Global Voices Online

Sesawe's blog publishes an English translation of an article which appeared in France's Le Monde 2, entitled Censors of the Net, written by Claire Ulrich, which focuses on censorship, including that in Bahrain and Tunisia, to name a few.

Harvard University's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society has released a study of the Arabic blogosphere entitled Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere. About 35,000 active blogs were covered. “The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs,” announced the centre.

Tunisian blogger Hamid Zanar who writes on Reflexions of a Former Muslim [Ar], launches a virulent attack against religious violence and fundamentalism amidst accounts of renewed threats made against intellectuals and teachers in his country.

Lameen Souag links to Berber books available online for downloading.

Earlier this morning, Tunisian blogger Slim Amamou, announced on Twitter the launch of the Yamli bookmarklet that he, along with other Arab Techies, have developed in their Arab Techies Code Sprint 2009 in Cairo.
Yamli is a real time smart Arabic keyboard that allows users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard, from within their web browser. With this bookmarklet, you can now use Yamli on any website, with a simple click of a button.

Blogger kuskusu, whose husband is Tunisian, makes some observations about the Tunisian people living in Japan.
Dividing them into two categories, she observes that, since 9/11, immigration laws in Japan have become more severe and illegal Tunisian residents are very few nowadays. While many of them come to Japan as students specialized in I.T. and other scientific fields thanks to the exchange programmes between the Japanese and the Tunisian universities, others come to find a job and not few are those who have opened their own restaurant in the recent years.

“On this day Khalil al Wazir fell under a hail of bullets as an Israeli death squad attacked his home in Tunis. The Zionist state mistakenly believed that by killing him they would kill the Palestinian Intifada but, more than twenty years later, the Palestinian people are still resisting,” writes Maysaloon, from Syria.

Tunisian blog Nawaat posts a video which they claim shows US president Barack Obama snubbing French President Nicolas Sarkozy - who is later seen embracing Tunisian President Zeinalabideen Ben Ali.

Five Tunisian students have been on hunger strike since February 11th to defend their right to study. Their health is seriously deteriorating but the government is ignoring their request. More on the story on Facebook — here and here.