Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

Blogger Tomáš Homola blogs [sk] about a new Mercedes Benz E car recently acquired for 63,096 Euros for Professor Karol Mičieta [sk], the Rector/President of Comenius University in Bratislava. Homola describes Mičieta's connection to politics, and also recalls that the Ministry of Education just a short time ago was forced to cancel renting of an Audi A6 [sk] for about 3,000 Euros per month from a company whose owner is the former Minister of Economy allegedly deeply involved in the Gorilla scandal. The saddest part of the story is the extremely poor condition that the university building is currently in (see images in Homola's post).

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On January 23, 2013, an excerpt from the annual report of l'ACAT-France, A World of Torture 2013, makes a fresh assessment of the state of torture in the world [fr]:

“A report called A World of Torture in 2013, assesses torture practices that continue to be alarming, from Pakistan to Italy, by way of South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Bolivia. From authoritarian regimes to democratic countries, none are exempt from criticism on the topic. In 2013, torture remains as endemic, omnipresent and multi-faceted as ever”.

The area near the main train station in Bratislava doesn't look too neat [sk]. Nor do other neighborhoods. Some people refuse to accept it passively, however. Next month, the Green Patrol (Zelená hliadka; sk) initiative, led by Matúš Čupka, will celebrate its second anniversary. Through targeted cleaning actions, Green Patrol aims at highlighting the problem of garbage in public areas and motivating citizens to pay more attention to the environment in which they live (see photos). Bratislava's Green Patrol community has already inspired people in other parts of Slovakia (e.g., here and here; sk).

Slovak NGO/think-tank Conservative Institute [en] blogged [sk] about the results of a study of 270 second-level EU regions (NUTS 2). Comparing changes in unemployment, they found that during 1990-2011, despite the growing amount of Euro-funds, the differences between the regions grew by about 4 percentage points. In more than 50 years of European integration, the EU institutions have created 112,140 regulations. Conservative Institute claims [sk] that the actual EU strategy is causing loss of competitiveness, higher debts, taxes and a lower level of employment:

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Lucia Kureková, in her blog analysis [sk], shows that in Slovakia the majority of those who receive the Benefit in Material Need (BMN) are not the “typical” Roma families with many children, but are single, of any ethnicity, and childless (62%), often young and unemployed. About two-thirds of the Slovak Roma households receive child support and other family benefits; about half of them receive BMN, but here they make up about one-third of all benefit-receiving families (while officially there are just about 2% of the Roma population in Slovakia).

European Information Society Institute, a Slovak NGO, reports [sk] that the Slovak Antimonopoly Office (AMO) does not see it as a problem that the country's Financial Directorate is forcing taxpayers to use Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer, arguing that there is just about 10 percent of 44,000 subjects who have to use eTax and eDane applications, which are not compatible with Microsoft Windows. Netizen jaaaaaaaaaaj notes [sk] that, using AMO's logic, murder also affects just a negligible number of the population.