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Australia: Kenyan women refused refugee status · Global Voices
Kevin Rennie

Two Kenyan women are facing deportation from Australia after their asylum applications were rejected, despite risks that they may suffer forced genital mutilation if they are sent home.
According to an article in Australian newspaper, The Age, Grace Gichuhi, 22, and Teresia Ndikaru Muturi, 21, arrived in Australia in July last year on tourist visas for World Youth Day.
There have been few reactions to the case from most of the political blogosphere regulars in Australia. Climate change and economic stimulus strategies have dominated in the last week.
But the article on The Age has attracted 54 comments from online readers showing anything but popular disinterest. The comments represent opposite poles of opinion, including:
Let these women stay.
Ben | Adelaide – September 22, 2009, 9:30AM
They applied. Their applications were assessed. Their applications were refused.
Send them home.
Case closed.
David_T – September 22, 2009, 9:34AM
How pathetic that these two women should be refused asylum. Australia could do well to have more people like these two girls and as far as I'm concerned they're welcome here for as long as they wish.
jollysroger | Townsville – September 22, 2009, 10:22AM
On her blog, at Pocket Carnival, Penny Eager says she was moved to write to the Minister for Immigration & Citizenship, Chris Evans on his online contact page, expressing her outrage:
I have just heard of the case of Grace Gichuhi & Teresia Ndikaru Muturi, two women from Kenya who have been denied status as refugees.
I believe that the torturous practise of genital mutilation is abhorrent, and that to deny these women refugee visas is to take a weak stance on this issue.
I urge you to intervene in this case, not only to help these women, but also to send a clear message to Kenya that Australia does not condone these practises.
A religious issue?
Aussie News and Views a self-styled “American, Australian, Israeli, British ‘Judeo-Christian Friendly’ blog” posted a video of a news clip about the women and asked:
Gee I wonder who could be behind this? what sort of Satan worshipping Death Cult could be alive and well in Kenya today that would do such a thing to young women?
Philip Maguire at Whaddya Reckon? drew a number of comments with his post:
TWO Kenyan Christian women are to be deported from Australia despite facing death or genital mutilation.
Maybe they should have arrived here cashed up via a boat from Indonesia.
Lisa Valentine of Embrace Australia, an online community for foreign nationals looking to live in Australia, also took up their case:
Both Grace and Teresia are now terrified of what fate will lie in wait for them if they are deported back to Kenya.
A spokesman from the Australian Immigration Department said: “Under the refugee convention, they weren’t found to engage with Australia’s international obligations.
The girls, along with Sister Aileen Crowe, a Franciscan nun who is supporting them, launched an appeal to the Australian Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, but he rejected that appeal. A second appeal has now been launched and the girls are awaiting the results but have been told to prepare for deportation.
Ironically new legislation is due to be introduced to Parliament that would ensure protection for the girls. The legislation is called Complementary Protection and it expands the criteria under which a refugee can apply for protection.
Online campaign
On Facebook a ‘Causes’ page titled Help save these Women from Genital Mutilation has been launched by Australians who support the women's attempt to stay in Australia. So far, 91 people have joined. An update was posted on Tuesday by Vanessa Muradian:
This is the most recent update – sources said these women are protected here in Australia — until Evans decides what to do with them. Whether he rejected them or not the first time we are still to know… the government need to pass the complimentary visa… which I am further researching at the moment – Basically the complimentary visa, will ‘compliment’ the protection visa, SO THAT THESE refugees can fall under a protection visa. CURRENTLY the protection visa doesn't protect women from GENITAL MUTILATION and honour killings. The bill was proposed to parliament in September and currently the Liberal party are opposing this bill…
Right now these women just need our support – Minister Evans will be making the decision with his privilege of Ministerial Intervention.
I guess we need to contact him…
As well as other governing bodies whom can help the government pass the complimentary bill!!!!!!!

author: Kevin Rennie


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Bahamas: window to the past · Global Voices
Nicholas Laughlin

Bahama Pundit takes a look at a 186-year-old document of life in the Bahamas: the diary of an American doctor who lived in Nassau in the early 19th century. “Townsend witnessed the declining days of the decadent plantation society that the Loyalists had tried to build in the Bahamas following the American War of Independence.”

source: news-globalvoices

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

author: Nicholas Laughlin


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Bangkok Twestival · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Bangkok Twestival organizers happily announced that the event raised more than US$600 for the benefit of two orphanages.

author: Mong Palatino


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Bangladesh: The Importance Of Learning A Foreign Language · Global Voices
Rezwan

“If manpower is our strength, proper foreign language training at home will be a small step in equipping them better to settle down in foreign territories. A change of perception at our language expertise and workforce, especially the young, is vital now,” comments Bangladesh Corporate Blog.

author: Rezwan


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Belarus: Internet Issues · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Andrei Khrapavitski of Belarusan American Blog comments on Evgeny Morozov's TED talk on “the ways the Internet can actually help oppressive regimes stifle dissent.”

author: Veronica Khokhlova


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Bolivia: Lloyd Aereo Boliviano Reappears Like Phoenix · Global Voices
Eduardo Avila

Erika Pinto writes that the former state airline Lloyd Aereo Boliviano continues to reappear like a “phoenix” [es] now that it is continuing to fly in partnership with the military transport company TAM, after many failed attempts to continue flying as its own company.

author: Eduardo Avila


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Brazil: Has a free Internet really appeared on the electoral scene? · Global Voices
Roger Franchini

