Global Voices Online

MediaCritic posts a lengthy critique of the quality of the camerawork seen on Guyanese television.

Bahamians Larry Smith and Lynn Sweeting offer two perspectives on the Bahamian Christmas-time festival of Junkanoo.

“Annoyed”, writing at the Talk Antigua blog, has serious reservations about the attention showered by Antigua upon Michael Perham, the 14-year old British boy who sailed solo across the Atlantic England to Antigua: “I do agree he put the country’s name in the guinness book of world records again. But what about our own local youth that have done commendable things?”

Groundviews has some insights about the Muslim community in Sri Lanka. “At the same time the Sri lankan government is going to enroll 3,000 Muslim people into the army regiment under a Muslim regiment”

The recent cold wave in Nepal meant hard times for many people. More at United We Blog! - “Four more people in Siraha died today due to the cold wave that has hit the Terai region hard in the last few days.”

Kalpana Sahni writes on borders, culture and shared history. “These lines divide families living on either side of a river or they divide linguistic groups (the Punjabis, Kashmiris and Bengalis). While politicians and the military debate and argue over borders, there is another deeper reality that defies these divides.”

~Kashmir~ on the mess that is Jammu and Kashmir's Tourism Department. “The Jammu and Kashmir Tourism will do just one thing: it will speed Kashmir’s ecological destruction because of its failure to embrace the concept of eco-tourism.”

Goa Blog has a comprehensive post on Goa's local drink - Feni. “And the reason is not difficult to understand because feni is the name of the most popular local drink among hard drinks.”

“As new municipal and state governments took office in early December and this month, the many and various mayors and their staffs began taking inventories of what they had inherited from their preceeding municipal governments. It is apparently not a pretty picture” writes Oaxaca-based Mark in Mexico who focuses on the debt inherited by municipal governments in the state of Jalisco.

Ignacio Escolar [ES] has put together an exceedingly useful wiki-based directory of journalistic weblogs in Spanish [ES].

Latino Netroots is a bilingual aggregator of what are described as “Progressive Latinos on the Net.” The aggregator seems to have been set up by Washington DC-based “DaBloguiMan” who blogs at Los Blogueros [ES] and podcasts at El Bloguipodio [ES].

Colin Brayton lends his extensive free time to following the Daniela Cicarelli sex video scandal and the mainstream media misinformation that has followed. Brazil-based Ricardo Carreon says: “My god, we really need the judges to understand how the whole internet works. And we really need them busy on issues that are far more important to all of us that watching the back of a model.”

The Macintosh Users Group of Ecuador [ES] and ALT1040 [ES] are just two of the hundreds of weblogs in Latin America that were following every last word uttered by Steve Jobs at the MacWorld conference this morning in San Francisco.

Liz Henry discovers the group The Latin Playboys via fellow blogger Alisa Lynn Valdes and asks for more music-related links.

Carlos Correa Loyola observes that, although Ecuablogs.com lists nearly 1,000 registered weblogs, many are inactive or unrelated to Ecuador. Furthermore, only a handful are based in the Andean city of Loja. To help promote a sense of community and local awareness, Loyola says he is starting his own informal directory of “Blogs Lojanos“, which he will publish each week along with a series of Creative Commons-licensed interviews with various Loja-based bloggers.

Sean Roberts reports on Karim Masimov, the man nominated to be Kazakhstan's new Prime Minister (who looks poised to be the country's first Uighur Prime Minister) and analyzes what his ascension may indicate about intra-elite politics in Kazakhstan and the country's policy direction.

Kazakhstan's Prime Minister has stepped down. KZBlog reports and surveys media coverage of the news.

Onnik Krikorian reports on how two Armenian independent media outlets are seeking operating funds, and how one of them is trying to break its reliance on handouts.

The Armenian Economist discusses tax holidays for investments by foreign firms in Armenia. This is the last year that such investments qualify, and the blogger asks whether or not the holidays should be extended or whether they are too expensive for Armenia.

