Global Voices Online

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, reformist politician, reminds us that these days ladies are inspected in many streets of Tehran. The ladies who are not wearing proper veil (hejab) are arrested… the ladies who are traced in the streets these days are mostly born after revolution and they have all been grown up in this period. We have spent a lot of money and facilities for the religious centers, what have they done to make relationship with this generation and convince them observe Islamic rules? Spending so much money out of public treasury and not being able to reach this goal is not a great sin which should be investigated? Fighting this by police and force is the easiest and at the same time most problematic way.

A series of rallies were held worldwide to draw attention to jailed Egyptian blogger Kareem Nabil Suliaman, who have been sentenced to four years in prison for insulting both Islam and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Supporters gathered in Berlin, Germany, the United Kingdom, Bucharest, Romania, Stockholm, Sweden, Washington DC, US and Athens, Greece.

Joe at Japan Law Blog explains the reasons why, unlike in many other countries, in Japan checks never caught on: “Japan has an entire legal structure for the payment systems familiar to Americans and Europeans. Yet if you live in Japan all your life, you may never write a check unless you have to pay someone overseas.”

Trans Pacific Radio reports on an interview with Sankei Shimbun Editor Yoshihisa Komori, conducted in late-March for the PBS series Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria, on the “Comfort Women” issue. TPR notes that “three things struck me [about Komori]: He looks off camera quite a bit, he brings up every red herring and irrelevant side issue he can think of, and he’s well fixated on playing the ‘victim’ game. I don’t think he was a wise choice at all for Japan to have speaking on its behalf.”

Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey is hanging his boots and calling it quits.
“One of the chief reasons is the fact that there has been too much heat around me lately. I no longer believe that my anonymity is kept, especially with State Secuirty agents lurking around my street and asking questions about me since that day. I ignore that, the same way I ignored all the clicking noises that my phones started to exhibit all of a sudden, or the law suit filed by Judge Mourad on my friends, and instead grew bolder and more reckless at a time where everybody else started being more cautious,” he notes.