Global Voices Online

The Kenyan blogger, Kachumbari, who wrote from a village in Central Kenya has passed away:
“I just found out from Ndesanjo that Kachumbari was killed in a car accident several weeks ago. His cousin Samuel offered an obituary and explanation of his death on the blog - Kachumbari had travelled to Nairobi to buy goods for a store he was setting up in Nyahururu, and went to visit a friend who lives in the downtown. He was hit by a hit and run driver and died while enroute to Kenyatta hospital.”

“For decades, African cinema has been poised for the kind of international breakthrough that Asian and Middle Eastern films have enjoyed. There are lots of stories to be told and there have been directors willing and able to tell them, but the financial resources available to filmmakers on other continents aren’t within easy reach of their African counterparts,” writes Sociolingo.

Zimbabwean cartoonist joins the debate around the Domestic Violence Bill, “He raises an interesting issue, writing at some length about the ill-treatment of maids by their female employers, discussing this as woman-on-woman violence and asks whether this form of domestic violence will be included in the Domestic Violence Bill,” via Kubatana Blog.

Home of the Mandinmories writes about torture and coercion of the alleged coup plotters in the Gambia: Browsing through the Point today, a story on the court martial of Captain Yahya Darbo caught my eye. I wish I can say I told you so, but the abuse and indignity suffered by the victims will make your blood boil. This was what I wrote in march when these guys were paraded on national television and forced (in my opinion) to make confessions.

At neweurasia, Vadim discusses the HIV/AIDS problem in Tajikistan.

The Atyrau Informant gives a tip on what shoes to wear to make it through Atyrau's winter mud.

Ben Paarman notes that Kyrgyzstan's Mailuu Suu has been listed as one of the ten most polluted sites on earth by a US environmental group. Elsewhere in Central Asia and the Caucasus, a site in Azerbaijan makes the list.

Kotaji puts together analysis on North Korea nuclear test and its effects.

Occidentalism summarizes the buzz over Mt Geumgang tourism project. Reports said that Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill demanded the supension of “inter-Korea project” as a part of the sanction against North Korea nuclear test.

Logan Wright points out that Agricultural bank of China is following the bailouts and the overseas listings of the other large state-owned banks (Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank). This time it may ask for a USD$100 billions tag!

Positive solution discusses whether social harmony is possible with one child policy.

Registan.net notes that Turkmenistan's president has unveiled a building shaped like a book that is a gift to the country's media and dedicated to free media. The author notes that this is quite an irony as independent journalists are a rarity in Turkmenistan.

Joel Martinsen in DANWEI translated an article from Nanfang daily on a prosecution resulted from a political poem in Chongqin.

Peace Corps Volunteer Trent Milan posts a journal detailing the planning for the upcoming rodeo in Kochkor, Kyrgyzstan.

Ellen Fields has been reviewing Latin America-focused weblogs in English for quite a while now. Here is a list of every blog she's reviewed so far.

In his inimitable style, Rob Rivera let's loose with “Panamanians and My Rants.”

Both Ana Maria Salazar and Mark in Mexico relate, in their respective styles, the heightened political ambitions of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO). Colin Brayton describes the murder of “Pánfilo Hernández, an elementary school teacher from Zimatlán, who was shot around 9 p.m. by unknown persons traveling in a blue Jetta with mirrored windows.”

La Gringa gives a lesson in bi-national cuisine; a step-by-step explanation of how to make “Honduran-American tortillas.”

Citizen media and the Chilean government continue to collaborate. This time Atina Chile announces its alliance with the Ministry of Culture [ES]. According to the post, a series of joint projects will soon be announced.

It'll be a busy weekend in Sao Paulo. Made in Brazil explains why.

Where is Jorge Julio Lopez. That's what all of Argentina wants to know “a month after 77 year-old Jorge Julio Lopez disappeared, a key witness in the recent trial against former police official Miguel Etchecolatz, who was sentenced last month to life imprisonment for his involvement in the last dictatorship in Argentina.

Open Source Radio will be having a dialouge on their show tonight about recent events in Turkey with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk to the passing of a bill in France on the Armenian Genocide. Global Voices‘ author Deborah Dilley will be interviewed as well as Murat Altinbasak from Amerikan Turk.

