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The world is talking, are you listening?

The tree makers. Photo by @teksega, used with permission.

Continuing the tradition that started last year (en, mk, nl, es), the Macedonian Twitter community has erected a new Christmas Tree made of plastic bottles (mk, mk, photos 1, 2, 3) in Skopje City Park in order to raise awareness of the importance of recycling. The event was again organized around the hashtag #елкамк (Macedonian for ‘fir tree mk') and open source instructions [mk], announced [mk] three weeks in advance by several bloggers. The tree will be purchased by a local recycling company and the money donated to charity.

Responding to an assertion by Gerald Knaus…

Athens and Skopje face a [prisoner's dilemma]: if neither side believes that a solution is possible, and acts on this, both will lose.

…Zarko Trajanoski wrote on Facebook:

However, the analogy with “prisoner's dilemma” is not only false, but very offensive: Athens is not a prisoner, but a prison guard and perhaps a political torturer in this case. And the outcome of this political torture, aided by Sofia as well, is the rise of the Macedonian ethno-nationalism and the decline of the liberalism, democracy and human rights.

He later provided an elaborate explanation in a blog post [mk].

A screenshot of the Face the Balkans website.

Fifteen young journalists from six different countries have produced a series of personal stories about representatives of the minorities (in a broad sense) from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, and Macedonia. The stories are available in English, German, and French on the Face the Balkans website.

Expat blogger Rainier Jaarsma provides periodical roundups of the English-language coverage of events in Macedonia. The latest one regards this past November.

Promotional banner for Critical Mass #7: ‘The Streets are for Bikes, Too’

The 7^th Critical Mass [mk] group cycling will take place on the streets of Skopje on November 28 (Wednesday) starting at 5:30 pm, organized via #КМ7 hashtag and the FB event [mk].

Riding a bike in Skopje. Photo by Na tochak, used with permission.

Na tochak (On a Bycicle), a group of cyclists organizing the Critical Mass movement, used video and photos to document the experience of riding in the bike lanes of several Skopje boulevards, reconstructed and widened ahead of the local elections scheduled for March 2013. More »

Léa Promaja, the alias of an independent journalist working in the Balkans, posted an audio interview [in Portuguese, with English and French subtitles] with Izabel Pimentel, “the first Brazilian woman crossing the Atlantic single-handed.”

On October 9, nearly 200 Macedonian websites participated in a day-long blackout, protesting the censorship-inducing provisions [mk, en, sq] that the Government “sneaked in” within the Draft Law on Civic Liability for Defamation, presented as approved by the EU and COE. Activists from Free Software Macedonia, who provided the JavaScript code for the initiative, also documented the Blackout initiative [mk] on their wiki.