After much deliberation, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies [pt] and National Senate [pt] have this month approved a bill that reforms the laws number 9.096/95 (Electoral Law, pt) and 9.504/1997 (Standards for Elections, pt), imposing new rules for the 2010 election  campaign, the largest in the country, in which the president, state  governors as well as state and federal members of parliament will be chosen.
With  the reform, the restrictions that used to ban all campaign advertising on the Internet have changed – and a few perplexing caveats, especially when it comes to blogging, have been put in place: now, personal websites and media outlets shall be treated equally, follow the same rules of conduct and be liable to the same punishments, already applied to the mainstream media. For it to come into force by next year's  presidential and state elections, President Lula must sign the bill into law by October 2, exactly one year before the polls.
Political parties will campaign for their candidates  from July 5 through October 3, 2010, the election date. The law will be  enforced during this period, regulating the political  propaganda as well as voters’ participation on the Internet. The  National Chamber of Deputies, who call themselves “the People's House”, released  the news through their official news website [pt], stating in bold headlines that the “Chamber allows the Internet in election  campaigns,” as if the use of the web was a gift given to citizens by  members of parliament. So did the Senate.
The joint report [pt] by two of the Chamber's Commissions (Justice and Citizenship and  Science, Technology and Innovation) upheld the point of view of the  bill's author, Deputy Henrique Eduardo Alves [pt], and saw no objection to making independent Internet users’ expression equal with political propaganda on radio, TV and print media.
Unfortunately, the national parliament has missed an excellent  opportunity to display support for Brazilian society, choosing instead  to respond to political interests only to the detriment of the broader  freedom of expression. Regarding this point, Raphael Tsavkko on the Trezentos blog [pt] criticizes the lack of sense of the Brazilian Parliament in bringing  the electoral reform close to the laws imposed on people by the  military dictatorship 70 years ago. He highlights [pt] the contradiction that while bloggers can not  speak their minds anonymously, campaign donors  have kept the right not to reveal their identities:
Eles brigam, nós, o povo, perdemos.
A tentativa de colar a idéia desta censura à uma suposta  moralização é inútil, soa ofensiva quando os políticos corruptos e com  ficha suja continuarão a concorrer em total liberdade. Existe liberdade  para a bandalha, para o roubo, mas não para a livre expressão! Nós,  palhaços, ops, eleitores, para piorar, sequer podemos sabem quem  financia nossos candidatos! A piada da doação oculta permanece. OS  parlamentares tem medo de dizer a verdade, de mostrar de onde vem o  dinheiro de suas campanhas e pra quem irão, efetivamente legislar. Para  nós é que não é, disto já sabemos!
The same blog suggests that readers send mass e-mails to the members of  parliament responsible for the reform, stating dissatisfaction with this  rights restricting law, and lists the relevant e-mail addresses.
On the other hand, the news pieces about the project's approval last  week proved that society no longer remembers the censorship imposed by Law  9504/1997, a legal text that had already put the Internet and mainstream  media in the same bag. To refresh your memory, this symbol of negative  individual rights of the Brazilian people prohibits “disseminating  opinion for or against a candidate, party, coalition, or their  representative organizations” online (Article 45, item III), under penalty of a fine of up to R$ 100,000.00 (approximately  US$ 50,000).
The  current project does not differentiate personal blogs  and web pages from those belonging to mainstream media, and includes  other restrictions, such as those regarding debate and interviews with candidates. Should  a netcitizen “commit this crime”, they may suffer criminal penalties and be subject to fines  ranging between R$5,000.00 and R$30,000.00 (approximately US$ 2,500  to 15,000). According to the Members of Parliaments’ interpretation, anyone who talks about a candidate is dangerous and should be tightly  controlled. Moreover, if a blogger criticizes a candidate, they  must give the  right of reply according to fairness rules, which has made many Internet users wonder, like Rogério Martins, from the Marginal Conservador [pt] blog:
A Câmara manteve a liberdade de blogs, redes sociais, sites e programas de mensagens instantâneas (até o msn neguinho  quer vigiar!), mas com ressalvas. Ressalvas um tanto inusitadas: o  direito democrático de cada blogueiro em expressar sua opinião por um  ou outro candidato está liberado, mas caberá o direito de resposta e a  proibição do anonimato em artigos e reportagens. […] Direito de  resposta para blogs?!?! Ora, os blogs estão entre os meios mais  democráticos da internet, pois o “direito de resposta” já é algo  inerente a eles, na ideia dos comentários que qualquer leitor pode  fazer após a leitura das postagens. É isso que torna a internet 2.0  única. Aqui, o leitor também tem vez: cada post tem espaço para  comentários, elogios, críticas, “direitos de resposta” etc. E há também  a flexibilidade: podemos sempre “corrigir” textos já escritos,  acrecentando algo ou cortando eventuais tropeços.
The MP's fear of losing control over the free expression of all citizens is shown in item I of Article 57-D of the bill, which prohibits news pieces dealing with electoral research regarding the campaign and candidates, including:
Art. 57-D – It is forbidden for content providers and multimedia services, as well as media companies on the Internet, in their content available on the web pages:
I – To transmit, albeit in the form of journalistic interviews, images, text or sound about electoral research conducted, or any other kind of popular consultation about the elections where it is possible to identify the [candidate] interviewed or where there is data manipulation.
In other words, besides forbidding  comments about any candidate, no online vehicle, including blogs, will be able to mention electoral research results, even if in a critical or journalistic instance. An online article that a netcitizen eventually writes can not bear the names of candidates, parties, coalitions, images, videos or other means to identify them. According to Arturios Maximus, from the Visão Panorâmica [pt] blog, the behavior of the members of parliament reveals a fear of having their personal lives exposed  [pt] by the work of individual netcitizens:
A fantasia de honradez de hombridade e de  progressividade longamente cultivada diante das lentes da televisão e  dos gravadores de jornalistas subservientes e tolhidos por empresas  dependentes de publicidade e de financiamentos públicos; de repente se  torna a carantonha feia e asquerosa, corroída pela corrupção e por toda  sorte de vícios e ilicitudes cometidos ao longo de décadas de  dissimulação estudada, tolerada e incentivada. Do dia para a noite o  “nobre senador” ou o “nobre deputado” vê sua verdadeira imagem de  escroque oportunista exposta aos quatro ventos para quem quiser ver;  bem ali, ao alcance de um simples clique do mouse.
Member of Parliament  Flávio Dino, who co-authored the controversial bill, gives a lesson in empty rhetoric, acknowledging that the Internet, radio and TV are all the same but at the same time denying that he had acknowledged so in an interview for the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo [pt]:
“A internet não é igual a rádio e televisão, mas é também rádio, é também televisão.  É também equivalente a jornal e a revista. Então, o regime jurídico tem  que ser também misto, tem que ser também híbrido. A equiparação  absoluta que nós fizemos foi apenas em relação aos debates. Ou seja, se  é feito um debate em um portal comercial e em uma rede comercial de TV  há que se observar as mesmas regras que são democráticas. São as regras  de garantir voz para todos”.
Marcelo Träsel, in his homonyms blog [pt], analyses the problems of comparing media traditionally linked to the market with Internet individuals, noting that the private nature of the Internet does not allow it to be treated in the same way as mainstream television channels, radio and press:
O maior problema é a comparação da Internet com rádio  e televisão, completamente falaciosa. As regras para propaganda e  jornalismo em rádio e televisão são mais restritivas por se tratarem de  concessões públicas. A Internet não exige uma concessão para que  qualquer pessoa ou instituição possa se manifestar, portanto não pode  seguir as mesmas regras de rádio e televisão. Nas redes de  computadores, os candidatos podem ocupar espaços livremente, sem  depender da chancela de um jornalista ou empresário de comunicação.  Assim, as possibilidades de manipulação por parte do poder econômico  são muito menores — embora existam.
The disservice done by this piece of legislature to the press and Web 2.0 reaches unimaginable proportions for a 21st century that is free from  dictatorial moorings. The lone netcitizen has been legally obliged to behave as a media entrepreneur, unable to analyse the posture of candidates and the conduct of the elections in his country, and has had his  constitutionally guaranteed right of expression restricted. Another shovel full of earth on the fragile democratic state.

