blog in English.

Christian Garbis writes about dual citizenship in Armenia and the Armenian diaspora. He asks why some people want Armenian citizenship when the only major difference between that and special residency status is the right to participate in politics.

Melissa de Leon has posted photos of the Kuna people from the autonomous Panamanian region of Kuna Yala (wikipedia), more commonly referred to as San Blas.

In a series of posts on the Indian blogosphere, Desi Pundit features a post on sports and Indian Blogs.

Lives in Focus had a videolog of an interview with Raj, a person living with HIV. “Raj is among the approximately five to ten percent of the global HIV+ population that was infected through contaminated blood five years ago. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated in 2003 that nearly seven percent of AIDS patients who have reported their condition to the National AIDS Program in India acquired the virus after a transfusion of blood or blood-related products like plasma.”

Dubai has power outage, and one of the reasons given was exceeding the allotted supply. Seabee wonders: “People exceeding their allotted supply? Maybe I'm the only one who didn't know that there's an ‘allotted supply'. Or is it a language problem in the reporting?“

Rime Allaf sadly writes; it is necessary today to remind the world – including the Syrian people – of this fact, as in the last six years, somehow, the issue of the Golan Heights has been wiped off the international agenda, being overtaken by Syria's interference in Lebanon (now itself dubbed an occupation by mainstream media) and ridiculous questions of Syrian “seriousness” about peace.

In Morocco, abolition of the death penalty is backed by NGOs such as the Association of Moroccan Bars, the Moroccan Association of Human Rights, the Moroccan Organisation of Human Rights, the Moroccan Forum of Truth and Justice, Amnesty Morocco, and the Moroccan Observatory of Prisons. The NGOs formed a national coalition for the abolition of the capital punishment. It is to be hoped that Morocco will soon join those countries who have turned their back on such a barbaric penalty, Samir said.

Backed by government financing, Germany's public international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, is preparing to beam as much as 24 hours daily of news programming in Arabic this autumn. France's yet-to-be-named CNN-style channel is in development for a year-end opening, along with a Web site in Arabic and later in 2007 an Arabic television version.

The state-owned Russia Today has similar plans for a Web site and Arabic television along with a $40 million budget, while the U.S.-based news giant CNN is holding back for now, preferring to watch the development of its Arabic Web site, which currently attracts more than 300,000 unique visitors monthly, Karim report.

As many had predicted, Mexico Votes 2006 reports that the July presidential election has taken a back seat to the World Cup. Ana Maria Salazar Slack, however, is an informative exception to the rule.

Erwin Cifuentes has a useful recap of the last week in Latin America. Similarly, Boz shares his weekend reading list.

Fernando Casale has posted five songs by Peruvian 60's rock band and punk forerunners, “Los Saicos.”

Christian Espinosa compares videos of the Ecuadorean and Argentine broadcasts of Ecuador's 3-0 win over Poland (ES), noting that the “curious comparison would have before been impossible to make without the new possibilities of sharing video over the internet.”

Cemgen has a post on a Singapore bloggers, who is being investigated by the authorities for posting anti-Christian cartoon on his blog. The blogger claims that he posted the cartoons to provoke a fundamentalist. “If he wanted to put the supposed narrow-minded intolerant “fundy” in his place, he could have just emailed him privately the alleged anti-Christian cartoons instead so that the dispute remained private and not public.”

In Nepal, Inside Stories are the flavour of the month. “One interesting fallout of the summit between the de facto leaders of the “old” and “new” Nepalese states is the rapidity with which the inside stories can now be expected. And, boldly enough, Maoist supremo Prachanda has led the way.”

An elegy for Bangladesh at ElectrikBlues. “for those who think i’ve declared death prematurely, be assured, we’re at war. we’ve got the guns, we’ve got the bombs, we’ve got the fighter jets (and more on the way). but we’re not sure who the enemy is, or what it is we’re fighting for.”

