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Chile Seeks Political Transparency

Last week, Fernando Flores (ES), Senator from the leftist coalition, decided to suspend his party affiliation to the PPD because of a corruption scandal with other senators from the same coalition.

The week before, the worldwide ranking of transparency listed (ES), Chile at position number 20 and first in transparency in Latin American.

Referring to the positions of the coalition, Rodrigo (ES) writes:

Vemos acciones de defensa corporativa, aparecen comisiones secretas que ya no lo son y otras rebeliones senatoriales, como la Renuncia y declaraciones del Senador Flores al PPD – pandilleros y camorra - y sus consecuencias posteriores, para luego callar. Nadie podría aceptar a políticos electos con dineros del Estado y menos aún si con dineros públicos se llega al gobierno por medio de la intervención electoral directa o indirecta.. Ese es el gran dilema actual”.

We see corporative self-defense actions, secret committees that are no longer secret and other senatorial rebellions, such as the withdrawal of Senator Flores from the PPD- gang members and pure trouble - and their consequences, that later were silenced. No one could accept elected politicians with government money, and less so if that public money reaches the government through direct or non-direct electoral intervention. That is the current big dilemma.

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Moscow, Now and Then

Veronica Khokhlova · 18:13 · Eastern & Central Europe

On Oct. 31, LJ user dolboeb was at his Moscow office, taking pictures (RUS) of a huge traffic jam down below:

MosGorProbka [Moscow City Jam], across the street from the Russian Foreign Ministry - by Anton Nossik/LJ user dolboeb: “Although my photos are covered by the Creative Commons license, there's still the [Internet charity] fund Pomogi.org, and neither money, nor publicity would hurt it, even if I myself am not charging for my photos.”

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English Russia has just posted a Moscow subway video shot with a cell phone camera during rush hour:

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Back in May 2005, LJ user valkorn came up with a nostalgic postcard tour (RUS) of Russia's capital: the city looks eerily - or blissfully - deserted on some of these photos, scanned from the 1980 edition of Moscow encyclopedia:

“Hi, I'm the daytime traffic flow on Gorky Street.”

Below are the translations of the captions from the rest of this interactive, talkative series:

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USA: Video-sharing places L.A.'s police in the spotlight

Sameer Padania · 18:09 · Americas

Hop over to Technorati right now and you'll see that six out of the top fifteen videos being linked to by bloggers show the same incident - University of California police officers using a taser gun on an Iranian-American student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, in the Powell Library at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). Here's one of those videos, from UCLA's student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, which explains the story (which contains some graphic imagery and abusive language):

For more background and reaction, take a look at Iranian group blog Iranian Truth's coverage of this story. There may be more coverage in the Persian-language blogosphere - Los Angeles has such a significant Iranian population that it's sometime humorously called Tehrangeles…

The UCLA incident is one of three videos of different incidents showing police in Los Angeles appearing to use excessive force when arresting suspects. All three videos were shot by ordinary citizens. The first video of the three emerged on YouTube, and showed an LAPD officer punching a handcuffed suspect repeatedly in the face after a foot chase. The second video, which has not appeared online yet, but was shown as evidence to the L.A. Times by the victim's lawyer on Monday 13th November, involved a homeless, handcuffed suspect being doused in pepper spray by the arresting officer. The officer has since been cleared of wrongdoing, citing the officer's restraint in the face of the victim's “belligerent, threatening and combative behavior”.

Emily at PicturePhoning.com provides links to other incidents involving police captured on video by citizens both in the USA and elsewhere. This seems to testify to a trend that can only grow as more and more people get access to videophones. Some groups are encouraging citizens to use their phones and cameras to record abuses by the police and to upload the clips to video-sharing sites. Sherman Austin, a founder of Cop Watch L.A., a police watchdog website, told a Yahoo! reporter that:

We urge everyone to have a camera on them at all times so if anything happens it can be documented. The concept of patrolling the police is something we are trying to push as a form of direct action.

Do you think this could be an effective form of scrutiny of the police?

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Voices from Kazakhstan

Leila Tanayeva · 15:30 · Central Asia & Caucasus

Kazakh President in Aralsk by lambro

“Kazakhstan invented a national chess game. Introduced a new chess piece “President”. It can go as it wishes and take whatever it wishes to take”, jokes LJ user kubekov (RUS).

President's New Initiatives

It is usually a case in Kazakhstan that the President starts new initiatives, announcing them sometimes expectedly, sometimes not quite. This gives a lot of room for public deliberations - and online discussions. Let us see how the following new statements were discussed in Kazakhstan blogosphere. (more…)

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Jamaica: “I am HIV”

Georgia Popplewell · 13:55 · Americas

lingua → fr

It's widely acknowledged, in the Caribbean and elsewhere, that the fear of stigma and discrimination is a major factor preventing people with HIV/AIDS from seeking treatment or from admitting their HIV status publicly.

For this woman, however, photographed in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica by blogger and Flickr user Ria Bacon, social stigma is hardly a concern. As Bacon writes on her blog:

“When I asked to take her picture, I suggested that I wouldn’t photograph her face. “Nah man,” she replied. “P’haps udda people learn from my mistakes.”

When I showed her the picture, she smiled sadly: “Bwoy, dat a huggly face!” [Boy, that's an ugly face!]”

The Caribbean is second only to sub-Saharan Africa in its rates of HIV/AIDS infection. At the end of 2005 it was estimated that 25,000 people in Jamaica — or 1.5% of the country's population between the ages of 15-49 — were living with with HIV/AIDS. Haiti, the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago are the Caribbean territories with the highest incidences of HIV/AIDS.

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