Global Voices Online

Writing at Not Green Data, Tarek Amr is not amused with the international media coverage following the Egypt-Algeria football match.

Several regional branches of the Indonesian Ulema Council want to ban the movie ‘2012′ claiming the film's content is “unsuitable to be viewed by Muslims because only Allah knew when the world would end, not heathens like the Mayans.”

Roy Berman from Mutantfrong Travelogue blogs about a recent protest action in Taiwan against the importation of American beef. The student wanted to show that eating American beef is scarier than eating Taiwanese cow dung!

C.A Yeung translated a petition signed by more than a hundred Chinese netizen demanding the Beijing police to release Zhao Lianhai, a famous rights activist and the founder of an organisation called the Home for the Kidney Stone Babies. Zhao was arrested and detained by the police since November 13.

AdnanEmin's Blog, Prison Diary, a new blog from Azerbaijan, has been set up to republish letters sent from prison in the oil-rich former Soviet republic by Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli, two detained video blogging youth activists sentenced last week and considered by Amnesty International to be prisoners of conscience. The first post carries a message from Milli after his sentence.

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: How To Marry a Bulgarian hosts a series of readers' personal reflections: Biliana Velkova, Alexandra Grashkina-Hristova, Maria Vassileva; Hungarian Spectrum writes that “for Hungary and the Hungarians the whole thing started much earlier”; Belgraded writes about the upcoming and much-awaited fall of the “visa wall” for Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia; CAFÉ TURCO writes about the anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Kristallnacht, and the destruction of Mostar’s Old Bridge;

IZO posts a translation of an open letter to president Medvedev “about the destruction of old Moscow under Mayor Luzhkov,” written by urbanism scholar Yuri Bocharov. Russia! reports on the defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, filed and won by the Moscow mayor.

Ujjwal Acharya at The Radiant Star praises the Maoists for ending their recent protests in Nepal peacefully. The blogger comments: “I hope that both sides – ruling coalition and the Maoists should somehow agree on a few basic things including two hot issues”.

From Trinidad and Tobago, This Beach Called Life clears the air on “the not-so-new property tax that has angered homeowners into an angry fireball. Citizens, despite cursing and more cursing, were about to resign themselves to paying the much higher property tax when, out of nowhere, a flagpole appeared.”