author: Roger Franchini


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China: Crowd sourced translation and the issue of copyright · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Joel Martinsen from DANWEI translated an article by Janson Yao discussing the crowd-sourced translation of The Lost Symbol in relation to the issue of copyright infringement.

author: Oiwan Lam


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China: Preparation for 60th anniversary of PRC · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

China digital times has a series of photos on oldier parade rehearsal for the 60th anniversary of PRC. After looking at the photos, you can understand the cruel and inhuman story of the grand parade.


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China: Reflections on blogging · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Roland started a post reflecting on his blogging experience at ESWN.


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Cuba: gift packages · Global Voices
Nicholas Laughlin

The Cuban Triangle analyses the US Commerce Department's new regulations on sending gift packages to Cuba. “These regulations are another good, humane move…. It recognizes that Americans in general might have something positive to contribute.”


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Ecuador: Festival of Independent Art in Pillaro · Global Voices
Eduardo Avila

Gabo of Ambato Loco [es] posts a video from the Festival of Indpendent Art in the city of Pillaro, Ecuador.


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The Egyptians Tweet Farouk Hosny’s Defeat · Global Voices
Tarek Amr

Bulgarian candidate, Irina Bokova, 57, was elected the head of the UNESCO on Tuesday, defeating Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosny. Bokova won by a vote of 31 to 27 to be the first woman and first Eastern European to run the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, after five rounds of voting at the UNESCO's headquarters in Paris.
Thanks to microblogging site Twitter, we have a summary of mixed reactions from Egypt and the Middle-East towards Farouk Hosny's defeat. In 140 characters, Twitter users
As expected, all Egyptians should be sad because their candidate for the UNESCO was defeated. And Hanan Abdel Meguid‘s sad tone was so obvious in the  tweet below:
And Youssra was astonished, and it seems that she wasn't expecting him to be defeated:
But wait a moment. It looks like other than the above two tweets, no one else was sad. Even Cairo-based blogger and journalist Sarah Carr wrote the following post asking people to help her find those few ones who were sad for his defeat:
In fact, it seems the no one was able to help Sarah in her search, especially that the majority of the Egyptian Twitter users were not sad at all. Ahmed El- Sadek, for example, wrote here that he can't really say that he is sad:
Zeinobia on the other hand couldn't hide the wide smile in her tweet.
Mona Eltahawy was happy too:
She even wrote another Tweet thanking God because Farouk Hosny did not win.
And Amr Salama wrote:
So, it seems that most of the Egyptians were against him. Ahmed Shoukry wrote here to clarify that if this point of view is so common among the Egyptian blogs and tweets, then it is for sure the same point of view of the majority of people on the street:
But what really makes most of the Egyptian take such stand?!
Mona Eltahawy believes that it's because Hosny is not Egypt's candidate, but he's the Egyptian regime's candidate.
The following conversation between Mostafa Hussein, and JPierre also elaborates why people didn't want him to win:
And Cairo Gem has an almost identical point of view to Mostafa Hussein‘s:
AlAnany believes that Hosny tried to please both the Egyptians, the Westerners and the Israelis and at the end he pleased no one:
And as usual, all our political debates have to end with a cool conspiracy theory like this one.
For more reactions on Hosny's nomination before the election read Marwa Rakha's post here.

author: Tarek Amr


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Harvard Forum: Are we satisfied with what we’ve got? · Global Voices
Ethan Zuckerman

