Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

Puerto Rican hip hop star René Pérez (@Calle13Oficial) of the band Calle 13 announced today [es] through Twitter that he is with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange was given refuge after being accused of a sexual crime in Sweden. Pérez will be live on TwitCam tomorrow at 10 pm (London time) from the Embassy composing a song with Assange and his Twitter followers. His tweet says:

Hello FBI! Here I am with Julian #Assange founder of @wikileaks. Tomorrow we will be writing together. With you. 10 pm London time.

That bloke is a nut. A nut who happens to be Muslim. Blaming Muslims for this is like blaming Hitler’s moustache for the Holocaust.

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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.