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‘Spain Is a Corruptocracy’: Netizens Slam Google News Tax · Global Voices
Lourdes Sada

Farewell to the Spanish edition of Google News. Image from Enrique Dans's blog with CC BY 3.0 license.
Within fifteen days of Spain's new Intellectual Property Law coming into force, Google News has announced that it will suspend the activity of its Spanish subsidiary as of today, December 16, 2014. The new law, which will take effect on January 1, 2015, requires that aggregators like Google News, Menéame, or Reddit pay a fee for reproducing even small fragments of news published in online newspapers.
The law was promoted heavily by the Spanish Newspaper Publishers’ Association (AEDE), an organization of which major Spanish newspapers such as El País, El Mundo, and ABC are members. These large traditional media outlets have seen their circulation figures plummet for several years and intend to offset this loss of readers with the tax. The new law considers the Google tax an “unalienable right” that should be applied to all newspapers in Spain, whether or not they agree with the measure.
In a statement published on his blog, the global head of Google News, Richard Gingras, explains the decision to shut down the service:
Dado que Google Noticias es un servicio que no genera ingresos (no mostramos publicidad en el sitio web), este nuevo enfoque resulta sencillamente insostenible.
Por ello, lamentablemente, el 16 de diciembre (…) procederemos a retirar a los editores españoles de Google Noticias y a cerrar Google Noticias en España.
Given that Google News is a service that does not generate revenue (we do not post ads on the website), this new approach is simply unsustainable.
Therefore, regrettably, on December 16 (…) we will proceed to remove the Spanish Google News publishers and shut down Google News in Spain.
This news, although not surprising to anyone, has created a stir on the Internet, not only in Spain, but also among online media in other countries, which were unanimous in criticizing the new law. Tim Worstall calls the law “an example of purblind incompetence” in Forbes Magazine, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jeremy Malcolm says that the law forms “part of a broader trend of derogation from the right to link.” He adds:
Once it becomes illegal for aggregators to freely link news summaries to publicly-available websites, it becomes that much easier for those who want to prohibit other sorts of links, such as links to political YouTube videos, to make their case.
On his blog, Professor Enrique Dans dissects the political changes that led to the development of the law – which he labels “absurd” and “nonsense” – and concludes:
Enhorabuena, gobierno de España. Siguiendo las directrices de AEDE, una de las asociaciones más caducas y cavernícolas del mundo, habéis conseguido evidenciar que España es una corruptocracia en la que cualquier grupo de presión puede escribir leyes a su antojo (aunque sean abierta y claramente tan demenciales como ésta), en la que los periódicos condicionan su línea editorial a la financiación gubernamental, y en la que el gobierno no tiene la más maldita idea de cómo funciona internet.
Congratulations, Spanish government. Following the guidelines of the AEDE, one of the most outdated and caveman-like organizations in the world, you have managed to show that Spain is a corruptocracy in which any lobbyist can write laws at will (even if they are as openly and clearly insane as this one), where newspapers limit their publishing according to governmental funding and the government does not have a damn clue about how the Internet works.
Arsenio Escolar, editor of online paper 20 Minutos, takes to his blog to explain that the law only pleases the most powerful members of the AEDE, while the Spanish Association of Publishers of Periodicals (AEEPP), more numerous and representative of the Spanish press, is totally against the IPL:
Todo es una expresión genuina, una vez más, de nuestra Marca España: conchabeos entre el poder y la prensa, y nada de libre mercado o libre competencia, nada que fomente la pluralidad y la libertad de prensa. (…)
El cierre de Google News (…) lo vamos a pagar todos los medios, los tradicionales y los nuevos. Nuestra visibilidad en la red se reducirá, nuestro tráfico también, nuestros ingresos probablemente también… Veremos lo que tardan algunos editores tradicionales -autovíctimas de su propia iniciativa- en pedirle a Google que reabra su Google News.
Everything is a genuine expression, once again, of our Marca España: illicit pacts between power and the press, nothing of free market or free competition, nothing that promotes pluralism and freedom of the press. (…)
The shutdown of Google News (…) all of us, both in traditional and new media, will pay for. Our network visibility will be reduced, as well as our traffic, our revenues probably too… We will see how long it takes some traditional publishers — victims of their own initiative — to ask Google to reopen Google News.
Since the news broke, the debate has grown on Twitter where “AEDE” and “Google News” remain among the most searched words.
Es decir, que google news nos ha hecho un “boom! In your face losers!”. Bien merecido!
— Emilio J. Higinio (@EmilioHiginio) December 12, 2014
This is to say that google news has given us a “boom! In your face losers!” Well deserved!
#AEDE #Jiwert , imaginad que a El Corte Ingles sus proveedores le piden dinero por estar expuestos en el escaparate. Hay q ser tontos…! — Joan Jimenez (@joanjimenezl) December 12, 2014
#AEDE #Jiwert, imagine that El Corte Ingles's suppliers asked them for money for displaying their products in the windows. You have to be stupid…!
Following Google's announcement, it seems that the AEDE media have realized the tremendous damage brought on by being removed from a service as popular as Google News, and have surprised everyone with a statement in which they admit that “Google (…) is the true gateway to the Internet” and require “the intervention of Spanish and EU authorities, as well as those of competition, to effectively protect the rights of citizens and businesses.” As such, AEDE's unexpected change in tone was celebrated on Twitter:
¿La AEDE pretende prohibir a una empresa extranjera que cierre? ¿Y cómo lo va a hacer? ¿Con tanques? Jojojojojojo. — OIER FANO (@oierfano) December 12, 2014
The AEDE intends to prohibit a foreign company from closing? And how is it going to do that? With tanks? Hahahahahaha
Lo van a tener difícil los medios AEDE para superar el ridículo que están haciendo. Pero no les infravaloremos, ellos pueden
— Gabriel Ruiz (@gabir) December 12, 2014
It is going to be difficult for the AEDE media to overcome the ridiculousness they are creating. But we won't underestimate them, they can do it.
Minister Wert, responsible for the IPL, was quick to downplay the whole thing, claiming that Google has rushed to shut down, since they could have negotiated the amount of the media tax, ignoring the fact that Google refuses on principle to pay for what they consider to be a basic right on the Internet: the link.
As blogger Faircry states on Probably Fair:
…vamos a ver cómo se desarrolla todo esto y si los viejunos peninsulares al poder consiguen regular “el internete” ese invento del demonio, o no.
Pero el futuro de la prensa escrita pasa por internet, y morder la mano que te da de comer se llame Google o Bing o Baidu o Menéame o Reddit no puede tener muy buen resultado.
… Let's see how this develops and if the old Peninsular Spaniards in power manage to regulate “the Internet”, this satanic invention, or not. But the future of the written press passes through the internet, and biting the hand that feeds you, be it Google or Bing or Baidu or Menéame or Reddit, cannot bring about good results.

author: Lourdes Sada


text:
What the Global Climate Movement Can Learn From Latin America · Global Voices
350.org

The Amazon. Photo credit: Mariusz Kluzniak (Flickr)
This article was written by Hoda Baraka for 350.org, an organization building a global climate movement, and is republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement.
Latin America has a long history of popular movements, whether it be in the environmental, political or economic context. Today, these movements have established themselves as a major social and political force largely shaping regional realities.
Below are highlights from conversations with climate activists in Latin America shedding light on the uniqueness of the climate movement in the region and what the global movement might be able to learn from this inspiring example.
Similar to other regions in the Global South, Latin America continues to undergo a process of urbanisation as populations shift from rural to urban areas in search of economic opportunities. Although urbanisation brings forth many environmental problems and rural cultures are seen to be largely replaced by urban cultures, in the case of Latin America the rural and the urban activist groups have joined forces to confront the climate crisis.
So rather than succumbing to the changing times dictated by urbanisation, they are adapting and joining forces with the emerging youth activist groups based in urban areas.
As Peruvian climate activist Majandra Rodriguez Acha, who is one of the founders of the activist group known as TierrActiva Peru, explains:
I think the climate movement in Latin America is new but also quite old. Groups that are directly affected by climate change such as indigenous groups, women’s groups and rural groups have been mobilising around climate change related issues for a long time; but I also think that as a more urban and maybe a more youth led movement this is quite new to some extent. It’s a diverse and growing movement and more and more people are finding out what climate change is and how it’s affecting them and affecting others in different contexts.
Listen to the below podcast where Majandra also talks about the realities of climate change in Latin America, affected communities, the risks of being an environmental activist in the region, and more.
What observers refer to as Latin America’s climate movement is in fact a coming together of numerous movements. Not only does this add power to the climate struggle, but it is also an accurate reflection of the cross-cutting impact of climate change since it affects, livelihoods, jobs, health and beyond.
The coming together of these forces takes the climate conversation to another level and represents a whole new level of pressure on governments (who are lagging behind on climate action) while adding real power to the multiple voices united in their call for climate action.
Climate activist Nicky Scordellis, who joined the Bolivian climate movement years ago and is part of activist group TierrActiva Bolivia, explains:
Latin America has this huge movement which often doesn’t call itself the climate movement, but what they are doing is completely a part of the struggles against climate change. Two key elements at play: one is resistance and in Latin America there are huge resistance movements against the mega projects, fossil fuel extraction, mining, all of that which is often related more to territory issues and indigenous rights, but actually they are all connected to climate change and that’s incredibly strong right now in Latin America. And the other side of that is people building alternatives; across Latin America there are incredible experiences of building transition projects of people building communities, working with local organic agriculture building  eco houses and urban gardening, these are happening all over Latin America. I think these are incredibly powerful in terms of how we face climate change and I think its really important for movements across the world to see what’s happening across Latin America and learn from those experiences.
Listen to the below podcast where Nicky also talks about climate activists in Bolivia and how they are working to connect with other climate activist groups from across the region.
Across Latin America many indigenous spiritual traditions express ethics of respect for nonhuman life, for particular places and landscape features, and for the Earth itself. Consequently, this reverence towards nature is reflected in an understanding for the need to live in balance with the environment, respecting and protecting the eco-systems which make life on this planet possible.
In a world economy driven by capitalist pursuits, many view nature as a simple resource which should be exploited for economic gain. To confront this greed, and the destruction that ensues, many indigenous communities have stood in defence of nature, tragically too often costing them their lives.
Across Latin America, building on their indigenous roots, many are incorporating these concepts and spiritual traditions into a larger developmental approach. The premise of this approach is doing things in a community-centric, ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive manner. One such well-known approach is called the Buen Vivir/Well Living movement, which originated in Ecuador rooted in the worldview of the Quechua peoples of the Andes.
Other social movements across South America have been inspired by this and have expanded the movement, also linking to other indigenous belief systems, such as those of the Aymara peoples of Bolivia, the Quichua of Ecuador and the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina.
Read more on the “Buen Vivir” movement in The Guardian: “Buen Vivir: the social philosophy inspiring movements in South America“

source: news-globalvoices

license: Creative Commons - Attribution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/


