Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

Prasant Naidu at Lighthouse Insights reports that after a successful start on Twitter, the Indian Army has recently joined Facebook. This is a welcome move as last year the Indian Army had issued orders asking all personnel — both officers and other ranks — to stop using social networking sites like Facebook or Orkut.

On Orsai » Blog [es], author Hernán Casciari narrates, as suspended in time, 10.6 seconds [es] that have gone down in football history and that remain in the memories of each and every person who lived through them, directly or indirectly:

Less than eleven seconds earlier, when the Argentinian player receives the ball from a team mate, clocks in Mexico indicate thirteen hours, twelve minutes and twenty seconds.

[...]

He closes his eyes. He lets himself fall forward, his body leaning, and the whole world remains silent.

The player knows he's taken forty four steps and [given] twelve taps, all of them with his left foot. He knows the move will last ten seconds and six tenths. Then he thinks it's about time to explain to everybody who he is, who he has been and who he will be until the end of time.

David Bandurski from China Media Project explained the idea of “online social management”, a set of tactics to increase the capacity for channeling online public opinion, put forward by Fu Siming, a professor at the Central Party School.

Screenshot from press conference video

Medical professionals in Mozambique have announced they will strike. They consider that they were “humiliated, insulted and disdained” in their last meeting with government. This current strike follows a strike earlier this year by doctors. The video announcement is available with subtitles in English, and a number of languages.
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The Bermudian government has introduced a set of reform initiatives; Vexed Bermoothes puts forward one of his own – “mak[ing] MPs accountable for their vote.”

On the blog section [es] of Chilean newspaper El Mercurio [es], columnist Leila Guerrero analyzes the meaning of prestige [es] and notes:

Rock musicians have been smart: ‘rock star’ is one of the few jobs (we'd had to add non-Saxon public servants) where a loss of prestige means an increase of quotation. Almost for every other member of the human race, regardless of their profession, prestige, for some time now, is useful only to estimate the height where they will fall from.

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