Canada's International Development Research Center and Harvard's Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who's around the table and what we're planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage page, which includes links to the background papers prepared by participants.
We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts – we'll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.
Had enough ICT for development? Me neither. But Professor Spence may have. He introduces the question for our last closed session, “Can we agree?” He suspects the answer is no, and invites us to go out for cocktails. But first he suggests we identify questions that are top research priorities for the ICT for development field.
Berkman Center's Yochai Benkler wants us to clearly identify our goals as concerns ICT and development. Are we seeking income growth in relation to relative poverty? Use of ICT that enables a sense of self, of well-being in the world, knowledge creation?
Important tension that we need to deal with in defining research agendas is how much of the agenda needs to be defining a range of plausible goals.
He sees an intriguing tension between systems that favor openness and freedom through a decentralized systems versus the relatively rapid diffusion of devices that enable communications through more centralized networks. We can think of this as mobile versus internet systems, or carriers versus open wireless networks. Again, to study this research agenda involves how strong assumptions about what questions we're trying to solve.
In our discussions today, we've seen a shift to thinking of knowledge, learning and innovation processes as social and economic practices. ICT is part of these processesm but it's layered on top of these social structures. In the past, we tended to think of  knowledge and development as being about diffusion from high-knowledge to low-knowledge parts of the world. We now realize that creativity and insight happens everywhere in the world. Knowledge is always a creative reappropriation of what worked in one place into another, not a simple translation of a practice in one place to another.
Finally, Yochai offers a thorny question: are ICT issues simply a small part of much larger issues like gender and power relationship, povery and class relationships? If they are, must we solve these larger issues before addressing the ICT component. Or is
there a legitimate way of influencing these other systems through smart ICT interventions?
Rohan Samarajiva of LIRNE.net feels like he can agree with one of the people in the room, Nobel-winning economist Michael Spence, who believes we need to embrace the success of market forces in combatting poverty. Poverty reduction has occured through global markets, the spread of knowledge, the development of infrastructure and the establishment of “learning cultures”.
These are critical foundations for a knowledge-based economy: personal security, infrastructure, and learnign culture. But then we should leave application development up to actors in different countries. We need to embrace multiple innovation practives, letting computers and users innovate. “Who are we to decree who and how we innovate?”
Mobile networks are the networks for innovation for the developing world. Directly addressing my concerns that mobile networks are centrally controlled and less generative than open networks, he points to My Gamma, a social network for mobile phones. The company managing the network has users in 86 countries, without agreements from mobile phone networks. It is ad supported, without marketing salespeople, just based on online ad sales. He tells us that the service's inventor observed, “I don't aim to serve the blue-collar guys, but they seem to be using my service.”
(MyGamma, as it happens, is a web service running over WAP on data-enabled phones. In other words, the reason it works in 86 countries is because it's running on open protocols on a decentralized network.)
The evidence seems to be showing us that poor people won't be connected by anything other than wireless networks. ICT4D projects shouldn't build wireless networks – even telecentres are now connecting on the 3G networks. We need to embrace this wireless future.
Hernan Galperin offers some ideas we all shoudl be able to agree on:
- ICT matters to countries at the aggregate level.
– On a general level, we know what policies need to be in place to promote ICT investment and adoption.
– We cannot outperform the private sector in terms of scaling of communication networks.
There's a vast amount we don't agree on. We don't know what the true effect of ICT on poverty, and we don't know which policies are most important to building successful ICT policies. He critiques “the Benkler standard” – the idea of connectivity that's affordable, neutral, generative, open – as an unrealistic gold standard that describes no more than 10% of the reality of the developing world (Yochai interjects, “That much?”) He believes we need to embrace and celebrate technologies that might be less open but have greater reach, like indigenous programming on Brazilian satellite television. It's broadcast, not interactive media, but maybe it's the right way to reach large audiences.
We need to think more carefully about what we're trying to achieve. There are huge sunk costs in developing any of these paths – they require huge investments to build infrastructure, and it's hard to change path once we've gone in certain directions.
Finally, we need new indicators, beyond the small set of indicators that seem to have worked for the past few years. How do we define access? If I've got a telecentre 5km  from my home – is that access? How does it compare to 10mbit/sec at home? How do we consider if communications are affordable? How do we measure people's skills? We need to answer these questions so we can see how we're doing in the long run.
Alison Gillwald acknowledges that mobiles are the default platform for the poor. But she wonders, “Is that all poor people are entitled to? Are we not creating greater equity issues between them and those who have access to high bandwidth?”
Before we accept the current situation, we need much better research and understanding of potential impacts of ICT. We need to understand what the high costs of communications in developing nations are doing not just  in terms of personal usage, but on marginalized economies as a whole. Costs of bandwidth in Africa are orders of magnitude more than in the rest of the world. What does this mean for African development in the long run? Will it increase the gap between Africa and other developing nations?
Gillwald agrees that there's a basic set of good governance practices we can all agree to. She wonders why so few African nations have implemented them. “We're just reiterating the same solutions without understanding why they're not being implemented.” We need to look at the factors that make it so difficult to put these policies actually into place.
She notes that we have the tendency to celebrate people's creativity, innovating from constraint, inventing techniques like flashing. “Should we be satisfied with them? Perhaps this is all that's possible at the moment, but should we be content with this state?”
She worries that, in developing ICT4D policies, we tend to assume a functional state capable of managing processes of innovation – what's missing in the literature is discussion of large-scale institutional failure providing massive bottlenecks and constraints.
In South Africa, she worries about the rise of the state in terms of provisioning and operating communication services. “The historical record in this isn't good.” There's a backlash against markets due to economic crisis. She asks, “Wwhat's the role of the state in deploying ICTs for economic recovery? Is it spending state money on building a multi-million Rand backbone, or for creating an investment environment that enables this sort of development?”
Bill Melody of LIRNE.net takes his stab at a statement with “unquestioned agreement”: Poverty reduction is the empowerment of individuals and institutions in communities in poverty. Communication tools are powerful tools of empowerment.
But we disagree on appopriate uses of these technologies. We've remarkably bad at predicting how these technologies will be used. Based on study of the literature, it seems that use for communication is roughly ten times what was predicted by network designers. No one predicts where the communication will be – they usually expect users to connect to the capital city, but they tend to connect to one another in rural areas. The economic and social uses are different than what's predicted, and most predictions are totally wrong.
That's what we learned with the explosion of mobile telephony. We claim that mobile phone companies opened this market – that's totally false. The mobile networks were the innovation of poor people when they were enabled to use it the way they wanted to. Poor people spent much more income than we ever thought they would.
Melody revisits the old parable of teaching a man to fish so he eats forever, to make a comment on regulation and business: “If you teach a man to fish, that means he needs fishing equipment, which means he needs a business model to pay off the loans, and he needs a license and ways of dealing with quotas.”
He offers this story as a way of considering universal service funds, funds taxed from mobile phone operators to provide connectivity in rural areas. In many cases, these funds can't go to support community wireless networks. We celebrate openness and liberalization, but participation hasn't made it down all the way to local people.
The process of regulatory reform is a complex one. We all tend to recommend reforming the telecom industry, then the ICT sector. But communications providers are “anchor tenants”, who make it possible to extend networks to underserved areas. And while everyone wants a free, open market until they get in, once everyone is established in business, they then want to close the doors behind them.
Melody ends with kind words for our sponsor, IDRC, who he describes as the most farsighted funder in the ICT4D space.
Michael Spence offers the observation that economies that grow by building inclusive economies, economies that encourage involvement in multiple dimensions. He asks what IT has to do with inclusiveness, and suggests that it has “something to do with knowledge, and something to do with access to crucial services, like savings channels, access to credit.” There's great potential for entrepreneurship in poor populations – the issue is that there are missing pieces of economies that prevent that instinct from being exercised, like credit facilities.
Addressing the issues I raised in my paper and presentation, Spence says he doesn't dismiss the notion that technology choices should be made with an eye to the capacity to control, interfere with and shut down these network. (I'm suggesting, of course, that we choose tech that's hard to shut down and interfere with.) While he agrees that this consideration is “not crazy”, he suggests we not overfocus on this. “There are institutional failures all over the place – they're the main cause of stalled growth… If you're in a state that shuts down communication channels, there's something larger wrong.”
(He admits that this sets up an intersting paradox, as China is growing incredibly quickly, but shows extremely high willingness to control these communication channels.)
Spence offers the observation that our discussions may center on a very simple idea – we're seeing insufficient investment in infrastructure. If an average commitment of public sector resources to critical infrastructures, including education, might be 3 to 4% of government spending, the countries that are experiencing the most significant and sustained growth are spending 5 to 7%. The private sector can help, but if you don't see that high level of government spending, you won't see the improvements in infrastructure, education, and capacity necessary to sustain growth over long periods of time.
More live-blogging by Ethan Zuckerman
- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and
- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus