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Anti-Coup Activist Says Thai Officials Threatened Her with Rape  · Global Voices
Moui

Anti-coup activists Kong-udom and Seritiwat (wearing blue tie) hand a letter to Thailand's human rights chief Amara during human rights day. Image from Khaoson English.
A student activist who was detained by police after she and another person interrupted a speech by Thailand's human rights chief has accused two plainclothes officials of harassing and threatening her with rape.
Natchacha Kong-udom, a university student, and Sirawit Seritiwat, a core member of the Thai Student Centre for Democracy (TSCD) managed to show the three-fingered salute, which is outlawed by the junta, in the full presence of media, security personnel and guests who attended the International Human Rights Day event in Bangkok on December 10. The event was organised by Thailand's National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).
The popular “Hunger Games” salute was adopted by anti-coup demonstrators after the removal of Yingluck Shinawatra's caretaker government by the military last May. The military has outlawed protests and public criticism of junta policies.
The students managed to display protest signs such as “Where is the NHRC when the gun comes out?” “Missing person”, “Are you still alive?”, and “Stop paying the NHRC.”
Chairperson Amara Pongsapich, who has been chief of the NHRC since 2009, was caught off guard by the sudden disruption. Kong-udom and Seritiwat were taken from the NHRC premises and brought to the police station for failing to obey the prohibition set by the National Council for Peace and Order. According to the junta’s council, acts of dissent would lead to national security problems.
Two NHRC representatives attended and observed the “attitude adjustment” interrogation between the police and the detained students. The students claimed they were forced to sign a statement saying that they will not participate in future anti-coup demonstrations.
Meanwhile, Kong-udom lodged a police report at the Tung Song Hong Police Station against two men she accused of harassing and threatening her with rape at the NHRC event.
สัมภาษณ์นักศึกษาที่ถูกเจ้าหน้าที่นอกเครื่องแบบขู่จะข่มขืน หลังไปประท้วงชูสามนิ้วที่ กสม.
— Sunai (@sunaibkk) December 13, 2014
Interviewing the student activist whom plainclothes officials threatened to rape after she staged 3-finger salute protest at NHRC.
She noticed that she was being followed at the NHRC event and stopped to ask the suspicious man, “พี่มาทำอะไรค่ะ ตามหนูมาตลอดเลย,” which means, “What are you doing here brother? You follow me all the time.” The man replied “ก็ตามมาข่มขืนน้องไง,” which means “To try to rape you.” The threat was made in front of many witnesses, including NHRC officers and journalists.
Sunai Phasuk, senior researcher on Thailand in Human Rights Watch's Asia division, tweeted about this incident on December 12:
Plainclothes officials threatened to rape student activist after she staged 3-finger salute protest at #Thailand Human Rights Commission.
— Sunai (@sunaibkk) December 12, 2014
Kong-udom told Prachatai, an independent news website, that other activists were also being followed by suspicious individuals:
I know that I and other student activists have been followed for a while and of course I’m afraid. This is an abuse of rights. After all, where is my safety?
This photo of Kong-udom, which was widely shared on social media, shows her making the “Hunger Games” salute as a sign of protest against the Junta government in Thailand
Kong-udom, who is transgender, was first arrested in front of a cinema in Bangkok on November 20 for flashing the Hunger Games salute.
As of this writing, the NHRC has not yet released a statement about the threat.
The incident is a recent example of the intensifying intimidation suffered by acivists in Thailand ever since martial law was declared by the military last May.
Activists are risking their safety by organizing peaceful flash mobs and anti-coup activities to call for the restoration of civilian rule through democratic elections yet they have received no assistance or even a statement of support from the country's major political parties.
The harassment of activists is one proof of the worsening human rights situation in Thailand. Fortunately, this case was reported because of the perseverance of Thais who are unwilling to submit to repression.

author: Moui


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Castro and Obama Open New Chapter on US-Cuba Relations · Global Voices
Ellery Roberts Biddle

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff via Deviant Art.
The governments of Cuba and the United States want to rebuild diplomatic ties, reestablish trade relations, and reopen lines of communication that have been frozen for over fifty of years. The news is almost unreal, like a dream. But we heard it today, from the leaders of both nations.
In a live speech televised from the White House, Barack Obama described how the two governments worked together over the last 18 months to negotiate the changes announced today. On Cuban state television, in an address that was transcribed and published by Cubadebate, Raul Castro thanked the Vatican and the government of Canada for supporting the delicate process.
In the months ahead, the governments will establish embassies in each other's countries. US Secretary of State John Kerry, who has long advocated for normalizing US-Cuba relations, will review Cuba's designation as a state sponsor of terror. Obama indicated that this label, disputed by many experts, is outdated in the current global context.
Of course, Obama cannot unilaterally dismantle all US government policies limiting contact and commerce with Cuba. As both leaders noted, the embargo is codified in legislation that only the US Congress can change. With a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, and a still-powerful constituency of pro-embargo hardliners supporting key Cuban-American legislators like Marco Rubio and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, this will be no small feat.
A Havana billboard depicting the faces of the five jailed Cubans reads, “Freedom Now!” Photo by Giorgiopilato via Wikimedia Commons. Released to public domain.
The two governments have already taken bold steps in this new direction. Both presidents confirmed that US officials today released three Cuban government agents who had been imprisoned in the US since 2001, and that Cuba had released two US government employees, one of whom had been in prison on the island for over two decades. The other prisoner, US government contractor Alan Gross, was jailed in 2009 for bringing large amounts of tech equipment into the country without a license. Multiple mainstream media sources are also reporting that the Cuban government plans to release 53 prisoners of conscience in the coming weeks.
In contrast to Obama's relatively tempered announcement of the release of Gross and the yet-unnamed intelligence agent, Castro's announcement was impassioned.
As Fidel promised on June 2001, when he said: “They shall return!” Gerardo, Ramon, and Antonio have arrived today to our homeland.
The enormous joy of their families and of all our people, who have relentlessly fought for this goal, is shared by hundreds of solidarity committees and groups, governments, parliaments, organizations, institutions, and personalities, who for the last sixteen years have made tireless efforts demanding their release. We convey our deepest gratitude and commitment to all of them. President Obama’s decision deserves the respect and acknowledgement of our people.
Although their story has received scant coverage in US media, one can barely walk the streets of Havana without seeing signs of the campaign to free “Los Cinco Heroes”, as they are commonly known in Cuban parlance. The five men, all working as counter terrorism agents for the Cuban government, sought to infiltrate anti-Castro militant groups in the US and were arrested in Miami in 1998. They were later convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and acting as an agents of a foreign government, among other charges. Although they originally faced sentences ranging from life to 15 years behind bars, an in-depth appeals process has since led to reduced sentences for three of the men, and the release of two, one in 2011 and the other in February 2014. Today, they are all free.
Although little is known about the US intelligence agent who was released today, the story of US government contractor Alan Gross has been widely reported since he was arrested in 2009 for bringing technological equipment into the country. Gross made five trips to Cuba on behalf of Development Alternatives International, a subcontractor of USAID, on which he was assigned to set up small WiFi networks in the country. Gross was convicted of traveling to the country without proper permission and of acts that violated the “integrity of the Cuban state”. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He has since been viewed as a bargaining chip in the notoriously tense dynamics between the two governments.
At the time of Gross's conviction, Cuban blogger Iván García quipped,
[t]he real enemy of the Castros is not Gross. The American is nothing more than a good currency of exchange. It’s not bad for negotiating with the Yankees. Or as a political show. Little more.
Despite the explosion of media response and online commentary about this historical shift, it will take many months for those closest to the situation to interpret and put into political context what has happened today. What will this mean for Cuba's future? How will it affect the Cuban Revolution, which according to government workers and the majority of the Cuban population, is still ongoing?
Castro's speech anticipated these questions and suggested that the transition could in fact help support the system his party has worked so hard to preserve since they came to power in 1959.
The heroic Cuban people, in the wake of serious dangers, aggressions, adversities and sacrifices has proven to be faithful and will continue to be faithful to our ideals of independence and social justice. Strongly united throughout these 56 years of Revolution, we have kept our unswerving loyalty to those who died in defense of our principles since the beginning of our independence wars in 1868.
Today, despite the difficulties, we have embarked on the task of updating our economic model in order to build a prosperous and sustainable Socialism.
Although Obama advocated for leaders on both sides to “leave behind the legacy of both colonialism and communism,” it is not clear how this will play out in practice, given that the Cuban government has shown no intention of letting go of the latter. Obama also made clear that human rights concerns remain a high priority for US policy towards Cuba. “The United States believes that no Cubans should face harassment or arrest or beatings simply because they’re exercising a universal right to have their voices heard,” he said.
Obama also noted US government intentions to continue “supporting civil society” in Cuba, perhaps a tacit reference to US government “democracy promotion” programs such as the one under which Alan Gross was hired.
It may be weeks or even months before Cubans themselves are able to see clearly how these changes will affect their daily lives and the broader trajectory of their country and society. Although I attempted to get quotes and reactions on the news from our Cuban colleagues at Global Voices, most said only that they were speechless, overwhelmed with emotion and surprise. We look forward to highlighting more perspectives from Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits in the days and weeks to come.

