Global Voices

English

The world is talking, are you listening?

Bálint Szlankó, a Hungarian foreign correspondent, was kidnapped – and later released – in Aleppo, Syria. He wrote this [en] on his Facebook page on Jan. 23:

Just been through a 12-hour kidnapping ordeal in Aleppo. Yesterday morning me, a Mexican and a Basque journalist were abducted by unknown gunmen near the Ezzaa frontline in eastern Aleppo. We were handcuffed, blindfolded and held in a cell for the rest of the day. Eventually we were stripped of all our possessions and left by the roadside in an abandoned area of the city. We then made our way to the headquarters of the Al Tawheed brigade, one of the main armed opposition groups in Aleppo. We are now well and unharmed and out of Syria. [...]

Hernán Haines, from blog El espacio de Hernán Haines [es], provides his readers with some suggestions for a better life in Argentina due to “the constant enquiries I get about my proposals, following up you'll find a list, an incomplete one, by the way”. He then presents a 45-item list and claims that for them “to be effective, [those measures] must be carried out by appropiate, responsible, honest and discerning people”.

Jabberwock shares this amazing story about an animal loving old woman living in a small makeshift shanty in Delhi. She has been looking after street dogs for years now, on her meager earnings from collecting and selling reusable garbage.

In part one of a two-part series on governance and integrity in Tobago,  Afra Raymond examines the Tobago House of Assembly project.

If you took a poll in our streets about Cubans’ most serious problems, the youngest…would list…lack of access to the Internet. They want to dive into that sea of kilobytes!

Translating Cuba explains that “this situation of disconnect could be about to change…the great World Wide Web may be closer than it appears.”

Rick Falkvinge, the founder of Pirate Party, reinterprets the wars of religion that devastated Western Europe in the XVI and XVII centuries in terms of the current struggle to control information through overbearing legislation related to copyright and freedom of expression:

The religious wars were never about religion as such. They were about who held the power of interpretation, about who controlled the knowledge and culture available to the masses. It was a war of gatekeepers of information.