author: Ethan Zuckerman


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Harvard Forum: Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture · Global Voices
Ethan Zuckerman

Canada's International Development Research Center and Harvard's Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who's around the table and what we're planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage page, which includes links to the background papers prepared by participants.
We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts – we'll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.
The primary format at the Harvard Forum is short presentations by invited participants. We've all submitted two-page papers (a very few of which actually occupied only two pages) and speakers are taking turns amplifying and expanding these papers, and receiving feedback from the room.
Ronaldo Lemos, the director of the Center for Technology & Society at the Fundação Getulio Vargas Law School in Rio de Janeiro, is a leading advocate for Creative Commons and open access to knowledge. His paper focuses on LAN-houses, a unique, local form of cybercafe. Lemos notes a comment from Professor Sen, that “ICTs are important because unpredictable things happen.” These LAN-houses are a good example of this unpredictability.
The Brazilian government subsidized the purchase price of home computers. Adopters of this program used the subsidy to buy computers to build gaming labs and cybercafes – LAN-houses. 49% of people in 2007 in Brazil were accessing the internet through one or more of 90,000 LAN houses. That compares with 2,000 movie theatres or 2,600 bookstores – the LAN houses span the country from extremely poor neighborhoods through the middle of the Amazon.
These LAN houses, Lemos argues, are changing the Brazilian public sphere. The forthcoming elections will be the first where a majority of Brazilians are online. In the previous election, the government simply banned the use of online technologies for campaigning. There's been a lively debate, and now there's somewhat restricted access to the Internet for campaigning and political discussion.
The media landscape in Brazil has, traditionally, focused on “classes A&B”, elite classes. The potential of digital media is to expose the culture of lower classes. He points out that YouTube videos for widely known Brazilian artists like Jobim have perhaps a million views, while “underground” artists are getting tens of millions of views. This represents a democratizing of the media landscape.
Lemos suggests we look at Orkut – a social network on Yahoo used mainly by Brazilians – reflects Brazilian society as a whole. Upper-class Brazilians, he suggests, are fleeing to Facebook, aided by a media narrative that condems Orkut. But the Orkut community is 30 million, while there are only 4 million on Facebook. There's a new word – “orkutized” – to describe a place too popular to be useful anymore.
Anita Gurumurthy, the founder and director of IT for Change, asks us to imagine people independent of the gadgets that connect them. There's tremendous range for women to be involved with community IT efforts, but we also need to concentrate on their needs independent of this technical context. (Her paper is here.)
She reminds us that previous focuses on ICT4D have promoted a social enterprise model, led by private sector interests. This, she argues, means that arguing for women's empowerment required demonstrating why this is good for the economy. When development strategy focused on eGovernment, it looked strictly at engaging the private sector in building egovernment solutions.
There's been little critique of market-based development, Gurumurthy argues. While some alternative public-finance models did show a way to design telecentres useful to the poor, these models were completely eclipsed by the market-based discourse. When market-based telecentres collapsed, the blame was put on the poor, arguing that there was no demand for services.
Gurumurthy sees this mistake being repeated in the world of mobile phones. We've adopted a proprietary network model where individuals are locked into network providers. She wonders who is to produce services to the poor that market may have no incentive to build, ad argues that the failure of market-led social enterprise models are now being used to prop up the mobile telephony model.
We need to avoid a network society in which participation could be no more than owning a gadget. She suggests there's an overemphasis on privacy, security, individual rights and an underemphasis on institutional tranparency, community computing and informatics, all of which she sees as necessary for an information society that benefits the poor. The questions are more political, not just about practical, palliative solutions to connect individuals with gadgets.
Ophelia Mascarenhas focuses her remarks on PICTURE, a four-country research project she's coordinated from Tanzania. She notes that in the past several years, mobile phone penetration has increased from 1.2% to 25%. The people she surveys say that the  biggest change in their lives is the ability to communicate quickly via mobile phone. Countering expectations, these technologies are more used by women than men, more used by people below the poverty line than the rich. The radio is still the most important information technology for receiving information in poor populations, but that function's been displaced by the mobile phone in richer communities.
There's no training in the use of these mobile phones, she tells us, but people discover extremely creative ways of using these tools – sending simple messages by “flashing” or “beeping” while avoiding the cost of completing a call. These costs are extremely high, and there are real disparities in access between rural and urban areas. Notably, financial transfer systems like M-PESA don't work in very rural areas – instead, there's only the ability to transfer airtime, which is only useful for much smaller sums.