author: Ellery Roberts Biddle


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Do #EmptyShelves Await Tomorrow’s Russia? · Global Voices
Tanya Lokot

Shopping in tomorrow's Russia? Images edited by Kevin Rothrock.
As Russia experiences its worst currency crisis since the days of Boris Yeltsin, Russian consumers appear to be making a run on the stores, buying up whatever they can.
At 2 a.m. Moscow time, December 17, photoblogger Ilya Varlamov reported on LiveJournal that people around Moscow were lining up at stores throughout the city, cleaning out vendors of various goods that are likely to cost more if the ruble continues to depreciate at the start of the workday. Russians are looking to unload their rubles any way they can—either by selling them for dollars and euros, or buying up electronics, groceries, and clothes.
Ordinary Russians appear to be in a full-scale panic, and they're naturally documenting the whole meltdown on Instagram and Twitter, using hashtags like #кризис (#crisis) and #ЧерныйВторник (#BlackTuesday). The ruble is crashing, but Russian Internet activity is soaring.
Varlamov writes:
Вы спите, а завтра с утра во многих магазинах будут пустые полки.
Пока одни бегут в обменные пункты скупать валюту, другие штурмуют магазины. Берут все, что не успело подорожать, в основном, конечно, технику, продукты, одежду. Люди спешат избавиться от рублей. В круглосуточных магазинах прямо сейчас стоят огромные очереди. Немного шокирующие фотографии сейчас люди публикуют в соцсетях.
Из-за резкого снижения стоимости рубля по отношению к другим валютам Россия в считаные недели превратилась в центр мирового шопинга. Процессинговые компании фиксируют рост транзакций по банковским картам нерезидентов в российских магазинах, да и сами ретейлеры говорят о притоке покупателей-иностранцев.
You’re probably sleeping now, but tomorrow morning you’ll awake to empty shelves in many stores.
While some people are running to currency exchange booths to buy up dollars and euros, others are storming the stores. They’re grabbing anything with a price tag that hasn’t yet skyrocketed (mainly tech products, groceries, and clothes). People are hurrying to get rid of all their rubles. The stores open 24/7 have had long lines all through the night. People have begun publishing some rather startling photographs on social media.
Due to the sharp decline of the ruble’s value relative to other currencies, Russia has in a matter of weeks become a world center of shopping. Credit card processing companies have tracked a spike of transactions by foreigners in Russian stores, and Russian retailers themselves talk about wave of consumers from abroad.
RuNet Echo has collected several of the photographs Varlamov highlighted on Instagram, translating their Russian captions into English.
#Икеа#очередь#ажиотаж#всескупают
A photo posted by Olga (@tishkina07) on
IKEA, Mega Belaya Dacha shopping mall, Moscow.
Ахаха, это моя новая любимая тефлоновая сковородка! Сегодня после работы отстоял двухчасовую очередь в М.Видео, чтобы ее купить. Там такой дикий ажиотаж! Народ, прекрасно понимая, что из-за грехопадения рубля буквально завтра утром цены взлетят вверх в два, а то и три раза, раскупает телевизоры и другую крупногабаритную бытовую технику, как горячие пирожки. #ЭкономическийКризис #ОбвалРубля #Ад #ЧерныйВторник #ЕвроСтоРублей #EconomicDepression #BlackTuesday #МВидео #Евро100 #Доллар80 #Очередь #Шоппинг #Shopping #Ахаха #Ahaha
A photo posted by Arkadiy (@arkadiymo) on
Ahaha, this is my new favorite non-stick frying pan! Stood in line after work today for two hours in MVideo to buy it. So crazy in there! People understand quite well that because of ruble's downfall prices will shoot up tomorrow morning, two or three times, so they're buying TV sets and other electronics like hot cakes.
#кризис #дефолт #мвидео #дурдом #этороссия #доллар #шопинг #очередь #санкции #евро #пустыеполки #авыкупили
A photo posted by Первая ДВЕРНАЯ ФАБРИКА (@roman_dveri) on
#crisis #default #mvideo #crazypants #thisisrussia #dollar #shopping #line #sanctions #euro #emptyshelves
#кризис #дефолт #мвидео #дурдом #этороссия #доллар #шопинг #очередь #санкции #евро
A photo posted by Первая ДВЕРНАЯ ФАБРИКА (@roman_dveri) on
#crisis #default #mvideo #crazypants #thisisrussia #dollar #shopping #line #sanctions #euro
#очередь
A photo posted by Александра (@aleksandranosevich) on
And you can't even see the end of the line from here, the line curls to the right and goes on in the isles.
http://instagram.com/p/wrdfRXKRZf/
Unbelievable scenes happening in MVideo. If not dollars, then electronics.
Сегодня я снова не подготовилась с едой вне дома, тк даже представить себе не могла, что проведу днем в понедельник в Икее 5 часов, и это еще беременная подруга скостила очередь на доставку на 1,5 часа  утром кашу и сейчас рис. #икея #понедельник #пп #дневникпитания #очередь #народвпанике #рубльничто
A photo posted by Кулинарный Блог ПП (@olga.lifestyle) on
… I couldn't even imagine I'd spend five hours in an Ikea on Monday afternoon…
Решили съездить в #ikea
A photo posted by @stilet_designer on
We decided to go to Ikea.
Санкции напугали всех? Теперь подарки на Новый Год такие дарят?  #рыбныйстол #тцтройка #ашан #подаркинановыйгод #последствиясанкций
A photo posted by @shy4ka_krashennaya on
Have sanctions scared everyone? Or is that what one buys as New Year gifts nowadays?
Some Russian Internet users have criticized those sharing photos of long lines at stores, saying it exacerbates Russia's crisis. One LiveJournal user, for instance, says it's just another attempt to spread panic among the public:
не понимаю в чем новость вообще. на календаре 17 декабря, последние годы эти очереди с безумцами в магазинах и пробки вокруг торговых центров – обычное дело для предновогодней истерии.
I don't understand what the news is. It's December 17, in the last few years these lines with crazy people in stores and traffic jams around shopping malls are a usual thing for pre-New Year hysteria.
Whatever the pressures of holiday gift-giving and Instagram-induced panic, it's hard to deny that Russian consumers have the common sense to understand the ruble's vanishing purchasing power. The rush to invest in dollars, euros, vacuum cleaners, jackets, food, and who knows what else all suggests remarkably low confidence in the nation's economy—confidence low enough to compel people to wait in line for hours at IKEA on a Tuesday night.

author: Tanya Lokot


text:
In Between Images of the Peshawar Attack, a Thought About Pakistan’s Army Public Schools · Global Voices
Sahar Habib Ghazi

Screengrab from the Facebook page of Mubeen Shah. He was murdered during the attack at the Army Public School in Peshawar.
My two-year old daughter looks at me and says, “What happened, Mama?” I can’t get the images of the blood-stained green-and-yellow striped neckties and white uniforms out my mind. I hope she doesn’t see them in my eyes.
Minutes later my husband messages, “Just like us at that age. In line at morning assembly. Never can you imagine something like this happening.”
Six gunmen dressed in paramilitary uniforms entered the Army Public School in Peshawar, with only murder on their minds. More than a hundred and thirty innocent, beautiful, and hopeful children had their lives snatched from them in the most terrifying way possible. Hundreds of other students and families have been left with open wounds on their bodies and minds.
We are supposed to protect our children from imaginary monsters under the bed, these children faced heinous real monsters in the classroom.
An hour after the gunmen entered the school, and 30 minutes after Pakistani special forces cordoned off the the sprawling Peshawar campus, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban told Reuters the attack was in “revenge for the army offensive in Waziristan.”
Some of the children attacked might even have a parent actively deployed in ZarbeAzb, a military offensive against the Taliban launched in June.
There are tens of thousands of students at Army Public School (APS) campuses across Pakistan, a progressive school system that educates children of servicemen and hard-working Pakistanis.
Mubeen Shah in his APS uniform. His Facebook profile image uploaded on December 3, has been shared by hundreds.
Many Pakistanis may be shocked that I call the APS system “progressive”. I don’t use this word lightly. It's the only conclusion I can reach after poring over their website the last few hours, recalling stories I’ve heard about the schools and comparing their values, training processes, curriculum, and organization to other schools in Pakistan.
There are more than 146 Army Public Schools across the country. Some of them are in the most remote parts of the country, where there are no other schools. While there are other school systems at the scale of APS —for example, Beaconhouse, City School and Roots—they are all private schools with high tuition fees.
Years ago, my husband and his brothers went to APS schools, often when their father was posted in a place where only APS schools existed. Today, they jokingly blame their typos on their APS education, but their other tales about the holistic, close-knit, community-driven education they received have always sounded so unique and special to someone like me, educated at a private Catholic school in New York, and a semi-government all-girls school and a private school in Islamabad.
The education system in Pakistan has many flaws, but the APS system tries to offer affordable education, prioritizes holistic development, rigorous teacher training, incredibly well-developed handbooks, and agile curriculum development. I got all this information from their website, which they present as a “resource for teaching and learning as well as a forum for parents to become a part of the learning triangle. ”
Here's a snippet from one of their FAQ's for “pre-school” teacher training: “Formal teaching in school becomes meaningful to students if it is linked to everyday life. When students realize that that the skills taught/developed in the class are applicable to real life, they find the education meaningful and develop more interest.”
Like most schools in Pakistan or other former British colonies, the student body is divided into “houses” that compete in debates, sports and other activities. At APS, the houses are “Unity”, “Faith”, “Discipline”, and “Tolerance”. Those are the values that are ingrained in APS students.
Candlelight vigil in Karachi for the victims of Peshawar's attack. Image by @aliachughtai.
In 2013, APS’ central organizing body launched the “Smiles-Raising Emotionally Healthy Children” project on their website for parents to send queries to a clinical psychologist with 14 years’ experience working with children and young people. I didn't test the service, but apparently an expert will respond to a query via email.
They also run a “Values Education Programme” which focuses on “global citizenship emotional well being and developing better human beings who can contribute in creating a conflict free world based on peace & harmony.” Their 2013-2014 handbook for this program, titled the “Year of Peace and Harmony,” talks about conflict resolution, bullying, cyberbullying, recycling, and so much more.
Here’s an excerpt from their section on understanding and managing conflict in classrooms: “As human beings, it is inevitable that we come into conflict with others as we all have different priorities, values, beliefs, needs and wants. Conflict , therefore, is a normal and natural part of our lives. Conflict is not necessarily destructive. How we respond to conflict determines whether it is constructive or destructive.”
I don’t know how much of this material or training is trickling down to their dozens of branches across the country, but at least they have a solid roadmap. A roadmap for the children whose parents are fighting one of Pakistan’s most scary and heart-wrenching problems—ideology-bred Taliban militancy.
Many of Pakistan’s other schools—both private and government—could learn so much from APS’ handbooks and teacher training guides.
In the end, this war will not be won by bombs and bullets, but by giving vulnerable children, who might fall prey to a brutal ideology, the tools to recognise the merciless monster for what it is.
Sahar Habib Ghazi is Global Voices’ managing editor. She didn’t intend for this to read like a press release for APS, and is very sorry if it did, but she believes APS’ story is one of the many important and untold stories in Pakistan. She tweets at @SaharHGhazi.