Jeremy Taylor publishes a Table of Contents with links to his very substantial series of articles on Trinidad & Tobago.

Francis Wade overcomes some hesitation and writes about a few recent encounters he's had with the Jamaican police, and the things he learned about himself in the process.

With characteristic eloquence, Jamaican writer Geoffrey Philp explains why he reads.

Archivex Haiti publishes a list of women imprisoned in Haiti compiled by the Haiti Information Project. According to the post, “the vast majority of the women prisoners on this list have never seen a judge in violation of the Haitian Constitution. Most consider themselves political prisoners and were arrested by the Haitian police and/or the United Nations forces after they went to their neighborhoods in search of their fathers, brothers, husbands and boyfriends.”

“Like a piranha without teeth…nah, worse, like a donkey without a bray, that was how I been feeling without this compooter,” writes Guyana-Gyal in her account of the temporarily un-wired life.

Dr. Eloy Gonzalez, a bilingual Cuban doctor resident in Fort Worth Texas, cites a Father's Day greeting from the young daughter of an imprisoned Cuban dissident in order to remind us of the 2004 incident in which the girl, along with the “Ladies in White” (a group comprising wives and female relatives of a group of Cuban dissidents imprisoned in 2003) were attacked in front of the church in Havana where they meet regularly in peaceful protest.

Cayman Bobby is concerned that the high cost of living in the Cayman Islands is driving expats like himself away, including some of his potential colleagues at the Royal Caymanian Police Service: “Something needs to change and it needs to happen quickly. Expats from all professions are leaving the island in droves and before long the basic needs of the island will suffer as a result.”

Indigenous issues blog The CAC Review calls for a boycott of the Disney film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, in a post which also recounts some of the controversy surrounding the filming of parts of the movie on location in Dominica. The post also includes a link to the trailer, which The CAC Review says “clearly shows the Caribs roasting live people on spits and holding captives to be eaten…in a stark reminder of some of the most vile imperialistic imagery produced in the early colonial era. Such images are getting a new lease on life thanks to Disney, which with the resources that rival those of a colonial power, has now dedicated itself to popularizing and internationalizing images of the Caribs as ‘cannibals'.”

The Barbados Labour Party blog gives its political leader — and Prime Minister of Barbados — Owen Arthur a pat on the back for the role he has played in the development of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME).

Lemuel of Deleted by Tomorrow posts the final part of his series on the “the good, the bad, the ugly” of the Slovak politics, and also writes about being bored and depressed by the Sunday election: “when an ex-minister and an MP candidate for one of the minor parties killed himself in a car-vs-train accident yesterday, my gut reaction was ‘Oh, really!? And election-wise this will help him how exactly!?'”

Viktor of Belgrade Blog posts pictures of Serbian fans watching the game against Argentina and writes that they “should have read the signs” to prepare themselves for the disastrous defeat: “But it all started so nicely… we first we beat such quality names in qualifications as Bosnia and Herzegovina, then the country splits but we still go under the same name of Serbia and Montenegro, i think without any Montenegrins in the team, listening to national anthem of a country called Socialistic Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, under the flag of Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, when we really are Serbia. Makes you wonder though - if we manage to get to the World Cup under so strange circumstances, do we really have to go OUT of the World Cup with a bang? Maybe it was unavoidable. But then again - it was 16.06.06, Gelsenkirchen, Germany - we should have read the signs really.”

Meaghan of American For Hire posts part two of her report from a Serbian wedding: “That's right, we were there to buy the bride. While this was once a serious transaction, it's now done very much in the spirit of tradition and good fun. The negotiations were heated, with much waving around of money and arguing, and at one point the groom's brother pretended to walk away, saying ‘She's too expensive. Let's go'.”

Henrik of Hungarian Accent writes on the reaction of the Hungarian blogosphere to the government's attempts to balance the budget. The prime ministers blog is also reviewed.

