Global Voices

English

The world is talking, are you listening?

You can now call him Doctor Teodoro Obiang  Nguema Mbasogo.

MyGab.Tv reports that [fr] the Univesité internationale du Bénin UPIB is now called Teodoro Obiang  Nguema Mbasogo University after the Equatoguinean dictator. Teodoro Obiang  Nguema Mbasogo has been the benefactor of many schools in Benin [fr] and has received a doctorate degree Honoris Causa from the university at the inauguration ceremony.

Valdir Lamim-Guedes, a Brazilian biologist, who blogs at Na Raiz [pt], shared an article he published together with Carlos Junior Gontijo-Rosa on the Global Education Magazine about their experience as visiting professors at the National University of Timor-Leste in 2012, focusing on the challenges of teaching in Portuguese. Despite being one of the official languages, the majority of the population doesn't speak it.

The website journaldekin.com, commenting on the interference on the national Radio Okapi, a station which has been sponsored by the UN in the Democratic Republic of Congo since December 1, recalls [fr] that:

Radio Okapi, which this year celebrates its tenth anniversary, is born from a partnership between the Swiss foundation Hirondelle, specializing in media services in post-conflict zones, and the UN, who deployed its most important peacekeeping mission worldwide in the RDC. Launched in 2002, the radio broadcasts throughout the entire country in French and four other local languages, thanks to the United Nations’ network. It is the most widely listened-to national radio station, with 22 million listeners.

Two-thirds of the 176 countries assessed in the 2012 Index received a score of less than 50, on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (almost no corruption). This shows that public institutions should be more transparent and senior officials more accountable.

On December 5, Transparency International released the Corruption Perceptions Index 2012, which measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption in 176 different countries and territories around the world.

Left-behind children is a term to describe a special group of children who are left in rural areas while their parents work as migrant workers in big cities in China. However, in Fujian province in Southern China, there are about 10,000 left-behind foreign children whose parents are illegal immigrants to other countries (primarily the US) with low-paid jobs. The children are sent back to China when they are only a few months old because their parents cannot afford to raise them in the foreign countries. OffBeat China picked up the story from Chinese media[zh] with lots of pictures.

Who will govern the Internet and how? What is Venezuela's position in this debate? These are two questions that Luis Carlos Díaz tries to tackle in a post for Prodavinci [es] where he looks at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) and Venezuela's position regarding these issues.