author: Sahar Habib Ghazi


text:
OjoVoz App Helps Underrepresented Communities Go Digital With Their Storytelling · Global Voices
Eduardo Avila

It is true that there are many mobile apps on the market that allow users to take photographs, record audio, or both, but the Android app OjoVoz (EyeVoice) is specifically designed with underrepresented and marginalized communities in mind. These communities may not be as familiar with technology, so the simple-to-use interface contains four buttons providing the user ability to take a photograph, record their voice, add a keyword, and then upload to the internet.
Demonstrating the use of the OjoVoz app. Photo provided by Eugenio Tisselli and used with permission.
Beginning in 2011, programmer Eugenio Tiselli started to work on the mobile app after working nearly eight years working with the project Megafone, another project that provides digital storytelling tools aimed at diverse communities. With his current project, he has been able to provide the tools and support for groups eager to share their stories, culture, and knowledge with each other and with a wider audience.
In an email interview with Rising Voices, Tiselli stressed that OjoVoz is not simply the technology, “but rather the collaborative processes in the creation of knowledge. Even though they are mediated by technological elements, the most important is the co-existence and the face-to-face meetings that are generated as part of the dynamics of the projects.”
Over the past few years, the OjoVoz app has played a role in community projects in diverse places such as Tanzania, Colombia, and Mexico. These are a couple of examples of how communities are mobilizing to tell their stories using their mobile devices.
Sauti Ya Wakulima (The Voice of the Farmers) is a collaborative project where farmers from the Chambezi region of the Bagamoyo District in Tanaznia have been capturing images and voice recording to document farming practices as a way build to preserve the existing knowledge.
Click on image to visit the content.
Ms. Mariam is one of the cassava growers and she is giving us some explanations on this crop. She is saying that, as compare to the previous time, now they are cultivating in an improved way, they have improved seeds and the know how to plant in rows and weed their crops, she is thankful to the government for sending agriculture officers to the villages as well as investors as now they can process cassava flour, they can have enough harvest and sell to other people so this is a good development. They are selling cassava flour to business people in Dar es Salaam. In the past years they use to get very little harvest as compare to now, she is expecting if things remain the same in the next five years she will build a house out of farming activities.
Los Ojos de la Milpa (The Eyes of the Milpa) is another collaborate project that aims to preserve stories told by elders in communities in the mountains of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico about how the milpa, a crop-growing system used across Mexico and parts of Central America, which has been taking place for generations without the help of fertilizers or other types of technology. The project provides content in Spanish, English and Ayuujk (Mixe language).
Click on image to visit the content.
Yïte’n ëëts mïku’uk ïxaa nyïkwä’ätsy yë tsapajkx jïts yë ujts yïktäjjë’kkixy jïts jïtïn wä’äts yyo’nt, jïts yë pyijyu’nk yë’ tpëkt xaa të yïkkukeepy jïts yä’ät wyä’ätst jatïkoojk.
This is how we weed the peach groves, it is necessary to remove all the weeds so that nothing will stop them from growing well. Some branches were pruned so that the trees may flower, they will grow again.
The free and open-source approach to the app plays a fundamental role in the app's development. Tiselli noted that already a group of Colombian programmers have built upon the app to add the functionality of recording videos in addition to existing options of recording sound and capturing images.
OjoVoz takes an active role in “incubating” projects by offering technical assistance and providing a temporary space on the site's server to upload images. To download and configure the app, visit the OjoVoz website for more instructions, and there is a short video tutorial in Spanish on how to use the app.

author: Eduardo Avila


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Serbia Arrests 11 Foreign Human Rights Activists Ahead of Protest · Global Voices
Danica Radisic

A similar group of activists staged a protest near Downing Street in London on 17 June 2014 to condemn the persecution of Falun Gong activists in China. Photo by Reporter#19616. Copyright Demotix
Eleven human rights activists from Bulgaria, Finland and Slovakia who were planning to protest in Serbia were arrested on December 14 and 15 and are being detained in an undisclosed location outside of Belgrade by the country's authorities, according to reports.
In a public statement on December 17, Amnesty International demanded their release and explained:
The individuals, who had reportedly travelled to Serbia to participate in peaceful demonstrations against the Chinese authorities’ actions towards Falun Gong practitioners during a summit of leaders from Central Eastern Europe and China in the capital Belgrade, were taken from their hotels by police and detained. […]
Amnesty International is concerned that the Serbian authorities are acting unlawfully, and urges them to immediately end any detention based solely on the persons’ intention to exercise their right to peaceful assembly.
Practitioners of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual discipline, have been persecuted in China since 1999. A 2000 Amnesty International report describes methods employed by the Chinese government to crack down on Falun Gong and similar groups, including intricate media campaigns, forced ideological conversion, arrests, forced labor, and torture, sometimes resulting in death and illegal organ harvesting from the victims.
The peaceful protests planned in Belgrade by this particular international group of Falun Gong activists were allegedly to coincide with the high profile CEE-China Summit held in Belgrade on December 16 and 17, 2014. This is the third edition of this summit, during which 16 leaders from former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and communist leaders from China meet to discuss economic collaboration.
By some accounts of the story, nine of the activists were detained on Sunday, December 14, another two were arrested later, and at least two more individuals with ties to the group were banned from entering the country upon arrival at Belgrade's Nikola Tesla International Airport. Due to very little information available in the media or online, the facts of the case are still unclear however. Amnesty International's statement provides some details about one of the detained activists:
One of those detained, Lihua Lan, a Finnish citizen, was allowed to enter Serbia, but was subsequently arrested at her hotel on 15 December, and taken to the Detention Removal Centre at Padinska skela. She was informed that she would not be released to leave the country until at least this Friday, the date of her return flight. While Amnesty International understands she was in possession of the necessary travel documents, she, as well as nine Bulgarian and one Slovak national, was held under Article 49 of the Law on Foreigners, which provides for detention until deportation for “A foreigner who cannot be forcibly removed immediately or a foreigner whose identity has not been ascertained or who does not possess a travel document”.
Some local independent news sites and bloggers have covered the story, calling into question the legality of the actions of Serbian authorities. Independent news site OzonPress.net from Čačak reported in an article that authorities had banned the activists’ planned protest:
… Četiri uredno prijavljena skupa koja su ovim povodom trebalo da se održe na Trgu Republike u Beogradu ovih dana, pre dva dana su zabranjeni su od strane policije na nezakonit način i bez navođenja razloga, a prijavljivač skupa je podneo žalbu.
Sinoć, nešto pre 23 časa, beogradska policija je uhapsila 9 praktikanata Falun Gonga iz Bugarske, koji su se nalazili u hostelu u kojem su bili smešteni. Niko od njih nikada nije imao problema sa zakonom, a poznato je da su skupovi Falun Gong praktikanata uvek mirni i u skladu sa zakonom.
Policija nije dala razlog za hapšenje, a prema posljednjim nezvaničnim informacijama iz bugarske ambasade, ovih devet osoba se nalazi pritvoreno negdje izvan Beograda.
… Four neatly registered gatherings that were supposed to take place on Republic Square in Belgrade these days were banned two days ago by police in an illegal manner and without any given reason, while the organizer of the gatherings appealed [the decision].
Last night, sometime before 11 p.m., Belgrade police arrested nine practitioners of Falun Gong from Bulgaria, who were located at the hostel where they were staying. None of them had ever had problems with authorities before and it is common knowledge that Falun Gong gatherings are always peaceful and in line with the law.
The police has not given any reason for the arrests and, according to the latest unofficial information from the Bulgarian Embassy, these nine individuals are being detained somewhere outside of Belgrade.
According to a news report on the official site of the International Coalition to End Organ Pillaging in China, a coalition of lawyers, medical professionals, and human rights advocates dedicated to ending organ trafficking in China, the activists are being detained “provisionally” by Serbian authorities. Unofficial information has also implied that the activists might be facing deportation from the country, although no one has stated whether or not they may have broken any Serbian or international laws, nor exactly what the reasons for their detainment might be.
Serbian national and mainstream media have largely ignored the case, and those outlets that did cover it offered scant reporting. The online edition of Blic daily, owned by Swiss Ringier AG media corporation, mentions the case in a short article titled “Awkward Questions for Minister [for EU Integrations] Joksimović: Why Were Six EU Activists Arrested in Belgrade” (the number of activists detained in Belgrade at the time of publishing was, in fact, eleven).
The website of the largest Serbian national news network B92 only mentions the matter from a EU-related standpoint in an article about Minister Jadranka Joksimović's statements on EU accession terms for Serbia.
While state-operated national news agency Tanjug published a news wire on the matter, titled “Activists Who Wanted to Protest Detained?”, the agency only managed to get this answer from Minister Joksimović on the matter:
“Obaveštena sam o toj neprijatnoj situaciji, ali još ne znamo sve činjenice”, rekla je Joksimović, odgovarajući na novinarsko pitanje tokom konferencije za medije u Briselu.
“I have been informed of this unfortunate situation, but we still don't know all the facts,” Joksimović said, in response to a journalist's question during a press conference in Brussels.
The facts of the case remain unclear. Serbian NGO Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (YUCOM) have requested that “the Minister of Interior and the Minister of Justice provide information about the procedures against those detained”.

