Global Voices Online

John Burgess at Crossroads Arabia connects the dots between the Houthis in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

From Yemen, Omar Barsawad complains about the state of government hospitals and asks: “Hadhramout and Yemen as a whole, simply do not have the facilities to handle such kinds of ‘complications'. I have been wondering: if Egypt or Jordan can, why can't Yemen?”

“Michael Jackson wanted to give his greatest and best show. One last show which he called: ‘This Is It'. In death, he has done just that,” writes Yemeni blogger Omar Barsawad in this post.

Yemeni blogger Omar Barsawad photographs and writes about the intricate windows of Yemen: “I don't know of any where else, where so much care is taken to build such very elaborate, complex windows as in Yemen. Especially around Sana'a,” he notes.

Yemeni blogger Omar Barsawad comments on the recent Yemenia plane crash, off the Comoros Islands. “Whenever an airplane crashes, media coverage is instant and nonstop. Governments and elected officials, even though there are many more
people dying due to other causes, react immediately to plane crashes - offering condolences and promising action,” he writes.

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.

From Yemen, Omar Barsawad takes a closer look at a colony of baboons living in the valley of Hadhramout, near Seiyoun, and notes: “Humans consider baboons - pests; we always overlook the fact that it is us, humans, who are the most destructive and most dangerous here on earth.”

Alexandra Sandels, from MENASSAT, writes her interview with Walid Al-Saqaf, a Sweden-based Yemeni Internet expert, regarding the launch of his new program Al-Kasir (means the circumventer in Arabic) - during a summit on blogging in Cairo which was entitled “Blogging for the Future“.
Al-Kasir, which is currently available in its Beta test version, is a new software aiming to circumvent web censorship in the Middle East and beyond, where it allows Internet users to access blocked websites.
You can also read Esra'a's post on Mideast Youth on why Al-Kasir is different from other similar tools, and how it’s beneficial to users in the Middle East.

Yemeni blogger Omar Barsawad takes us on a trip to Tarim in this post, which is dotted with photographs.