She warns that ICT can be a way of siphoning money out of a country. “In East Africa, we're receivers of the technology. Money flows out when we bring the tech in.” There's no local R&D and production of technology. She wonders how African countries can build local capacity, and wonders whether we shouldn't be seizing some of this capital outflow to fight poverty.
At the end of her remarks, Mascarenhas notes that she hadn't discussed the internet at all. Simply put, access to the Internet is so limited in Tanzania, she doesn't consider it nearly as important to discuss as mobile phones.
Lawrence Liang, the founder of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, offered an especially provocative and creative paper to the Harvard Forum. The paper refers to a visit by French philosopher Jacques Ranciere to a set of cybermohallahs, “cyber-neighborhoods” create in Indian cities to provide opportunity and access to the poor.
Ranciere has written about the fascination French intellectuals of the 19th century had with laborers. Intellectuals praised the life of the laborer to the extent that Ranciere refers to Victor Hugo's praise for the “words of a worker” as “exclusion by homage”, a celebration that separates rather than treating laborers as co-equals.
At the same time, when looking at the actual intellectual life of these laborers, many of the laborers sought to write literature and poetry, seeking the bourgeois pursuits that the intellectuals sought to transcend. Liang argues that “we all need intellectual lives” and that the conditions to lead those intellectual lives are unequally distributed.
The most radical possibilities of ICT suggest a redistribution about who's entitled to participate in shaping a community's sensibilities. Liang sees piracy as the battlefield on which this reshaping is taking place. Ultimately, he argues, we need to move to a dialog that matches equality to equality, not inequality to equality – the very paradigm of providing access to balance inequality can make the playing field unlevel for these interactions.
Alison Gillwald focuses on Gurumurthy's presentation, which she saw as making the case that market models had failed to end poverty. What alternatives was she suggesting? Are those alternatives supply driven, not demand driven?
Gurumurthy explains that she wants to see markets embedded in society, not society embedded in markets. She focuses remarks on eChoupal, a project of an Indian transnational which attempted to both enable poor farmers to sell to larger markets. She sees the project as being more about constructing a market in poor communities for the company's products. The problem, she argues, with the Bottom of the Pyramid model is that it turns the poor into consumers capable of paying for essential social services, like water, education and communication. Is this an inversion of social responsibility that we're really comfortable with instituting?
Yochai Benkler notes that Lemos and Gurumurthy are telling stories that illustrate different complications in the relationship between markets and governments. Lemos's story is a classic example of a government subsidy turning into entrepreneurial growth. It's possible that the government might respond by saying, “Wait, we wanted to you to stay poor, just with a computer, not to build your own businesses!” E-Choupal, as described by Gurumurthy, is a project designed to cut out local middlemen, and its failure focuses on consolidation and elimination of existing market actors. He wonders what dialog there is between Gurumurthy's identification of people's desire to provision and contro their own food, and Liang's observation about the need to control one's own intellectual life.
Rohan Samarajiva offers some data to add to our conversation. He talks about surveys he's helped run in Sri Lanka which ask whether people are using ICT “for the right reasons”. The surveys asked what people used their mobile phones for. “Entertainment and family connection always lead in volume,” but this doesn't mean these tools don't have instrumental – “proper” – uses, like calling the doctor while you're having a heart attack.
Provocatively, he argues that “if we're not using government money, what's the problem?” We're not using government money in the mobile space – “we're freeing up government money” to educate, provision water or buy armaments. So what's our problem with these networks, as they're freeing government to use more of their own funds?
Clotilde Fonseca is struck by Lawrence Liang's talk, which she sees as addressing the importance of the poor being empowered by intellectual development. She cites a recent book by Robert Reich, which talks about the “weakening of the routinary workers and the
power of the symbolic analysts.” Those most empowered are those who have the intellectual power to be creative, to develop their minds. She warns of an “epistomelogical fallacy – equating information and knowledge” – we need to focus less on provisioning information and more on creating the capacity to build knowledge.
Mascarenhas argues that what's being promoted on mobile networks is simply communication and entertainment – if information that could make people more successful and more economically productive, there would be demand for this information and a radically different usage pattern.
Lemos closes the discussion addressing informality. The success of the Brazilian government's subsidy program was its informality – it allowed anyone to go to a store and buy a computer. Had it been significantly more careful, it just wouldn't have worked. The businesses he's celebrating are, for the most part, informal and unregulated. Regulations can be a massive problem – he tells us that a regulation which characterized LAN-houses as gambling establishments meant they could only be opened 2km from schools… which meant there were only two legal locations in Rio, one of them in state forest. Needless to say, without legislative change, these businesses have stayed informal. The question, Lemos suggests, is how to institute necessary formal structures without eliminating the magic of innovation.
More live-blogging by Ethan Zuckerman
- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and
- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus


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Harvard Forum: the complex world of ICT and gender · Global Voices
Ethan Zuckerman

Canada's International Development Research Center and Harvard's Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who's around the table and what we're planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage page, which includes links to the background papers prepared by participants.
We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts – we'll try hard to work those questions into the conversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.
Clotilde Fonseca of Fundación Omar Dengo urges us to broaden our vision of technology and look at the potentials of technologies, not just how we believe they're best used. She starts with a story about Avancemos, a foundation that provides small grants to children and youth. Many of the kids of received these grants went off to buy mobile phones. This led to debates about whether this was a good or bad usage of funds. Adults analyzing the situation thought that it was troublesome that the children were spending so much money on phones. But kids saw them  as watches, calculators, messaging tools,and resources for community building. They weren't especially interested in them as telephones.
Quoting Marshall McLuhan, she suggests that we face the danger of “looking at the future through the rear-view mirror.” Instead, we need to look at larger potentials of technologies. We have to avoid reductionist thinking, overly centered on the Internet. The revolution we're experiencing is a digital one, not just an Internet one – we can see the potentials of these tools, beyond uploading and downloading into the cloud, the potentials from productivity and communication tools.
We need to look forward because we need to make decisions about prioritizing investment. Otherwise, we end up with a deeply shortsighted strategy. This means addressing not just digital divides, but the cognitive divide: the intellectual gap to be able to profit from these technologies.
In the wake of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), it's disappointing that our plans continue to be so limited and technocentric. We need digital visions that focus not only on the technology but on bridging the cognitive gap that allows people to fully participate in Telliard de Chardin's noosphere. We need to consider the power of social netorks and the challenges to ensuring full access for developing world communities to these spaces. And we need to be careful to look for indicators which can actually capture the impact of these new tools.
(Fonseca's paper is here.)
Sabri Saidam (his paper), the advisor to Mahmood Abbas on telecoms and IT, suggests that we need to talk to the man and woman in the street about their perceptions of ICT. Based on his conversations, Saidam tells us that there are six key concerns he's developed:
- Lack of leadership – most leaders in the Arab world – and the world as a whole – don't understand the power of this technology and how it can help lead or impede development
- Senior citizens are rarely included in thinking about ICT
- Nations tend to be deeply allied with donor communities, and sometimes act against their own interest to satisfy donor needs
- The legal environment isn't conducive to technology development. Sabri has been working on the tender for a new mobile phone network. He tells us “I've been threatened with assasination so many times … people tell me, ‘The cost of getting rid of you is only a dollar or two, and you're costing us millions of dollars.'”
- Our educational system is weak, and it's dominated by Microsoft – we aren't getting exposure to other ways of building software and information systems.
- There isn't sufficient market competition – that competition only appears to be fierce.
He offers a demo of a statical tool developed to analyze IT usage in 10 Middle East markets. He shows a strong correlation between underlying literacy rates and the spread of ICT systems other than mobile phones, like Internet penetration.
Ineke Buskens (paper) wants us to consider the power aspects that underly our use of ICT. “The top of the pyramid is a problem as well as the bottom.” She warns us that “separation is an illusion” – problems like global warming and financial decline show us that we're all connected.
She warns that deep dynamics underly our assumptions about technology and power, citing a tension between Darwin and the church that doesn't rely on scientific timelines (creation within seven days) but on the idea of the fall. If there's evolution, perhaps there's no fall, and therefore no path towards redemption. She notes that the fall is inevitably blamed on women, in all three religions of the book.
ICT can “become the handmaiden of the systems, replicating the divisive characteristic of the systems”. She references a case in South Africa (I believe) where
mobile phones create a class system within a women's group, a division women who could afford to make calls and those who could only afford to beep.
“People adapt their preferences to a power-imbalanced world in order to survive in it.” This explains what happened in Zimbabwe at a computer lab where students were given time based on a first come, first served basis. Men gained almost all the access, and women were pushed away. When female students were asked why they weren't using the machines, they “spoke about their duties of wives and mothers at home keeping them away from the computers.” She argues that the students didn't have a conceptual framework to understand the access dynamics – when a researcher's intervention gave them a conceptual framework to question their role, they were abel to address their lack of access.
“There is no neutral space when it comes to knowledge and knowledge construction. I see a minefield of power dynamics everywhere,” and if we don't analyze this minefield, we only discover the mines when we step on them. She suggests we engage in “continuous and endless questioning of the concept of openness.” She suggests that Harvard's decision to publish academic papers on the university website will likely force other academic institutions to do the same – this technique will increase openness at the same time as it expands Harvard's prestige and influence, a virtuous cycle.  She sees in open source “a dream for a more egalitarian society.” Our challenge is to ask what openness will be used for, what the intents behind the decisions to be more open.
Nancy Spence (paper) suggests we broaden our search for what matters most in considering gender and the digital divide. Millions of Bangladeshi women have become mobile users and providers. This isn't just about economic empowerment – it's also about relationships. “Family and social relationships are the highest contributors to well-being,” in human development – if mobile phones strengthen our interpersonal ties, that might be a benefit for human development.
We also should consider ICT and personal security, as well as ICT and disaster recovery – these subjects are of major importance for women.
When we consider ICT challenges that matter, we need to think about women as ICT producers, developers and decisionmakers, not just as consumers. This doesn't remove the need to consider access – there are vast challenges in this space – but our consideration needs to move farther and wider.
Spence tells us about a group called Asia Pacific Women's Watch. This group closely monitors a set of trade issues that affect women. These aren't just traditional literacy issues – these are issues about the WTO and the implication of power structures for women. She reminds us that we need to consider a very wide range of issues when we consider how technology affects women – when we think of girls education, we've learned to think about the importance of separate latrines, women teachers, incubation centers that help women's businesses. We need a similarly broad and complex set of understandings of women and ICT.
I apologize for not capturing the full dynamics of our discussion in this session – I was one of the discussants, and spent the discussion dodging extremely difficult questions about technological determinism. For a sense for what I said, here's my paper. I will mention a lovely joke from Sabri Saidam, about three dictators who love technology:
One holds two fingers to his ear and starts talking – the other two ask, “what are you doing?” He responds, “I'm receiving a call.” The second dictator starts blinking on and off, and the other ask, “What's going on with you?” He responded, “I'm receiving a video.” The third is Yasser Arafat, notorious for mumbling and for his quavering lips. The other two asked, “What are you doing?” Arafat answered, “I'm receiving a fax.”
More live-blogging by Ethan Zuckerman
- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and
- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus


