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Lebanon: Pope, Politics, Post-War Casualties and Circumcision

Moussa Bashir · 16:09 · Middle East & North Africa

This week Lebanese blogs discusses circumcision, the environment, the Pope's quote on Islam, Lebanese politics, post war hardships and suspicions among other things.

Let us start this weeks sampling by answering these questions: What if Google was used to settled battles … who would win? Interested in knowing? Lazarus has graphical answers to a number of world conflicts.

What do you think about male circumcision? Maya@NYC wrote on this and other stuffs. Her post sounds like this:

Female brains work in mysterious ways. Even for a female observer. I have seen the tantrums, the jealousies, the possessiveness, the suspicion, the disregard… But male brains… not to be sexist or anything…. Men have this PC-inspired quality: shut down completely before updating the information. Tonight, an American female friend, after 3 hour of chatting and 1 glass of wine (or was it the other way around?) finally gathered the courage to ask me: so is circumcision a big thing in Lebanon?

What do you think of the environment in Lebanon? Take a look at the photo of the sad state of the Beirut River taken by Anarchorev.

Now let us look at the topic which had the most posts in the Lebanese blogosphere this week: the Pope's quotation about Islam during one of his lectures. The reaction to the Pope's quote was not just a simple attack or defense. They were in fact very diverse. They range from a call for inter-faith marriage to declaring that all religions are intrinsically intolerant.

Sietske in Beiroet makes the following call:

I myself am very much fed up with the whole religion issue, and I think my best contribution to this society has been to marry someone of a different faith. And when I think about it, all my good friends are mixed couples. We’ve got a Christian-Druze couple, a catholic-Sunni, an orthodox-Sunni, a Shia-protestant, a Shia-Sunni, to name just a few. And these are all marriages of 13 years or more. They all have kids that are oblivious to the fact whether someone is a Christian or a Druze or a Muslim. You want to do something for your country? Marry someone from the other sect. And make it fast. Time is running out.

Abu Kais declares the impossibility for any religion to be tolerant (more…)

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Thailand: Liveblogging the coup

Rachel Rawlins · 16:05 · East Asia

At least two blogs have been set up solely to cover the unfolding military coup in Thailand - a group blog 19sep which is in English and revolution.blogrevo which is in Thai.

Video copies of coup-related announcements are appearing on YouTube. Below is the first televised announcement of the take-over by the military.

There's also a capture of the televised announcement of the “first and second orders of the Democratic Reform Coucil”, a previously unknow organisation and the name used by the military who have taken control of Bangkok.

A search on the photo-sharing website flickr on the keyword “coup” brings up nearly 100 pictures from Thailand posted within the last 24 hours from pictures of the army in position round the streets of Bangkok…

[Picture by goshen42]

…to visual evidence of the blocking of foreign cable TV channels

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Sports, Health and Politics in West Africa

Oluniyi David Ajao · 15:16 · Sub-Saharan Africa

We begin this week's blog round-up with sports. The Trials & Tribulations of a Freshly-Arrived Denizen…of Ghana blogs about the selection of a new coach for Ghana's senior national football team, amongst other issues: As the Week Draws to a Close in Accra:: Regulation? What Telephone Regulation?; CAN 2008 is Here…Almost; More Ghana Rain

The week opened with a lot of speculation on who would be the next coach of Ghana, after they survived an “ordeal” of a nine-man-committee. Would it be Claude Le Roy, former coach of DRC; Cecil Jones

Attuquayefio, or the elusive Troussier? It turned out that Troussier would fail to turn up, citing family problems. This would be the second time he would do a non-show since 2004, prompting speculation by some sports journalists on CITI97.3FM, and elsewhere that he was probably expecting to be handed the job on a silver platter.

Yesterday, the speculation was rife almost everywhere that Le Roy would get the job. Regrettably Sir Cecil Jones was being tipped by some as the second-place man, which is both odd and not, considering

he’s a Ghanaian national, but also remembering that after Doya’s “success” in taking the Ghana Black Stars to Germany for FIFA2006, maybe a foreign coach might just bode well for the team…and the country.

Now to health, we go to Cameroon, where Scribbles from the Den gives a snapshot of the health system in Cameroon with a scary and very sad story in ‘Save My Wife’ [A Snapshot of Cameroon's Health System]

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China: Italian journalist inspires

John Kennedy · 11:00 · East Asia

Earlier this month when Chinese state-owned news agency Xinhua forbid mainland news media from printing foreign news agency content not purchased directly from Xinhua itself, there was lots to be said from the blogsphere. Here [zh] is journalist-blogger X Marden's take:

新华社之声誉
Voice of Xinhua

《外国通讯社在中国境内发布新闻信息管理办法》，为业界所鄙视。本以为新华社之用心，实乃”司马昭之心，路人皆知”。不料还有网友在blog为新华社”申冤诉苦”，认为其扮演”网络警察”之职能败坏国际声誉。某中央媒体极力撇清与”未签约色鬼导演”的关系，刘同学对此不以为然：他们以为自己还有声誉可以维护么？是的，新华社还有什么声誉需要维护的么？

The regulations on foreign news agency reports being printed in China, such a blow to the occupation. What I first thought was Xinhua's care is actually their widely-known ambition. As expected, people are complaining about this on their blogs, thinking that Xinhua's acting as ‘internet police' will ruin China's international reputation. Some state media have done their best to distance themselves from ‘horny directors who don't sign contracts‘, and classmate Liu did not object: as if they had any reputation left to defend? Right, does Xinhua actually have a reputation that needs defending?

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Translating Claroline into Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní

Patrick Hall · 10:35 · Americas

Editor's Note: It has already been mentioned several times on Global Voices that the world's first Quechua, Guaraní, or Aymara native speaker to blog has yet to arrive. There are several obvious reasons including lack of broadband penetration into the Andes, high cost of internet access, and the absence of blogging tools and documentation available in each language. Whereas English and Spanish-language bloggers have numerous resources available explaining how to effectively make one's voice heard in cyberspace, that reference material and support simply do not exist in Latin American indigenous languages.

One blogger hoping to help change that, however, is Spaniard David de Ugarte. In a recent post he described an effort underway to translate Claroline - an open source e-learning platform - into Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní. Patrick Hall has translated de Ugarte's original post below.

The principles of the Ubuntu manifesto state that “software should be available free of charge, [and] software tools should be usable by people in their mother tongue…”

Accordingly we would like to translate Claroline, the most widely used, free platform for web-based learning and distance education in Latin America, to Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní.

Here at the Biblioteca de las Indias Electrónicas we're putting out a call: we're looking for three volunteers for each of these languages who speak and write the language correctly to translate the localization file for the platform.

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