author: Danica Radisic


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Small Fries, Big Problems for Japan’s McDonald’s · Global Voices
Nevin Thompson

McDonald's sponsors sumo. Image: Gwydion M. Williams, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
McDonald's in Japan is only selling small servings of French fries to deal with a potato shortage caused by a port strike. The move is causing consternation and surprise among the chain's dwindling consumer base, and the potato shortage is just another example of the fast food chain's steady decline in Japan.
A port strike on the West Coast of the United States that is showing no signs of ending is the reason why McDonald's has resorted to rationing French fries.
【今日から】マックポテトがSサイズのみに http://t.co/VJE1PRtofJ #マック #マクドナルド #ポテトS pic.twitter.com/M9eSq0vN8X
— モデルプレス (@modelpress) December 17, 2014
Starting from today you can only buy a small French fries at McDonalds #McD's #McDonald's #small fries
All set meals will for the time being only be served with the smaller size of French fries, with a small discount thrown in to make up for the smaller size.
Japanese reactions to the restriction on French fry consumption can be followed using the #ポテトS (#small Fries) hashtag:
今日からマックポテトSサイズのみ。これは追い風だと思う！少なくとも、私にはMサイズは多すぎ。セット50円引きなのも嬉しいね！ http://t.co/OENKrPmkaD #ポテトS #マクドナルド #マックポテト
— ぽんあか（EOS6D+レンズ） (@ponaka_san) December 17, 2014
Starting today you can only buy a small fries at McDonald's. This is actually awesome because the regular-size fries McDonald's normally sells is too large, and now we get a 50-yen (US$0.50) discount with every meal!
Others were left uninspired by the change to the menu:
#マクドナルド なんて最近食べてないけど、ポテトのSサイズなんてショボくて食いたくないわ。#ポテトS pic.twitter.com/P8Cmm54ztb
— ゲリメル (@garymelson) December 17, 2014
I have not eaten at #McDonald's recently, and the sheer uninspiring dullness of their small fries is not going to bring me back.
The Japan French fry debacle is a continuation of the McDonald's restaurant chain's troubles in Japan, which date back just over a year to August 2013, when Sarah Casanova was appointed president of McDonald’s Holdings Japan, the company that operates 3,280 outlets across the country.
Originally from Canada, Casanova is a 22-year McDonald's veteran, who once served as executive director of McDonald’s Japan and marketing head from 2004 to 2009. She replaced Eikoh Harada, himself a former Apple executive who worked to aggressively build up McDonald's in Japan for nearly a decade, winning accolades as a business guru in the process.
However, in the year before his departure, McDonald's sales in Japan slumped thanks to a combination of strong competition from convenience stores and an ageing population.
Casanova's year at the helm of McDonald's in Japan has seen a steady stream of missteps, including a tainted-food crisis that severely dented consumer confidence in the company, notably because, from a Japanese sensibility, Casanova failed to properly apologize to customers. McDonald's Japan has also been criticized for overcharging customers.
Since the food scandal, customers have not returned to McDonald's, a contributing factor to the company's first-ever operating loss in Japan. According to a statement made at the end of October 2014, McDonald's Japan's operating loss is expected to reach 9.4 billion yen (US$85.5 million) in the year through December 2014, reversing an 11.5 billion yen ($US100 million) operating profit of the previous year, when Harada was running the company.
Franchise owners are upset, not only because of the sudden reversal in profits, but also because McDonald's, under Casanova's leadership, has implemented confusing and unmanageable business processes with franchises that have led to the losses in the first place.
McDonald's has tried to placate franchisees by temporarily reducing royalty payments. But with operating losses still forecast for 2015, for franchisees there is no end in sight to slumping sales and the expectation they will still have to pay their franchise royalties no matter what the market conditions.
A quote from a franchisee, as reported in the Nikkei Shimbun, has gone viral:
「フランチャイズオーナーの私たちには売り上げ目標を出させておきながら、会社が赤字の業績予想を出すのはどういうことか」
How can you be asking us franchisees to pay you royalties when McDonald's is forecasting to be in the red in 2015?
A Japanese business blogger observed:
しかし、フランチャイズオーナーらは、
「いずれは支払わなければならない」、
「実際はただ借金を負っただけ」と言う…
…「客足を回復する起爆剤にはならない…」と
見るFCオーナーの存在も。全店舗の７割近くをFC店が占め、
販売の中心は完全にFC店に移っている現状では、
消費者のみならず、FCのオーナーたちの信頼も
取り戻す必要があるのではないでしょうか。
The thing is, franchise owners are being asked to agree to future royalty payments while accepting all of the liability…
…Franchisees can see there is no way to instantly recover all of the customers that have departed over the past few years. Franchises account for 70% of McDonald's stores in Japan, McDonald's sales in Japan depend on franchise owners. The people who head McDonald's in Japan not only have to win over consumers, they also have to win over the franchisees as well.
The Nikkei article points out that for franchisees, the disappointment is caused by more than just falling profits and the threat of onerous royalty payments:
今回、FCオーナーを取材する中で感じたのは、オーナーたちが日本マクドナルドに対して強い愛着を持ち、誇りを持って働いているという点だ。
なぜか。実はオーナーの中には元社員から独立した人が多く、日本マクドナルドの創業者である藤田田・元社長の「現場主義」に共感し、「マクドナルドに育てられた」という思いを強く抱いている。そのため、ここ数年の現場の実情と乖離した本社の施策が出てくるたびに、疑問を抱きながらも従わざるを得ないという苦渋を噛みしめていたようだ。
When researching this story and speaking with franchisees, one feeling was very apparent: franchise owners feel a strong bond of affection for McDonald's Japan, and take pride in their work with the company.
One reason for this is that many McDonald's franchisees started out as McDonald's employees themselves, and went on to own and operate their own restaurants. They wholeheartedly embraced McDonald's Japan's original core philosophy of “management from the bottom up,” believing that McDonald's made them who they are as entrepreneurs.
However with every incident in recent years that points out how much the folks at head office in McDonald's Japan have become estranged from the day-to-day realities of running a McDonald's restaurant, franchisees have had to uncomplainingly swallow their bitterness.
Thanks to an aging population, more savvy competitors and plain mismanagement, McDonald's, once a beacon of American culture in Japan, faces an uncertain future in that country.
【悲報】マクドナルド中央林間店、翌年1/4の18時に閉店 30年の歴史に幕 pic.twitter.com/iOIMtMHYW7
— うみうし小川 (@39r5) December 6, 2014
McDonald's Chuo Rinkan store is set to close on April 1, 2014 after 30 years at the same location.

author: Nevin Thompson


text:
Southeast Asia’s Public Transport Woes in Photos  · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Despite Thai laws requiring mandatory wearing of crash helmets, both rider and passenger appears to flout the law. Photo by Matthew Richards, Copyright @Demotix (10/6/2012)
Earlier this month, Global Voices featured a viral photo of a Vietnamese woman riding a scooter without a helmet while carrying a child. One of the comments about the photo said that it reflected the real situation in the streets of Vietnam. Indeed, it is common to see motorbike riders without a helmet not just in Hanoi, but in other Vietnamese cities.
But this spectacle is not limited to Vietnam. If we travel to other cities in Southeast Asia, we can find similar examples of road safety violations.
The photo above this article shows another motorbike rider without a helmet, but this time it’s in Thailand.
Strict implementation of traffic laws is necessary to protect the public's safety. But we often see people, including children, riding vehicles that pose a great risk to their lives. They are concrete reminders about the inadequate and inefficient transport systems in many Southeast Asian nations. Check out the photos below:
Thai schoolchildren pictured as they ride home on the roof of a crowded truck. Photo by Matthew Richards, Copyright @Demotix (7/18/2013)
Travelling in Cambodia can be really difficult, especially in the northeast:
Photo from @billherod
Indonesia's trains can get very overcrowded during rush hours:
Train passengers in Jakarta sit on the roof carriage, side windows and between carriages. Photo by wisnu agung prasetyo, Copyright @Demotix, (9/29/2010)
Jeepneys transport people and goods in the Philippines, even if they are often overloaded:
Jeepney here in province be like … pic.twitter.com/xSThHDuxP7
— Alyssa Abordo (@AlyssaAbordo_) April 13, 2014
In Myanmar, writer Jason Szep probes the country’s antiquated transport system:
Most vehicles, for instance, are right-hand drive, a throwback to British colonialism. Yet the roads are right-hand traffic, similar to the American system, reducing visibility and keeping drivers on perpetual alert.
As Southeast Asian nations gear up for the 2015 integration of their economies, they must also overhaul their transport services to boost local growth, productivity, and most importantly, protect the safety of their citizens.

author: Mong Palatino


text:
The Pakistanis Choosing Light Over Darkness After the Horrific Peshawar School Attack  · Global Voices
Sahar Habib Ghazi