According to media, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. A teenage blogger, Kourosh Ziabary wrote an open letter in his blog to Minister of Communication and criticised government on this subject [Fa].

Estavisti writes about the final results of the parliamentary election in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

LEvko of Foreign Notes thinks that the Ukrainian “saga” of “coalitions and oppositions” is over.

“The essential tools of pirates: blank CDs, blank DVDs, external hard drives, and other copy-related technology, are about to get more expensive in Slovenia,” reports The Glory of Carniola.

The beatroot writes about the British National Party and groping - in Poland and in Britain.

Balkan Baby writes about his hitchhiking experience in Macedonia.

Declan Butler posts a letter on the plight of the Tripoli Six that the New York Academy of Sciences has sent to Mu’ammar al-Gaddafi.

A Fistful of Euros writes about the upcoming presidential election in Bulgaria.

Atanu Dey on the renaming of Indian Airlines as ‘Indian' - “But removing the “airlines” and just retaining “Indian” is as astoundingly stupid as one can ever get. So now when you say “Indian” you don’t know whether you are talking about food, clothing, land, thought, behavior, or . . . an airline! Making a bad thing worse is not an improvement.”

ravana.wordpress.com on why no one talks of sex in Sri Lanka. “We never get taught sex education in school. Even though there was a chapter on the sexual reproduction system in my GCE ordinary Level Science textbook in school, this topic was successfully ignored by the teacher. I just thought he was skipping it because he feared the dynamite laden questions the horny and curious 15 year-olds in his class had for him.”

An Anthropologist Wannabe on acid attacks on women in the subcontinent. “Being only 10 years of age, I didn't know the damage that acid could cause so imagine my shock when I saw Rivalli several months later to find half her face had been eaten away by the acid and she had a permenant limp owing to damage caused to her feet by the acid.”

A Time To Reflect on advertising that quite burns the eye. “if I did have the option of tagging outdoor ads with “this sucks”, I know where I would start… with that serial on Zee TV which ran those terrible teasers all across Mumbai and Delhi last month which said among many other appalling things - “Bete ek mannat, betiyan ek bojh” (boys are a blessing, girls a burden) and “Bete banaatey kanoon, betiyan khaana” (boys make the law, girls, food).”

Nepali Netbook reflects on the UN Security Council Debacle. “As if the vote count wasn’t humiliating enough, the government and the Maoists have been caught in a sickening blame game over Nepal’s failure to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council.”

Drishtipat highlights some of the positive economic news in Bangladesh. “In spite of the dreadful political instability that constrains our entrepreneurs, the economy seems to keep growing at a 6% rate, which makes one wonder what our true growth potential would be if we could just get rid of the political and institutional bottlenecks.”

“As the political terrain gains momentum for the 2007 general election in the country, the immediate past-president of the Information Technology Association of Nigeria (ITAN), Mr. Chris Uwaje, has said that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) knowledge and literacy should form the prerequisite for political aspirants,” writes IT Realms.

Is Black Looks going to touch electric fences in South Africa?:
“Very scary these electric fences. The house next door has one and I am so tempted to touch it just to see what would happen and if it really works. I am not sure which is more scary, the fence itself or me having this pushing desire to touch it. I am still here so no I havent done it yet. Coming from Nigeria the gates, bars, fences and wild dogs are no big deal. The only thing is we do not have electric fences since the electrity supply in Nigeria is so erratic that it would be a waste of time.”

Reacting to Madonna's adoption of a Malawian baby, Afrika-Aphukira writes:
“For Mr. Yohane Banda, who had never heard of the pop diva Madonna until she visited Malawi last week to adopt his 13 month-old son David, the closest he could relate with the material girl was the word Dona, meaning rich white woman, in Malawian parlance. In a matter of days, he now knows her, and the rich guy Guy Ritchie, as the new parents of his son. My initial reaction to the news was amazement at how a child whose father was alive and available could be termed an orphan, and be considered for adoption.”

Ethan Zuckerman writes about a radio show on the political tensions in Somalia:
“My friends at Radio Open Source are putting together a show on the political tensions in Somalia - their overview of the political situation is an excellent one, and reflects the difficulty they’re going to have in getting enough viewpoints around the table to build an accurate radio show - Somalilanders, Puntlanders, supporters of the provisional government, pro-Islamist Somalis, as well as Ethiopians - who are already weighing in on the comment thread.”