Global Voices Online

Le [Blog de Moi] announces (Fr) that Martiniquans, Guadeloupeans and other overseas French departments will vote one day early in the upcoming French presidential election taking place June 10 and 17, 2007 in mainland France. Explains the blogger “The point is to take into account the time difference and to make sure we don't vote after the results are known.. … To those who are complaining because ‘they have things to do on Saturdays': no comment”

On October 21, Convention Pour Une Guadeloupe Nouvelle commemorated a historical moment (October 21, 1801) it identifies as the birth of the Guadeloupean nation and added: “Nation without state, Guadeloupe is eternal and no one can destroy it. Our national rights must be respected by the French authorities that govern us today.” On October 21, 1801 the Guadeloupean army temporarily defeated troops sent by Napoleon to reestablish slavery.

InternetRapide.com is excited to offer (Fr) PC to mobile Skype Out rates from France to Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane and suspects that Skype products will hinder local providers from successfully developing attractive internet telephony products for those countries.

InternetRapide.com wonders (Fr) whether a recent sign read in a French Guiana telecom store predicts the imminent arrival of ADSL TV in the French Overseas Departments of the Caribbean.

Island Tips posts a list — by island — of the languages spoken in the Caribbean.

Jeremy Taylor ponders the appropriate uses of colonial forms and artifacts in the Caribbean context.

Reunion-based Pierrot Dupuy, himself the father of a victim of housing discrimination in France announces (Fr) advocacy group CollectifDOM's legal victory in the area of housing discrimination against French citizens from the French Overseas Departments and Territories (DOM-TOM) living in France. From here on, landlords can no longer ask for proof of a mainland French bank guaranty as a criterion to select tenants.

Says (Fr) France-based Senegalese blogger Seckasysteme about the allegedly affirmative-action induced hiring and debut of Black French newsanchor Harry Roselmack on French national television: “Roselmack's (…) professional competence and the recognition he has earned from his peers is so obvious that even the detractors of affirmative action are starting to admit the need to favor the blooming of all the hidden and underexploited talents that exist among French minorities so shamefully relegated to our ghettos.”

Le Blog de [Moi] is pleased (Fr) to learn that the first Caribbean Social Forum is happening in Martinique this week (July 5-9) but does not think its timing was particularly smart what with the World Cup's final taking place this weekend as well as an annual cultural fair in Fort-de-France.