Photo tweeted from vigil in Islamabad by @Fmullick. “In times of darkness we come together to bring light- @P_Y_A & @khudipk light lanterns for victims of #peshawarattack”
Across the border in India and the world over, people were shocked by the brutality of the attack on an army-run school in Peshawar. In Pakistan, there was horror, rage and resolve.
As Pakistan's special forces rescued the last of the hostages at the Army Public School, which six Taliban gunmen had besieged for eight hours, killing 145 people, 132 of whom were children, many Pakistanis tried to find light in the darkness.
With their permission, I am sharing Facebook status updates from friends that gave me strength. The first three women here are trailblazers in Pakistan's happening start-up scene.
Kalsoom Lakhani, the founder of Invest2Innovate, a company that supports and launches civic-minded start-ups in Pakistan, said this on Facebook:
My heart was heavy yesterday, thinking of the children, teachers, and families torn apart by monsters. I went to bed early, conflicted by a deep-seeded desire to block out this world and my simultaneous guilt for the privilege to even do so.
I woke up this morning with my heart still heavy, but my resolve much stronger. There is so much evil in this world, but there is also so much goodness. I see it on a daily basis when I work with our entrepreneurs – people who are striving tirelessly to make Pakistan a better place – improving and challenging education standards, employing artisan women, helping young people get jobs, the list goes on. I see it among our partners, our friends, and our mentors, who are committed to improving this country, who fearlessly challenge the status quo.
As far as I'm concerned, we can wallow in the dark or choose to live in the light. In honor and memory of all those senselessly killed and stolen by the dark, I choose the light.
Jehan Ara, the president of the Pakistan Software Houses Association, which is a trusted Google for Entrepreneurs partner, and Bolo Bhi, a non-profit dedicated to internet freedom, privacy and gender rights in Pakistan, shared:
I don't want to hear political statements; I don't want to see flags at half mast; I don't want to see your gloomy faces indicating how sad you are; I don't want to hear that you have said a prayer in the Assembly; I don't want to see posters or hear empty platitudes. I want all of you who ask for my vote each election to get together and work out how you are going to fix this so that these lives may not have been lost in vain.
Today my colleagues across the country and I re-commit ourselves to continuing our work for the young people of this nation. We know that there is so much good that is happening in so many nooks and corners of this country but we must also take our heads out of the sand and recognize that some things require courageous decisions and actions – and they must be taken now.
If you are indeed leaders, show us your strength and resolve today. Show the mothers and fathers and siblings of those youngsters whose lives were cut short that this will never be allowed to happen again. We want more than empty words this time.
Saba Gul, the founder of Popinjay, a company that Invest2Innovate helped kickstart and has introduced luxe fashion accessories by underprivileged Pakistani artisan women to the global market, shared this post on Facebook after attending a vigil in New York:
As I lit a candle and said a prayer, I thought to myself – is this all I can do? For now, perhaps it's all most of us can do.  But I choose to believe that as we all stood in solidarity in Washington Square Park – Jews, Muslims and Christians – we represented the coming to age of a polarized world. People young and old had tears in their eyes and sorrow in their hearts for the innocent souls that came to school and never went home to their parents. We represented the unity this tragedy has created. The understanding that we have no one but ourselves to blame for this. And like someone aptly said – this is our own shit to fix. No conspiracy theories, no excuses, no pointing fingers.
My biggest hope and dream with Popinjay is that the women and girls I work with can be empowered to raise sons that choose tolerance, peace and love.
A day after the attack, Isfandiyar Shaheen, co-manager of Cyan Capital, a $50 million private equity fund in Pakistan, offered his thoughts inspired by motivational speaker and popular Pakistani blogger quadriplegic Sarmad Tariq, who passed away earlier this year:
To live is to try by Sarmad Tariq. Today is also his birthday. I am mentally paralyzed following what happened in Peshawar. Reading this post again reminded me that the vast majority of our countrymen are criers and not triers.
Despite that obvious and sad fact, I feel fortunate to have met and known a handful of triers, the same triers are organizing blood drives, raising funds for aid, putting themselves in the line of fire, organizing trauma stress therapy initiatives, taking steps to hold our leaders accountable for adopting a flawed foreign policy, choosing to see the light and not giving up.
Don't give up and make sure that when you die, you are trying for the next step and not waiting for the next miracle.
As the eight-hour siege came to a close, before the death toll rose from 141 to 145, proving this to be the deadliest terror attack in Pakistan's recent history, this simple website started being shared widely:
Within a few hours thousands had signed up to help. Using the contact option, I got in touch with the person behind the site. A man named Zaki responded in an email:
Someone on social media came up with the idea – I read it and it struck a chord with me, so i decided to set up a quick website and put the word out there about this initiative.
The response is overwhelming – people want to see this happen. I'm trying to figure out how to set up to make it happen. Any connections or ideas you have are most welcome :)
We're at 4400 and the numbers been growing fast.


text:
The ‘Perfect Human’ Doesn’t Live in Puerto Rico (or Any Other Country) · Global Voices
Ángel Carrión

Drum workshop on Calle Loiza, Santurce, Puerto Rico. Photo by Flickr user Angel Xavier Viera-Vargas. CC BY-ND 2.0
Is there such a thing as a “perfect human being”? Many in Puerto Rico seem to think so. And those who do, believe the closest thing to one is, precisely, a Puerto Rican.
At least, that is what can be gleaned from the social media buzz generated by a blog post by Lior Pachter titled “The perfect human is Puerto Rican,” published on December 2 on his blog Bits of DNA, written in reaction to the news that James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's molecular structure, would be auctioning off his Nobel Prize.
Watson was shunned by the scientific community after he made incendiary remarks about how research allegedly pointed to the conclusion that black people are less intelligent than white people. This was only the latest in a long string of racist and sexist comments made by Watson throughout his career.
Pachter, who is a computational biologist, was being more than a little ironic when he chose the title for his post. The idea was to conduct an informal thought experiment to underscore how absurd Watson's obsession with genetically “improving” human beings really is. Essential to Pachter's thought experiment was the data on Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, better known as SNPs (or “snips”) collected on SNPedia, an open database of 59,593 SNPs and their associations. The particular data Pachter used was collected by researchers at the Caribbean Genome Center at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez.
Taras Oleksyk, one of the researchers involved in collecting the data, explained Pachter's thought experiment in a nutshell in a post published on the Caribbean Genome Center's blog a few days after Pachter's post went viral:
Using this genetic resource, Patcher [sic] looked at all the mutations in the database and notes the ones with a phenotypic effect. If the effect is positive, the mutation is beneficial. So the person with the most of the beneficial alleles and the least of the disadvantageous alleles must be the “perfect human”. It just happened that the sample that clusters the closest to this made up point was a woman we collected a sample from three years ago in Puerto Rico. She was therefore designated as the “perfect woman”.
Thus, the part of Pachter's post that gave it its title and that attracted the most attention:
The nearest neighbor to the “perfect human” is […] a female who is… Puerto Rican. One might imagine that such a person already existed, maybe Yuiza, the only female Taino Cacique (chief) in Puerto Rico’s history.
Leaving aside the historical error (Yuisa was not the only female taíno chief that we know of, nor can she be considered Puerto Rican), Pachter, to his credit, immediately admits that to try to define a perfect human is very misleading, at best.
Oleksyk, who is also a biology professor at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, felt obliged to offer some clarification in the post cited above, since it was the data that he helped collect that was used in Lior Pachter's exercise, even though he never imagined that it would help to cause such a firestorm on social media:
If the readers only read to the article’s conclusion, where they would notice that author is a fan of the “Puerto Rico All-Star Basketball Unicycle Team” they should ask themselves: How does this Berkeley professor know so much about Puerto Rico, while I live here all my life and I have never heard about such a thing?”
This is because the example is used to show that the author is sarcastic about this comparison. In fact, he is very happy that Puerto Ricans win the comparison, because he feared that the perfect human would be a white male of British descent such as Watson. For him, the exotic remoteness of the “winning” population is a great thing. As long as it were not Anglo-Americans, it could have been elves. Sadly, the audience did not see the subtle message, the resounding “Hurrah! We have won the race of the human race!” has made everyone unable to make a critical judgment.
This is no understatement. Spanish-language news agency Agencia EFE produced an article that treated Pachter's blogpost as a serious scientific study. That same article was later republished acritically in numerous news sites, including one of the most widely read Puerto Rican daily papers, Primera Hora, which, despite having the benefit of an interview with Lior Pachter himself, only helped to spread disinformation, leading many to believe that there really existed such a thing as a genetically “perfect” human and that the closest thing to one right now is a Puerto Rican.
Puerto Rican researcher Rafael A. Irizarry, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, who is also one of the most highly cited researchers in mathematics and computer science, wrote a Spanish-language post on his blog Simply Stats out of concern for the mistaken and downright worrying interpretation of Lior Pachter's post in mainstream media. After explaining what exactly the human genome is, how genetic variation works, and concepts like “race” in simple language, he finishes his post with the following thoughts:
A pesar de nuestros problemas sociales y económicos actuales, Puerto Rico tiene mucho de lo cual estar orgulloso. En particular, producimos buenísimos ingenieros, atletas y músicos. Atribuir su éxito a “genes buenos” de nuestra “raza” no sólo es un disparate científico, sino una falta de respeto a estos individuos que a través del trabajo duro, la disciplina y el esmero han logrado lo que han logrado. Si quieren saber si Puerto Rico tuvo algo que ver con el éxito de estos individuos, pregúntenle a un historiador, un antropólogo o un sociólogo y no a un genético. Ahora, si quieren aprender del potencial de estudiar genomas para mejorar tratamientos médicos y la importancia de estudiar una diversidad de individuos, un genético tendrá mucho que compartir.
In spite of our current social and economic problems, Puerto Rico has a lot to be proud about. In particular, we produce great engineers, athletes, and musicians. To credit their success to the “good genes” of our “race” is not only scientifically absurd, but also disrespectful to these individuals who through hard work, discipline, and dedication have achieved what they have achieved. If you want to know if Puerto Rico had anything to do with the success of these individuals, ask a historian, an anthropologist or a sociologist, but not a geneticist. Now, if you want to learn about the potential that studying genomes has to improve medical treatments and the importance of studying a variety of individuals, a geneticist will have a lot to share.

author: Ángel Carrión


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VIDEO: How Palm Oil is Causing Environmental Destruction in Indonesia · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

The team of Coconuts TV went to south Sumatra in Indonesia to document the impact of the burning of peatlands and forests to make way for the expanding palm oil plantations. The burning of forests in Sumatra is causing the displacement of endangered species in the island; and it also creates a deadly haze that affects Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.


