Global Voices · Citizen media stories from 2008 April 02

2 April 2008

Daily archive · 9 posts

Stories from 2 April 2008

China: Hu Jia to be sentenced today

Blogger Hu Jia goes back on 'trial' in a few hours where it is expected he will be handed down a sentence of up to five years in prison based on two interviews given and six unspecified blog posts most of which written during the more than one year he spent under house arrest.

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Arabeyes: April Fool's Day

Written by Amira Al Hussaini · Middle East & North Africa

Pranks were in the air across the Arab world this April Fool's Day. Ranging from an Israeli withdrawal from Palestine, to the sale of Mars to Dubai and the construction of a pipeline to supply the red planet with water from the Arabian Gulf, to the plight of a baby camel in Cairo, readers were left scratching their heads in disbelief.

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Bahrain: Harmony in Diversity

Written by Amira Al Hussaini · Middle East & North Africa

Over millennia, Bahrain has been an oasis of peace, embracing people of all religions, creeds and races. Bahraini blogger Christ's Blood (Ar) finds a picture of a neighbourhood in the capital Manama which reflects harmony in diversity.

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Bulgaria: Rethinking History - A National Holiday in Days of Tragedy

Written by Yavor Mihaylov · Eastern & Central Europe

On Feb. 28, a fire on the train from Kardam to Sofia killed nine people. The majority of Bulgarians thought that a national mourning must be declared, but the authorities postponed it until after the celebration of Bulgaria's biggest national holiday on March 3. Yavor Mihaylov reviews and translates Bulgarian bloggers' reactions.

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Jordan: What Do Our Children Read?

Written by Amira Al Hussaini · Middle East & North Africa

"What do our children read?" is the question posed by Jordanian Batir Wardam (Ar), who finds himself pleading on behalf of a girl at a bookshop who wanted to buy a children's magazine against her nonchalant mother's wishes.

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Romania: NATO Summit and Bucharest Traffic

Written by Stan Faryna · Eastern & Central Europe

Stan Faryna translates a Romanian bloggers' report on traffic in Bucharest on the first day of the NATO Summit: "After listening to the discouraging morning traffic report on the radio, I was surprised to find traffic was lighter than usual (like a quiet Sunday)."

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Colombia: bloggers gathering signatures for copyright and industrial property letter

Written by Juliana Rincón Parra · Latin America

Carolina Botero, lawyer and Creative Commons promoter in Colombia has been asking bloggers and anyone else with computer access and an interest in what are popularly called "intellectual property rights" to sign an open letter which will be sent to CONPES, the National Council for Social and Economic Politics, to counter a bill the DNP (National Planning Department) previously sent to them, where the new models of sharing knowledge that provide alternatives to the traditional "protection and enforcement" policies were completely ignored.

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Kuwait: Bloggers to Play Leading Role in Elections

Written by Abdullatif AlOmar · Middle East & North Africa

It's already Summer in Kuwait, where temperatures peaked 42 degrees Celsius. But what's also heating up in the race to the Parliamentary elections, scheduled for May 17, writes Abdullatif AlOmar, who reviews Kuwaiti blogs.

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Korea: Conflicts between Koreans in their 20s and in their 30-40s

Written by Hyejin Kim · East Asia

Recently, there has been a series of demonstrations that Korean college students have led against the increase in tuition fees. Presidents of college students’ associations got together and tried to...

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Updates from 2 April 2008

Romania

Andy of Csíkszereda Musings writes about the NATO Summit in Bucharest: “Bucharest is being flooded with loads of violent, aggressive and corrupt criminals. Any sane immigration policy would have kept these people out of the country and turned them back at the airport, but Romania instead is welcoming them and even cleaning up the city before them to make their stay a happier one.”

• Veronica Khokhlova

Armenia

Unzipped remembers the sixth anniversary of the demise of A1 Plus, an opposition TV station stripped of its license in 2002. The blog says that when A1 Plus returns to the airwaves it believes it will mean Armenia is a better country to live in.

• Onnik Krikorian

Brazil

Altino Machado [pt] has interviewed Ilzamar Mendes, murdered Brazilian environmental activist Chico Mendes‘ widow. “She makes a harsh assessment at the time that the Chico Mendes Virtual Committee, the Labor Party and the Acre “government of the forest” begin to “celebrate” the 20th anniversary of the Xapuri's rubber tapper's murder. “They killed Chico's ideals,” says the president of the Chico Mendes Foundation.

• Paula Góes

Cape Verde

João Branco [pt] on the lack of a theatre in the Cape Verde capital: “Perhaps it is here that lies the starting point for us to question the fact that in a city so full of life, of poetry, of contrasts, colors, smells, feelings of impossibilities, ironies, absurd, in short, in a blatantly theatrical city, there isn't, at the moment, a theatre that does justice to it”.

• Paula Góes

Chile

Luis Ramírez provides his thoughts on the recent Webprendedor 2008 conference in Chile [es], which brought together web entrepreneurs interested in presenting their new projects.

• Eduardo Avila

Ukraine: Homophobic Legal Initiatives in Sync with Public Attitudes

Came to find this post after signing the AllOut petition (which already has almost 50k signatures, and needs to grow...
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