Global Voices Online

Egyptian blogger Khaled Diab, who lives in Brussels, visits Israel and writes about his encounters here.

Israeli blogger themiddle wants you to play the guessing game this week and let us know where this picture was taken.

Responding to issue of a gender bias in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), The Other Side presents well, the other side - by pointing to what appears to be the real issue. “But the malaise runs deeper than that. In our society, career choices are made by parents, not by students themselves. Worse yet, these choices are made at the age of 14-15 years or so when the students take their Class X exams.”

Iraqi blogger Majed Jarrar argues that our present has a lot in common with George Orwell's 1984.

Egyptian blogger Nora Younis wonders why free speech ends people in prison in her country as she spearheads a campaign for freedom of speech. “Egyptian pro-democracy activists and bloggers are facing various forms of prosecution everyday,” she explains.

Egyptian blogger Issandr El Amrani links to a new blog about Egyptian Bahais. “Seeking Justice focuses on Egypt’s official discrimination against Bahais, an issue we’ve talked about before. It has links to other Egyptian Bahai sites and blogs,” he notes.

Citizen reporters at inmediahk.net put up an exclusive report, with youtube clip (zh), on how Chow Yun Fat visited the Queen's Pier at 5:30am this morning (April 28), to show his support for preserving the historical landmark, Queen's Pier, in Situ.

An English version of the report can be found at interlocals.net.

Japanese blogger hirochan comments on the recent elections in Japan [Ja] and gives his insights into the nature of the role of the Internet in political and election campaigns in Japan. He points out the fact that Japanese politicians are not maximizing the potential of the Internet as a tool, and points to the failure of such politicians to use this tool to compensate the lack of coverage by mainstream media.

Ken at What Japan Thinks reports on the results of a recent survey by MyVoice indicating that almost half of all Japanese want to see “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore's recent film about climate change.