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Cuba: More Money Means More Technology, With or Without State Reforms · Global Voices
Ellery Roberts Biddle

Correos de Cuba, Cuban postal service kiosk. Photo by Victor Manuel via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Wednesday’s bombshell announcements that the U.S. and Cuban governments have decided to re-establish diplomatic ties after 56 years of estrangement brought tears, joy, awe, and disbelief to Cubans across the globe. (And some anger from Cuban-Americans, too.) While President Obama’s speech was watchable in real time—televised and live streamed on the White House website—those outside of Cuba had to wait patiently for the text of Raul Castro’s speech to be transcribed and uploaded to Cuban state media sites. The brief address delivered by Cuba’s commander-in-chief was not streamed live because Cuba’s rickety Internet infrastructure cannot support it. At least not yet.
Among thousands of other questions flying around the Internet and the streets of Miami, Havana, and Washington today is the question of technology. What will these changes mean for Internet access and mobile telephony in Cuba? For now, little is certain. But there are a few things we can glean from what both leaders have said—and haven’t said—so far.
While Western advocates may rush to focus on how this will affect government policy and practice around the Internet, the impact of yesterday’s economic reforms on the tech environment in Cuba may be the most critical change to watch at the moment. With more money, more Cubans will be buy mobile phones and service. This does not mean that they will have Internet access – 3G is scarce at best on the island. But it will accelerate the changes that are already taking in place in Cuba due to peoples’ increasing ability to connect with one another through mobile telephony. More than ever, news and information that once traveled only by word of mouth will now circulate more quickly and in greater volume. And Cubans’ ability to communicate with friends and family abroad will likely increase too.
We can also anticipate an influx of tech objects and hardware on the island – computers, mobile phones, hard drives, pen drives are all in high demand in Cuba and they are not easy to come across. Yesterday’s changes will without question make it easier for Cubans to obtain tech objects that will in turn enable greater communication and information sharing among Cubans.
And greater access to capital will also enable more Cubans to get online at hotel business centers and Internet cafes, where rates (ranging from USD $4.50 to $12.00 per hour) are out of reach for most of the population. This will not only increase the number of Cubans who use the Internet first hand, but also the quantity and diversity of digital media in circulation on the island. Videos, music, news, and literature regularly circulate second hand via pen drive, mobile phone apps and other lightweight mechanisms for data storage – a person with Internet access downloads a video, puts it on a pen drive, and circulates it hand-to-hand among friends who watch the video, copy it, and distribute it to more friends. The importance of these second-hand networks, what Cuban blogger Orlando Luis Pardo once termed Cuba’s “Internet offline”, must not be overlooked.
It is hard to glean much from what the two leaders said about telecommunications policy. After acknowledging that U.S. sanctions on the country have for years “denied Cubans access to technology that has empowered individuals around the globe,” Obama stated:
I’ve authorized increased telecommunications connections between the United States and Cuba. Businesses will be able to sell goods that enable Cubans to communicate with the United States and other countries.
This promising but vague assertion raises a lot of questions—what kinds of businesses is he talking about? What kinds of goods? In recent years, telecommunications companies like Verizon and AT&T have pushed to loosen restrictions on their industries in an effort to enter negotiations with the Cuban government. And they have made progress since Obama came into office. But this is only one of two hurdles. The second is the Cuban government, which like, every country, imposes requirements and restrictions on foreign businesses that wish to establish themselves on their soil.
With a few exceptions, foreign companies can enter contracts with the Cuban government only if they are willing to transfer 51 percent ownership of their holdings on the island to the Cuban government itself. In effect, this means that all foreign businesses are still majority owned by the Cuban government. It is hard to imagine that the Cuban state policy on this has changed altogether. Obama’s words suggest that this may have been part of their negotiations, but Raul Castro’s only mention of the issue suggested that the ball was still in Obama’s court. The Cuban president didn’t discuss changing Cuban tech policy or infrastructure. He said only that he “called upon the government of the United States to remove obstacles hindering … telecommunications.”
So plenty remains uncertain. Obama cannot unilaterally dismantle all U.S. government policies limiting contact and commerce with Cuba—as both leaders noted, the embargo is codified in legislation that only Congress can change. And although Obama advocated for leaders on both sides to move forward and leave behind their respective legacies of “colonialism and communism” it is not clear how this will play out in practice. Old habits die hard—and trust is no easier to build in the digital era than it was in 1961.


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Freedom of Speech is a Top Target in Erdogan’s War on the ‘Parallel State’ · Global Voices
Arzu Geybullayeva

In December 2013, thousands protested corruption and Erdogan's government in Istanbul. A banner with Fethullah Gulen and PM Erdogan's pictures reads “one is no better than the other.” Fulya Atalay for Demotix, image no. 3553279.
Around this time last year, Turkey woke up to the drama of a criminal investigation linking the family and close associates of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the biggest corruption scandal in the country's history. Rather than resign, Erdogan promised to fight the political opponents he claimed were puppeteering the investigation.
So fight he did, in his own authoritarian way.
Fast forward to final weeks of 2014 and Erdogan is now president, as powerful as ever, celebrating a wave of arrests that has alarmed spectators in and outside the country. The arrests have targeted opposition journalists and supposed political supporters of Muhammed Fethullah Gulen, a former ally turned foe, who now lives in the United States. Gulen — a wealthy philanthropist, educator and former imam who inspired the Hizmet movement, is rarely referred to by international media without being described as reclusive — but has attracted admirers the world over. These admirers include policemen, judges and other government officials in Turkey.
Since the graft scandal exploded, Erdogan has been firing barbs at Gulen, whom he holds personally responsible for the darkest months of his political career. This period began with the arrests of the children of ministers in his cabinet in December of 2013 and peaked with the appearance online of an audio-recording of two men whose voices resemble Erdogan and his son, Bilal, in February of this year. In the recording, purportedly from the day the ministers were arrested, the two men discuss how to hide large amounts of money (presumed to be illegally obtained) as an investigation by police (presumed to be pro-Gulen) closed in on Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Given that Erdogan believes the anti-corruption investigation was the handiwork of Gulen loyalists, the Dec. 14 arrests targeting media workers with supposed sympathies to the educator have the feeling of a long-planned revenge.
Erdogan appeared to sound an official warning of what was to come Dec. 13, when he said:
We are not just faced with a simple network but one which is pawn of evil forces at home and abroad. Whoever is beside them and behind them we will bring down this network and bring it to account.
On the same day, Fuat Avni, a Twitter user claiming to be a government insider warned that police raids on media outlets were imminent.
In the event, 31 people — journalists and police officers with presumed affiliation to Gulen — were arrested. Among them is Nedim Dumanli, the editor-in-chief of Zaman newspaper, Hidayet Karaca, head of Samanyolu TV and Ali Kara, the scriptwriter of the popular and controversial television series, One Turkey. All have been charged with directing and founding and belonging to an armed terror organisation.
According to Human Rights Watch, the arrests are part of a pattern wherein terrorism and coup plot charges are leveled against opposition journalists. Emma Sinclair-Webb, the organisation's Senior Turkey Researcher wrote Dec. 15:
Arresting journalists around the corruption anniversary suggests an effort to discredit and intimidate Gülenist media…The arrests fit the familiar pattern of pursuing journalists for alleged membership of illegal organizations in order to silence critical media.
Relations between the two men were reportedly sour throughout 2012 but dive-bombed Nov. 13 when Erdogan began closing down the former's educational institutions in Turkey. Since Gulen's relationship with Erdogan took a dramatic turn for the worse, it has been much easier for Erdogan loyalists to identify the nation's true enemy.
Earlier this summer, ahead of his presidential election win in August, Erdogan sacked hundreds of police officers and prosecutors, effectively taking the momentum out of corruption allegations against AKP. While the charges against Erdogan's friends have all been dropped, it seems more likely that these new charges — against his enemies — will stick.
On Oct.14, the European Union that Turkey once had hopes of joining, condemned the arrests. Federica Mogherini, the EU Foreign Policy Chief and Enlargement Commissioner, and Johannes Hahn issued a joint statement that read:
The police raids and arrests of a number of journalists and media representatives in Turkey today are incompatible with the freedom of media, which is a core principle of democracy.
But condemnations in the name of democracy are just words that can be brushed aside, while political revenge tastes so sweet.

author: Arzu Geybullayeva


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Global Voices Contributor Thalia Rahme, ‘a Mix of Everything’ · Global Voices
Juan Arellano