Joshua Foust writes on the US and NATO's failures in Afghanistan, arguing that the failures to get the situation entirely under control indicates that the US does not care enough to get the job done.

It's Only Cricket posts the schedule for the upcoming Cricket World Cup, which takes place in the Caribbean this year, along with some notes.

Nicolette Bethel tells us why 2007 is an important year for the Bahamas.

Further Ramblings of a N.Irish Magyar writes about the “two forms” of Hungarian liberalism.

Ukraine List links to embellished and unembellished photos of Pripyat, the abandoned town near Chernobyl.

Siberian Light and Publius Pundit write about the gas-and-oil war between Russia and Belarus.

Pestcentric informs that the ordeal with the Wikipedia article on the Hungarian Revolution is over.

Music and Life - Everywhere! writes about Helene Holzman, a German married to a Jew in Kaunas, Lithuania, before World War II: there is a book based on her diary - and there are still people in Lithuania who remember meeting her in person.

Black Looks writes about The Gates Foundation's double standard in Nigeria, “One group of children who are benefiting from the immunization (measles and polio) programme are those living in the Niger Delta. While the Gates foundation is busy giving away huge sums of money to “good causes” like the immunization programme, the foundation is also benefiting from the returns on investments in Shell, Chevron and the other oil companies operating in the region.”

Mousen in bullog blogs a series of photos on poisonous food in China, which include:
First set: salt, white fungus, cruller, assorted vegetable, pig's fat;
Second set: ancient eggs, eggs, pork, dry pork, duck blood pundding;
Third set: barbeque, vegetable, chips, fish, fruit, bottle water, sausages;
Fouth set: bread, rice, noodle, assorted fruit, wheat, black fungus, milk powder;
Fifth set: hot pot, ham, soya sauce, wine, chilli sauce, cold green bean pudding, assorted meat,
Sixth set: instant noodle, honey, dog meat, bean curd skin, seeds, canned food, plastic lunch box;
Seventh set: white sugar, pop corn, tea, fermented bean curd, vinegar, recycled cooking oil, bean curd and green bean spouts.

Alejandro returns to LAX - LIM with a hilarious post on the clever parody advertisement that turned into the hum-it-everywhere hit of the summer.

The asia pages has some interesting conversations concerning the debate over the invention of instant noodles between Japanese and Korean.

“Latin American blogs resemble their counterparts in the rest of the world but have a particular feature that deserves some attention. They tend to gather themselves around some sites that function as phone catalogue listings, where authors can find themselves and other bloggers under country categories, regional and even gender BlogsMujer forms of belonging. The majority encourage the building of national blogospheres on their own right which are bits and pieces of the great international blogosphere being tracked by Technorati.” That is just one of the many acute observations by University of Bergen professor, Álvaro Ramírez Ospina, who has put together a must-read article analyzing, among other things, the nationalistic nature of blogging communities in Latin America.

South Korea's president's suggestion to name the sea between Japan and Korea (East of Korea) Sea of peace instead of Sea of Japan, has stirred up much reactions and comments.

Overoften in Japundit points out that the name Sea of Japan has never been an issue in Japan and other countries: As if it’s a mutually intractable problem that he’s magnanimously giving ground on. So what were President Roh’s suggestions?

Keso has some comments about blog advertisement and wins much echoes from other bloggers and readers: blogging will lose its fun when it is for direct income.(zh)

Fruss and Fuss cites the story of a science teacher who had to teach a math class. The teacher started the class with an apology to the students. The blogger takes the education ministry to task and says “Is this a comedy of errors? Both the teacher and the students are suffering from the mismatch. No wonder tuition centres are fluorishing around the country.”

Saigonnezumi bears the brunt of construction zeal of his neighbours in Saigon. Vietnam, one of the fast growing economy in the region, is seeing a big rise in construction activities.

Babasiga in Fiji is bored with the hairstyles that the Fijian men sport these days and posts pictures of hairstyles from the past as inspiration.

DPRK studies links to a Malaysian news story about two North Koreans found dead in Sibu, East Malaysia. This is the first time that we have news of North Korean labour being used in South East Asia.