Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

Iran

Almozakhraf has published several photos of “criminals” who have been beaten up by police.Several bloggers considered police violence inacceptable.

Morocco

Yesterday, May 25, 2007, it has been reported by numerous Moroccan blogger that Morocco has blocked access to YouTube video sharing website. There have been many ongoing speculations that the ban followed the broadcasting of material critical of the country's king and pro-Western Sahara. This is the third major sites blocked by the Moroccan filtering regime after Google Earth and Livejournal.

Morocco

Early this morning, the news broke across the blogosphere that Morocco has joined the ranks of countries like Iran and Tunisia, which already block YouTube. A Moroccan in Washington D.C. posted:

“According to postings online and friends in Morocco, access to Youtube is blocked. Nobody knows the reason for this. Whatever the reason is, it is the wrong step to take. Youtube is a high profile website and the news will be broadcast everywhere tarnishing the image of a tolerant Morocco and causing a setback to the reforms that Morocco has been undergoing under the young and reformist king. Blocking websites has proved to be a technique with many limitations in Saudi Arabia ,China and Thailand and the same thing will happen in Morocco.
It's quite saddening to see such a thing happening in Morocco;a country that has made giant steps in freedoms and socio-economic reforms in the span of short 8 years.”

Singapore

Mr. Brown is asking readers to contribute to a Flickr pool of pictures of a waterspout that appeared in Singapore waters yesterday.

Honduras

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya recently announced that all private media stations will be required to air messages from the government in order to counterbalance the incorrect and unfair information provided by the media. La Gringa's Blogicito wonders whether it will be the same situation as years ago, when people will no other choice than to hear the government's message because the other cable channels were ordered off the air during these two hours. Aaron Ortiz, who writes in Pensieve, states, “Mel complains about the power of the media, and he has a point, because they are controlled by the rich upper class. Nevertheless, he is abusing his power by forcing them to present political propaganda, which carries the authority of the Honduran state. This only heightens his paranoia and his martyr mentality.”

Argentina

Jorge Gobbi's Blog de Viajes [ES] discusses the strange figure in that nearly half of the airports in Argentina are currently out of commission.

Brazil

One Laptop Per Child News, an independent blog that provides “news, information, commentary and discussion” of the XO recently added videos of children in Uruguay and Brazil test driving their new laptops. The post's author, Charbax, writes, “I think that the OLPC foundation just needs to make sure that a few more of these fascinating videos from the actual OLPC test schools are filmed by the local reployment staff and then that those awesome videos be put on the Internet for us to have an idea how it is like to use the OLPC in the actual classrooms. This should be impressive enough to convince most of the sceptics around the Internet, about the awesome potential that is in embracing the mass deployment of XO-1 laptops all over the world as soon as possible.”

Colombia

Carlos Raúl van der Weyden takes a trip down nostalgia lane after finding several YouTube channels devoted to old Colombian television programming. News programming and telenovelas are some of the programs featured in his roundup on the Colombia Herald.