Thalia Rahme in Berlin. Photo from Thalia Rahme and used with her permission.
I do not have the pleasure of ever having meet Global Voices’ volunteer Thalia Rahme in person. But it just so happens that she considers GV French Translation Manager Claire Ulrich, who is one of my oldest and appreciated friends at GV, as a kind of a foster mother, so I can consider her as a niece then!
And a what a fantastic niece she is. I spoke with Thalia to get to know her a bit more. Take a look at the interview below.
Thalia Rhame (TR): I am the eldest of 2 girls and a boy :) Aries by horoscope, I live in Beirut – Lebanon, single hahah. I majored in anthropology and I am currently a communication officer on a regional programme in an international NGO. Soon jobless as my contract is ending in December .. hint, hint. A Gver since 2011, I'm someone very eclectic with no particular choice in clothes, food, style in guys (lol) or anything, and that is also extending recently to politics and social issues … I love travelling, airports and train stations :). Maybe that video produced during a workshop on digital storytelling during the DW Global Media Forum could give you an idea of who I am:
Thalia Rahme in Lebanon. Photo by Thalia Rahme and used with her authorization.
TR: Beirut es como yo, a mix of everything, hyper, with contradictions and oppositions, open. Some people prefer mountains and calm but I am a very urban person, I can't sleep if windows and doors are not open. I need to hear car horns every day, otherwise I would feel something is missing. Beirut has multiple identities in a way like me as well, speaks many languages. A very eclectic city. It has been demolished 7 times due to terremotos [earthquakes] and later on the civil war and yet it is still here as alive as ever :). I think foreigners love Beirut as they feel home … its a very comfortable city, for many its very expensive as well. Very polluted but I don't care much … when you love something you accept, and despite what people say … Beirut is very safe in many ways. And sorry to repeat the damn cliche but you can really find someone in mini-jupe [miniskirt] walking along side with someone in full veil.
JA: You speak a lot of languages, How did you learn them all?
TR: Bueno, as Lebanese I don't think I have much credit in that. Most of us already speak 3 languages (Arabic, French and English). Now as a child, I was born in a not so wealthy family if one can say, and so the only way for me to escape was in the beginning to read, and read as I couldn't afford plane tickets. At school I got the opportunity to study Spanish for my French Baccalaureate … which is relatively easy if you know French. Later on, “Samarcande” by Amine Maalouf, made me fell in love with the poetry of Omar Khayam and I promised myself that one day I will read his “Roba'iyat” in their original language …and since Farsi is close to Arabic that was a bit easy for me (though I am still at the very early stages learning … and due to lack of time, I often have to resume the courses).
I have some notions of Turkish because of the Turkish movies wave that downed the world :) so instead of watching the dubbed versions … I would seek the original with subtitles (no matter how lousy the translation was), besides I fell in love with Turkish songs which melody and rhythm is oriental. And finally I've just started learning German (don't ask me why lol). I do not describe myself as a polyglot rather as someone who can manage Turkish is connected to Arabic and Farsi … German to both French and English, and in a way, so far the languages I command even if a bit, are all related in a way or in another … so in a way I'm not doing much effort. I would have to challenge myself in a language with a completely different alphabet or structure to be able to say I am gifted. I don't know, Chinese maybe, Bangla, or some indigenous language? Quechua? Welsh? I am open to any suggestion.
TR: I am not sure if GV wants to change or if this change is imposed by a number of external as much as internal elements. The community is much larger than before (since the days GV started) but what is sure is that before, GV used to be a precursor or a pioneer in conveying the opinion of bloggers, citizen journalists, netizens … later on, this idea was replicated by all. So in a way or in another, GV has lost its singularity.
We have tried the tendency “Huffington Post” style through the section we innovated “The Bridge“, and I am curious to know the result of such an experiment in GV. For me, what is important is the GV community, the GV family … it doesn't really matter if we are like others or if others are like us. This is the strength of GV… as long as the info we're conveying is accurate, the rest doesn't matter and that is what should be felt in our posts.
It is true that we are transmitting others opinion which is on Twitter, blogs or god knows in the future which medium … the medium or media doesn't matter, it is the opinion in itself that matters. But in addition to these opinions, when I read a post of Claire Ulrich for instance or even a translation, I can really feel the specific style of Claire … When you read a post of any author or contributor, you should with your eyes closed, identify this author or translator.
The new tendency is a much stronger activism but without color. And this is where GV can differentiate itself. Nuestros colores y olores :) Our colors and smells… and through projects like Rising Voices…
Thanks, Thalia! You can follow her on Twitter at @Thalloula or read her blog in Arabic.

author: Juan Arellano


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Hong Kong Police’s Arrest of Teen ‘Shopping’ Protesters Sparks Concern · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Police officers raised a yellow flag in Mong Kok shopping district before they began arresting people. Photo from inmediahk.net
The author of this post is a volunteer editor for news site inmediahk.net, which is quoted throughout this report.
Hong Kong police have cleared all the protest sites of Occupy Central, the months-long sit-in movement demanding citizen nomination of candidates for the city's top leader. But in the shopping district of Mong Kok, protesters haven't given up, even though police say they can no longer stay. Thousands have taken to strolling through the normally congested area in a peaceful “shopping” protest.
Police have tried to clamp down on the tactic by arresting participants, something Occupy Central is certainly no stranger to — since the protests began on September 27, 955 protesters and protest supporters have been arrested.
In Mong Kok, however, the arrests have taken a troubling turn. Over the weekend of December 13 and 14, officers arrested 14 minors, accusing them of participating in an illegal assembly and obstructing police in the execution of their duties.
Human rights activists worry that Hong Kong police are targeting young activists, who are more vulnerable to threats and may not be aware of their legal rights.
14-year-old student activist Cheung Chun Ho has been arrested three times since the rehearsal of the Occupy Central protests on July 2, 2014. According to an interview with citizen media platform inmediahk.net, Cheung believes that he was singled out by a police officer on November 25 during the clearance of the Mong Kok protest site. He was arrested and charged with “contempt of court” and “obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duty”:
他憶述被捕時遭近20名警員「捉實」，當中有警員更曾點名高叫：「係你啦，捉住你啦！」…他表示自己當時嗌咪是和執達主任交涉及呼籲群眾離去，後來因現場擠迫，被迫到最前的封鎖線。
在到達警署後，他曾要求致電予家人，但警方只准許他提供電話號碼後代為致電。他指警方「開大冷氣」及不斷對他冷言冷語。及後至26日凌晨4時，有警員對張表示早上會向法庭申請保護令和「把他送到男童院」。
He recalled during the arrest he was pressed down by about 20 police officers and he heard a police officer yell, “You are the right person, now we catch you!” […] He explained that he was holding the microphone and negotiating with the bailiff officer and urging others to leave the scene when he was arrested. He was push to the front line because it was too crowded.
When he arrived at the police station, he demanded to make a phone call to his family, but the police made the call for him instead. He also said the police turned the air conditioner to very low temperature and kept speaking to him with a mocking tone. At around 4 a.m., a police officer told Cheung that he would be moved to the court in the morning for a writ authorizing his being in custody and will then be “sent to a juvenile home”.
While Cheung's court case was still pending, he was arrested again on December 14 when the police sealed off a street in Mong Kok district to crack down on the “shopping” protest. The police arrested him after they checked his identity card:
在警署中，警察除登記他身分證、電話及住址等資料外，更被問及家人電話和就讀學校等個人資料，有警察更曾對他說：「你以後行街小心啲。」
At the police station, the police not only registered his identity card, telephone and address, but also questioned him about his family's contacts, school and other personal background information. A police officer warned him to “be careful when you are in streets in the future.”
Shen Wai Nam, a member from Citizen Right Observe, told inmediahk that children and teenagers might not know how to exercise their right to remain silent or would feel terrorized by the arrest. He further said that the police's actions had violated United Nation's conventions:
沈偉男指出，目前根本沒有法例禁止未成年人在晚上逛街，這行為不應被預設為不正常及違法，警察的做法或已違反《聯合國人權公約》及《兒童權利公約》，侵犯了青年的「和平集會參與權」及當捲進法律衝突時的「受保護權」。
Shen Wai Nam pointed out there is no law prohibiting minors from walking in the streets at night. The behavior should not be considered as abnormal or illegal. [Arresting them] may have violated the United Nation's Convention on Rights of the Child and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the police deprived the teenagers from the right to participate in peaceful assembly and the right to protection.
Those arrested since the Occupy Central movement kicked off have been accused of having access to a computer with criminal or dishonest intent, illegal assembly, instigating a crime, and obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duty.
Chiang Kang, a writer from inmediahk.net whose father is a police officer, explained why the police are so nervous about the shopping protest:
跟我的警察父親辯論時，我不斷強調示威者是多和平、多平凡的普通人，他卻說：「你地放火燒車點算？你地去佔領機場一鑊熟咁點算？」聽到他的語氣，我語塞。他們，真心地，拒絕相信這個世界上有「和平示威者」的存在。[…]
對於鳩嗚這種無定性、無目的，流動性、可變性高的活動，他們更是莫名地恐懼。於他們看來，鳩嗚比佔領的不穩定性更高。他們對於「不知道接下來會發生甚麼」的恐懼很大，所以每一次都overreact，寧願有殺錯無放過，冒著濫權的指控，務求在生事前驅散或控制，更執意態度強硬，希望殺雞警猴。[…]
警隊，甚至整個香港，過去於人權教育上是可悲地缺乏。而且由於被放到了光譜的最極端處，他們對於集會自由等與日常生活不太切身的權利，不能理解，也看不到必要性；相對地，維穩和秩序是保持社回安定的必要條件。所以他們看到的，就只有一群搞亂香港的廢青，一群犯法的危險群眾。他們不能明白眼前的示威者，不能明白社會急需的變改，以及那變改所需要的手段。
站到前線，他們完全忽視、漠視了示威者的追求和聲音。[…] 說服自己是為了一個Greater Good，然後狠狠地毆下去。他們不曾想過，自己一手一棍扑倒的，可能就是那個Greater Good。
When I debated with my police father, I kept stressing that the protesters were very peaceful and they were just ordinary people. He said, “What if you burn the car? What if you occupy the airport and shut down Hong Kong?” His tone of voice made me speechless. They refuse to believe that “peaceful protesters” really exist in this world.
As for “shopping” — a form of protest that cannot be defined and is mobile, flexible and without any specific aims — they are deeply fearful. For them, “shopping” is more unstable than an occupation. They don't know what will happen next and that fear is huge. That's why they overreact and risk the accusation of abuse of power when they take action against it. They want to disperse the people before anything happens and determine to kill the chicken to scare the monkey [a Chinese proverb meaning to make an example out of someone] […]
Hong Kong, in particular the police force, is lacking in human right education. As the city is situated next to a most extreme region [mainland China], they can't comprehend rights like the right to assembly, which seems to have nothing to do with their daily life. That's why they don't find it necessary to defend it. On the contrary, stability is necessary. In their eyes, the protesters are teenage trash, a dangerous crowd that is likely to break the law. They can't understand the protesters or the changes that society needs, as well as the means that can achieve those changes.
When they stand on the front line, they disregard the dreams and the voices of the protesters.[…] They believe they represent the Greater Good when they beat protesters. What they don't realize is that their batons are actually hitting the Greater Good.
Andy Tsang Wai Hong, the head of the police department, told the press that they will continue to investigate the protests and carry out more arrests. On December 14, a total of 20 protesters were arrested in Mong Kok shopping district, seven of whom were minors. Judging from the crackdown on the “shopping” protest, young activists could be a major arrest target.
Follow our in-depth coverage: Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution

author: Oiwan Lam