Paul of Further Ramblings of a N.Irish Magyar writes about smoking in Hungary: “Countless people smoking whilst travelling down the metro escalaters. Security staff and policemen smoking in the Westend Shopping Plaza. Doctors openly smoking in the Baleseti Intezet hospital. Staff smoking in the Ujpest Thermal bathes. People lightening up inside Ferihegy airport.”

J. Otto Pohl writes about historians and the human suffering, quotes from a collection on Estonian women, and accuses certain U.S. university professors of lying: “Here we have ‘a simple Estonian woman' providing more truth about the experience of communism than dozens of leftist university professors in the US who sought and in some cases still seek to justify, minimize and outright deny such crimes.”

Giustino of Itching for Eestimaa writes about Estonia's potential presidential candidates.

Giustino of Itching for Eestimaa writes about Estonians' “most annoying habit”: to not let the well-meaning foreigners like him practice their Estonian - by speaking the foreigners' native tongues in reply.

Bob Green's Anguilla News celebrates the success of the island's cyclists at the OECS Championships athletics meet.

Hezar o yek rozaneh has published several photos from Tehran's Handmade Industry exposition. We can see women in local cloth and handmade decorative products.

Hamad, who calls himself a Moslem reporter, says Iranian President refused to attend a dance performance after official meeting in Shanghai. The blogger admires President's decision and adds the dancers did not wear what we can call cloth (Persian)! Hamad has published two photos of dancers to show how much President's decision was right not to attend this performance!

Do you want to see how Iranian President coaches Iranian national football team? Webgardian has put a link to President Ahmadinejad's meeting with football players on TV. Subtitles are in English.

Nigeria What's New comments that Nigeria is not working and will not work until the “rotten core is cut out”……….The Nigeria Leadership Initiative aims to create a global network of credible and very accomplished community-spirited Nigerian leaders” and their list of “fellows” is impressive, but this is simply elitist.”

Badagry Lagos, writes on being Black and female in the UK…” I just think that white people were born with this stupid privilege that they walk around with throughout their lives; I, on the other hand, have to work 5 times as hard, to get the same thing as the average white person, and I have to deal with the crap that they deal out too?! I'm seriously pissed off. Am I right to be?” YES

Pilgrimage to Self criticises the high price of fashion in Nigeria

Nigerian blogger Molara Wood posts a series of reviews on theatre and literature in Nigeria and the Diaspora

Ijebuman's diary posts on White Privilege referring “As a white person you will never ever understand what it feels like to be one of us, so please until you can walk in my skin you don't know shit…“

Aderemi's Notebook celebrates Ghana's win over the Czech Republic All Africa is waiting and hoping

After a year of blogging, Girl in the Meadow tells us the KBW blogs she reads and why…

Cock & Bull Stories publises a piece entitled “One Man's Worth” about a man that feels so bad he decides to take his own life only to realise at the last moment that “True, no one seemed to care much for him, but how could he expect anyone to care for him if he did not care for himself? Now, supposing he started taking care of himself?”

More great musical reports and links and photos from Steve Ntwiga Mugiri

Kenyan Soccer has a World Cup report with some cool links….

Weblog Ethiopia points to an interesting story in “Indian Ocean Newsletter” which discusses the relationship between a Lebanese businessman, Preem Holdings in Sweden, an Ethiopian-Saudi magnate, a French lawyer and the business/companies they are involved with.

Ethiopundit discusses the issue of ethnicity and politics in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tigray) “Tribal politics of the type practiced by ANYONE in Ethiopia is meant to be divisive and to exacerbate and create resentment and indeed rewrite history to serve the will to power of a few.”

afrika-aphukira remembers Soweto 30 years on through a moving poem to the youth of South Africa

Because We're Here has some disturbing photos of captured child soliders that had been operating in Katanga Province in the DRC. “They had been robbing, raping and murdering in Katanga province for months and had displaced over 100,000 people. It had taken months and months for the Congo army to hound the Mai Mai to point where they were willing to surrender to the UN”