Eight-minute video documentary of the prototype of Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop, which premiered yesterday at the WSIS summit in Tunis. Andy Carvin talks with the chief technology officer of the initiative and gets a first-hand look at this highly anticipated device.

Video documentary of my July 2005 visit to the Liberian refugee camp in Buduburam, Ghana. I learn about the challenges faced by Liberians forced to flee their homeland, as well as some of the training programs available to them. I visit one of the camp's telecentres, as well as an women's literacy support group. Music used with permission of Alula Records.

Nine minutes, 50 megabytes.

Low-res version (20 megabytes):
http://www.andycarvin.com/video/refugees-low.mov

Video montage of a telecentre based at a girls school in Comilla, Bangladesh. The telecentre is run by Relief International's Schools Online program, which coordinates 20 telecentres across the country.

Video of bicycle rickshaw traffic in Comilla, Bangladesh.

If you have a blog, here's what you can do. Sometime tomorrow, take a break from whatever it is you usually blog about, and post something constructive related to disaster relief. You can keep it topical to your blog; or, you can just dedicate blog space to listing websites where people can donate money (maybe even challenge people to match your donation). Or, share a story of a hurricane survivor. This goes for photo bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers as well - there's no reason why this should be text-only.

Though this is inspired by Hurricane Katrina, the goal is to deal with disaster relief efforts worldwide, posting about a disaster relevant to your community. Post lists of supplies needed for victims of yesterday's stampede in Baghdad. Post an update on how your family is recovering from the tsunami. Post multi-lingual resources for African families in Paris displaced by the recent apartment fires. Blog about whatever you choose, as long as it supports some kind of disaster assistance in a constructive way.

When you've posted to your blog, be sure to include a link to this Technorati tag: International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day. That way, when people follow that link, they'll be able to find a collection of all relevant postings published throughout the blogosphere. There will also be an RSS feed on that page, which can be used to aggregate all of the postings and display them on a single webpage. I plan to aggregate them on my Katrina Aftermath blog; you can do the same. (Later, I'll post a javascript on my Katrina blog to make it easy for anyone to do this - more soon.) One collection of disaster relief resources, countless bloggers. That's the power of the blogosphere.

So please join me tomorrow and participate in International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day. Take a break from whatever it is you normally blog about - even if it's just for one post - and give back to the Net.

Video of a Cambodian dance troupe performing a blessing dance at the opening of the Lowell Water Festival, one of the largest Southeast Asian festivals in the US, organized jointly by the local Cambodian, Lao, Vietnamese and Thai communities.

Two hilltribe girls in Mae Sai, Thailand, standing along the Thai-Myanmar border, by Andy Carvin.

“The Chadian government’s move follows a report last month by Human Rights Watch naming these six and 35 other leading Habré-era figures, many accused of torture and killings, who still hold key posts in Chad. Those dismissed include the powerful director of the Judicial Police who was deputy director of national security under Habré; a surveillance chief who was the director of Habré’s dreaded political police, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS); and a man described by a Chadian truth commission as one of Chad’s ‘most feared torturers.' It is believed that more sackings may be forthcoming.”

To learn more about mobcasting, please visit this blog entry I wrote last January, entitled When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting to see where this all got started.

The email list will be focused solely on this project; people who join the list should be interested in mobile phone podcasting and be willing to help us make this project happen.

To join the list, please send an email to mobcasting-subscribe [[at]] yahoogroups . com, with the spaces and brackets removed. Or, you can visit the Mobcasting list homepage.

Meanwhile, I've also created a DDN community that we can use as a workspace. The workspace has bulletin boards, document sharing and blog posting. Group members are welcome to post web resources, blog entries or files to this public page. We can also add news, events and feature stories to the site if they become useful at some point.

Looking forward to making this happen! -andy

Speculation so far has been that nobody was injured because of the amount of rain, and the fact that it's basically an area that vagrants are supposedly found in…. Evidence is expected to be washed away with the rain (that area frequently floods), and nobody was injured.

Yet, at the end of the day - who would do such a thing? And while some idiots who will try to twist the news to support their purposes (saying that it's Al Qaeda), nobody seems to have claimed responsibility again.

Kente Weavers of Ashanti: High res video Low res video

Production notes:

The video was shot on July 23, 2005 in Bonwire village, Ashanti Region, Ghana, using a Konica-Minolta dImage A-200 digital camera. The Quicktime files shot on the camera were uploaded to a Macintosh G4 laptop and edited with Final Cut Pro HD 4.5. Both versions of the video were compressed using the 3ivx compression codec. Total editing time was about 90 minutes, including compression.

Shootings with heavy weapon were heard Wednesday morning in Nouakchott after the presidential guard had taken the control of several strategic points of the Mauritanian capital, where a military coup d'etat has occurred in the absence of the Head of the State, Maaouyia Ould Taya.

As of 5H00 local (and GMT), soldiers of the presidential guard took the control of the buildings of the staff, the radio and national television and blocked access to the presidency and the ministries, according to this source.

According to observers, they also positioned vehicles equipped with heavy weapons and anti-aircraft batteries at several strategic points of the capital.
Five shootings of heavy machines resounded with 10h15 close to the center of Nouakchott, whose streets were emptied gradually, of the population.

In the capital, the administrative buildings were deserted and activity was weak at the end of the morning, with only some pedestrians and vehicles in the streets.

I'll try to track down more Mauritanian bloggers - hope others will do the same.