Global Voices

English

The world is talking, are you listening?

Tunisia

South Asia

United We Blog! puts out the call for more Nepalase bloggers. In furtherance of this goal, Uzz of UWB has translated WordPress into Nepali, and that tool will be availble to the public within two months…

South-East Asia

Sakdipat, at Thai-Blogs, blogs about her first day of school… as a teacher. One of her projects is teaching her students—who are currently learning in an all-Thai environment—to blog in English.

Mr.Brown critiques Singapore’s appearance in an American comic book. At least they got the Singlish right, no?

Photograph by Hartanto

The Middle East

Hoder explains the very practical impact of what’s at stake in the Iranian election. In addition, the Los Angeles Times has an interesting feature story about Hoder and his return to Iran in Thursday’s edition.

A Free Writer details the latest tactic that terrorists are using to raise money in Iraq.

Having traded Tehran for the countryside, Mr.Behi looks at the difference between Iran’s two presidential candidates.

Another Irani Online has voted and now he’s watching TV, waiting for the results.

Brooding Persian further explains his decision to not vote in the election.

Yishay Mor recently observed that Secure Computing’s filtering software is used by Tunisia to control their internet. David Burt, Secure Computing’s PR manager, posted a comment on his blog stating that Secure Computing does not license their software to Iran. Yishay wrote back, pointing out the discrepancy; Mr. Burt’s response is, to say the least, eyebrow-raising.

Ammar Abdulhamid, who writes Amarji - A Heretic’s Blog, is very skeptical of the Syrian Government’s attempts to reform itself.

Isam Bayazidi on the culture of software piracy in Jordan.

The pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat has been running a series of articles on Arab blogs; The Big Pharaoh points to two in the series that mention him.

A detailed cultural critique comes from From Cairo, With Love, as he tries to figure out why Egypt seems to be perpetually stuck in neutral.

Africa

Bankelele points out that Harvard Business School is holding an open house in Nairobi next month.

Amnesty International launched an appeal for action in Zimbabwe yesterday, reports This is Zimbabwe. The blog also condemns the African Union’s refusal to act, stating that the AU’s “comment[s] denies the truth that, even by Zimbabwe’s own legal system, the actions have been illegal.”

East Asia

Japanpundit looks back on the remarkably successful administration of Prime Minister Koizumi, and starts to explain how and why the Japanese political system is not what it seems to be to western observers.

Following up on the recent report of a black watermelon, Tokyo Times reports that square watermelons have started to go on sale in Japan.

SimonWorld notes that whaleburgers are now on sale in Japan. No first-hand reports on how they taste yet.

Europe

Pesticide notes that the world’s largest mass kiss-in will be attempted on Saturday night on the Elizabeth Bridge in downtown Budapest. I’m sure that if anyone wants to join in, they’d be more than welcome.

Heiko Hebig points to an interesting-looking German-language article about blogs and bloggers.

Is the French newspaper doomed? Loic Le Meur points to the report of a government think-tank that seems to think that it is…

Budget airlines are sprouting in Europe like mushrooms after a rain; A Fistful of Euros has the latest on their expansion into Eastern Europe.

When the cop’s in the bathroom, the crook will play? The Daily Czech reports an embarrassing incident when a billionaire fraud suspect managed to escape police custody when the police officer guarding him went to use the loo.

Central Asia

Pretend You’re Dread, a new blog about Kyrgyzstan, on differing cultural norms: “It seems that the guest of honour is very much optional when it comes to parties in this neck of the woods.”

Oneworld reports that Georgia is putting together a proposal to host 2014 Winter Olympics.

With elections in Kyrgyzstan only a month away, election-related ‘incidents’ are on the rise, reports Alan Cordova.

Australia

There’s a really interesting guest post at The Road to Surfdom about Chinese defector Chen Yonglin. The anonymous author is apparently a former employee of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Latin America

The Committee to Protect Bloggers [en] and Ecuablogs [es] both cover the cease and desist letter [es] which Ecuadorian blogger Eduardo Ochoa (AKA “blue”) recently recieved [es] from the telecom company Movistar. While Ochoa has so far complied with the demand, Mexican blogger Eduardo Arcos opines [es] that what Ochoa did was legal under article 83 of Ecuador's Intellectual Property Law [es]. Ochoa now satirically proposes [es] doing away with the letter “M”, which seems to be the intellectual property of a single company.

The Chilean blog, El mundo sigue ahí gleefully announces [es] that pro-business Chilean presidential candidate Sebastián Piñera has opened up commenting on his blog [es]. According to Angus Reid consultants, Piñera is the conservative favorite and currently is running second place after Socialist Party candidate Mora from Babalu [en] points us to Venezuelan blogger, Tomas Sancio [en] who in turn links to an audio file [es] of a Cuban-American man asking the Cuban Phone Company for a cell phone (which can only be obtained in Cuba with a government permit.

The Latin America roundup above was compiled by David Sasaki (el Oso).