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Francophone Bloggers on Oscars and Césars

Alice Backer · 21:59 · Sub-Saharan Africa , Americas

lingua → fr

Hostess Valérie Lemercier performs a Guadeloupean zouk hit from the 80's at the Césars awards.

Blogger reactions to the recent film award ceremonies in France and America are quite varied. Congolese Alain Mabanckou is happy with the attention Africa is getting in Hollywood. In particular, he is pleased with the best actor trophy Forest Whitaker received for playing Idi Amin Dada. He contrasts American attention to Africa to what he perceives to be France's snubbing of the continent from Algeria southward at the Césars, its version of the Oscars. Martiniquan InternetRapide.com on the other hand, celebrates the choice of a Guadeloupean zouk song in Creole to open the French show.

Alain Mabanckou, a California-based Congolese award winning author and blogger writes:

Quelque chose est sans doute en train de se passer à Hollywood depuis ces dernières années : le regard des producteurs se pose de plus en plus sur le continent africain. Cela donne des films appréciés aussi bien par la critique que par le public et nous fait découvrir au passage de nouveaux talents africains ou africains-américains.

Something has been happening in Hollywood for the past couple of years: producers are looking more and more to the African continent. That is generating films that get as much love from the critics as they do from the public while allowing us to discover new African or African-American talents.

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Ecuador, Chile: Kitsch Goes for Cash on YouTube

David Sasaki · 21:24 · Americas

Is there any method to the madness of who becomes a celebrity on YouTube? Should there be? Should the Hollywood stars of the global, digital era consist of an overweight adolescent falling into a creek, two guys arguing on a bus, Darth Vader shopping in a super market, and, of course, the infamous Numa Numa dance? What does it say about the world's netizens - lauded by Time magazine and by each other for circumventing the old media gatekeepers - if their most recognized representatives are recognizable for … well, for what?

Nothing is more fun for a 20-year-old Wikipedia-know-it-all to mock the laughable sincerity of a graying newscaster who is worried about the contents of Anna Nicole Smith's refrigerator or the most recent blonde teenager to go missing in the tourist town of your choice. But, then, can anything be taken seriously? Behind figureheads like Sacha Baron Cohen, Steven Colbert, and Jon Stewart, has irony finally triumphed even the internet as the true all-pervasive medium of how the 21st century world interacts?

More than just lampooning the ridiculous commentary allowed onto network television, this unshakable cult of cyber-satiricism is equally fond of making heroes out of the truly horrible. And such is the strange psychology that has launched Ecuadorean singer and lyricist Delfin Quishpe, better known simply as Delfín, to cyber-stardom.

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March of the censors: France, Turkey and China clamp down on freedom of speech

Sami Ben Gharbia · 21:23 · China , France

lingua → zht · zhs

march_of_censurers

Two weeks ago, the French blog AgoraVox, one of the leading European citizen media blogs, warned against what it termed the gradual “berlusconisation” of the French media and the threat posed by the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy, French Minister of the Interior and conservative party head, to freedom of speech in the country.

Yesterday, France’s Constitutional Council passed the Sarkozy law [Fr] ( Loi sur la prévention de la délinquance - Law on the prevention of criminality), which criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. During the parliamentary debate, government representatives said the law is meant to target a practice known as “happy slapping”, defined in Wikipedia as “a fad in which an unsuspecting victim is attacked while an accomplice records the assault (commonly with a camera phone or a smartphone).” (more…)

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Saudi Arabia: 2007 Riyadh International Book Fair, Ahmadinejad's Visit to the Kingdom, and More

Fahad Albutairi · 07:18 · Middle East & North Africa

This week's roundup includes more on Saudi broken blogs, Ahmadinejad's first visit to Saudi Arabia, a humble letter to the Saudi Minister of Labor, the capture of suspects of the attacks on French citizens in Madain Saleh, male belly dancers, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles' reassignment as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan, the Saudi victory on MBC's show “Al Tahaddi,” what some bloggers thought of the 2007 Riyadh International Book Fair, and much more.

The Iranian president has recently paid his first visit to the Kingdom a couple of days ago. According to the Yahoo! News article, they “pledged to fight the spread of sectarian strife in the Middle East” and “stressed the importance of maintaining Palestinian unity and bringing security to Iraq.” However, we must realize that this is what the Saudi Press Agency said. Crossroads Arabia posted an article about the Iranian take on the talks with Saudi Arabia. Neal of Arabia has reported on Her Majesty's now-former-Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles', reassignment to Afghanistan as part of the British attempt to expand diplomatic presence there.

NeeArt posted (in Arabic) her take on the situation of the recently-abandoned Saudi blogs, mentioned in last week's roundup. She thinks that the bloggers' decisions have more to do with increasing tensions, divisions among Saudi bloggers, and hearsay than governmental or political reasons; it's a very interesting perspective. Raed Al-Saeed has posted (in Arabic) a humble letter to Dr. Ghazi Abdul Rahman Algosaibi, the Saudi Minister of Labor. His letter mainly addresses the issue of Saudization in the job market. His solution is to place Saudis and non-Saudis seeking employment in similiar conditions, instead of forcing policy.
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Russia: Snail Mail

Veronica Khokhlova · 07:00 · Eastern & Central Europe

It takes roughly ten hours to travel from Moscow, Russia, to Kyiv, Ukraine, by train. But a letter sent via Air Mail from Moscow will most likely reach Kyiv in ten days.

LJ user valkorn - whose nostalgic postcard tour of Moscow was featured here in November 2006 - offers a graffic comparison (RUS) between Russia's highly inefficient postal service and its overseas counterpart, the United States Postal Service:

The logos of these two organizations provide a clear reflection of the way they work:

[image slightly altered to fit the GV format]

It becomes obvious right away why it takes three days for a package from the States to reach Russia, and then a month to reach the addressee in Moscow.