Global Voices

English

The world is talking, are you listening?

This month, Rob Martineau, Tom Stancliffe, and Guy Hacking are running 1,000 miles from Odessa to Dubrovnik, via Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Croatia, as part of the Run For Love 1000 campaign, whose aim is to raise funds for Love146, a UK charity that “gives care and hope to trafficked children, and to raise awareness of the scale of human trafficking across Europe.” Follow their run on the RFL1000 website, on Facebook, and on Twitter; support the runners by donating here (215 donations have been made so far, with nearly £12,500 raised).

Pete DeMola from Beijing Cream reviews Margaret Thatcher's China policy by looking into her five most significant moments and positions in China, including 1. fell down the stairs at the Great Hall of the People; 2. advocated against the Great Firewall; 3. lobbied against serving sea slugs and shark fins to senior-level cadres; 4. bonded with senior-level Chinese officials in 1977 over a shared contempt toward trade unions; 5. lamented sadness at the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China.

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”.

GV Author Filip Stojanovski, on his blog Razvigor, has translated into English a mock story [sr] by Njuz.net, “the Serbian equivalent to The Onion,” about the UK striving to join “the Un-European Union”:

The Council of Ministers of the countries of the Un-European Union stated today in Skopje that a long road lies ahead of United Kingdom in order for it to join this international organisation. [...]

The Macedonian translation of the story is here.

Rick Falkvinge, the founder of Pirate Party, reinterprets the wars of religion that devastated Western Europe in the XVI and XVII centuries in terms of the current struggle to control information through overbearing legislation related to copyright and freedom of expression:

The religious wars were never about religion as such. They were about who held the power of interpretation, about who controlled the knowledge and culture available to the masses. It was a war of gatekeepers of information.

Sokari writes about Earthling, a short story by Diriye Osman: “Set in Peckkahm south London, Diriye explores sexuality and sister to sister relationships in a British Somali family where desires to be married and to live out of the closet are set against each other. Mental illness and death, two familiar themes in Diryie’s work, are explored as Zeytun turns to the internet in search of ways of dying but really its a search for freedom.”