Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

Nikola Mladenov (1964-2013): “We want a society of free people, they want a bunch of spineless sycophants. There's no way to compromise!”

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“Black Monday”: Dec. 24, 2012

In order to shed light on the events of Dec. 24, 2012, when journalists and opposition MPs were thrown out of the Macedonian Parliament [en, es, mk], Foundation Open Society Institute Macedonia (@fosim) published a study entitled “Black Monday” [.pdf: en, mk, sq], with testimonies of witnesses and participants and analyses by relevant experts. Video from its promotion, with an extensive discussion, is also available online [mk].

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.

Seven European free culture associations issued a statement [fr] protesting against a public-private partnership between the French National Library BNF and Proquest database [fr], whose aim is to digitize a large amount of Public Domain works and privatize them with an exclusivity period of commercialization of ten years. Activist Philippe Aigrain explained [fr] “the genealogy of this disaster” on his blog.

Activists of the civic initiative AMAN [mk] continue to fight for a better energy legislation [mg, fr, mk, es], despite pressure and infiltrations. In November, “unknown persons” prevented them from talking to PM Gruevski [mk] at an “open meeting with citizens.” Currently, there's an ongoing signature-gathering campaign for the change of the law (the deadline is January 31, 2013), and AMAN has posted this announcement [mk]:

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The Beer Belly original logo, voluntary contribution by @dasaf

The “Beer Belly” blog celebrated [mk, mk] its first anniversary. Its author @Twibi thanked members of the Macedonian Twitter community who have been bringing him beer samples from their trips all over the world to review. So far, he has made 198 posts about beers from 20 countries, including Kenya [mk], thanks to the local GV Summit 2012 participants – @ieli and @bjasari.

Twelve Macedonian women – regular Twitter users – took part in a humanitarian project organized by @IlinaBookbox, two photographers and one designer via the hashtag #ТвитерКалендар (Macedonian for ‘Twitter Calendar'). The resulting nude art calendar was donated to anti-cancer association Borka [wallpapers available via mk, mk, sq]. The original photos are on sale through the exhibition in Lee Cafe in Skopje [mk], and all proceedings will be donated to charity.