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Honduras: Curfew Lifted During Day · Global Voices
Eduardo Avila

Aaron Ortiz of Pensieve writes that the Micheletti government in Honduras is lifting the curfew today so that people can buy groceries to “expect incredibly long lines, ‘venta loca’ (mad sales) at the markets.”


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Honduras: Ports and Airports Closed · Global Voices
Eduardo Avila

Honduras Daily News writes that all ports and airpots are closed today due to the continuing crisis in Honduras.


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Honduras: Scenes in El Carmen Colonia · Global Voices
Eduardo Avila

HablaHonduras [es] posts videos of scenes in El Carmen Colonia in San Pedro Sula.


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Honduras: Uncertainty of the Crisis · Global Voices
Eduardo Avila

David Morán of El Catracho [es] does not know “where and when this conflict will end, and more importantly, how..” and believes that the light at the end of the tunnel would be free elections.


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India: Where is the crowd? · Global Voices
Rezwan

Is it the heat? Is it the rain? Is it the recession? Sukanya from Kolkata, India wonders why the usual crowds for the Durga Puja festivities are not building up.


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Iran: Animations vs. Dictatorship · Global Voices
Fred Petrossian

Many designs, posters, songs and video films have been created by Iranians and non-Iranians worldwide in support of Iran's “green” protest movement against the June 12 presidential election results. Animators too, have declared war on the dictatorship in Iran.
Green People is an animation inspired by Gandhi
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009 election debate
Baha'i human rights
Another animation reminds us that the Islamic Regime has repressed people for years before the election. MideastYouth.com presents an animation about the persecution of followers of the Bahai faith in Iran. A 30 year story.

author: Fred Petrossian


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Iran: Protests Greet Ahmadinejad in New York · Global Voices
Fred Petrossian

Protests against the Iranian government and human rights violations in Iran await Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is traveling to New York this week to attend the United Nation's General Assembly. Citizen media is encouraging people to take part in the demonstrations today and tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the New York Helmsley Hotel has canceled a banquet next week after discovering that Ahmadinejad was scheduled to attend and speak.
Nikahang Kowsar, a leading cartoonist and blogger in one of his cartoons show a homeless Ahmadinejad in New York, asking the Statue of Liberty for a place to stay. In the cartoon's caption we read:
“Sister, don't you have an empty house or a mouse hole for rent for a week?”
Here is a video inviting people to protest against Ahmadinejad in the name of martyrs. The video displays a collection of posters and photos used in Iran's demonstrations.
At United4Iran,a non-partisan collaborative network working for human and civil rights in Iran, we read:
Where Is My Vote NY, along with other grassroots organizations, invite you to participate in the September 23rd & 24th demonstrations at the UN Headquarters in New York City. They are protesting Ahmadinejad’s presence due to violations to the human and civil rights of the Iranian people, as guaranteed by the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by Iran.
Kaaveh Aahangar explains in Iranian.com why protesting against Ahmadinejad in New York is not a waste of time:
The media notices when and where a protest is held. Bystanders and passers-by notice when a protest event happens. Politicians notice when there is a protest. And if the protest is staged well, it will invariably make somebody look at the cause with new attitude. Protest events are not persuasive in and of themselves, but they invite persuasion. They invite change. They invite a second look at the issues and the cause. Protests make the public, the politicians, and policymakers aware that people care strongly about that particular cause.


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Latvia: Security Police Questions Blogger · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Free Speech Emergency in Latvia highlights the case of a Latvian blogger who “harshly criticized the Latvian state and government as being little more than a rapacious mafia and has said in some posts that revolutionary violence against such a system would be justified” – and was later questioned by the Latvian Security Police.


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Lebanon: Anger Rebuilding of Palestinian Camp Suspended · Global Voices
Antoun Issa

JustImage: Matthew Cassel
Anger and protests erupted in response to the Lebanese Government's decision to suspend the reconstruction of the Nahr el Bared Palestinian refugee camp.
Hundreds protested in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli last week against the suspension, but as Lebanon-based photojournalist and blogger, Matthew Cassel, explains on his blog, JustImage, even that was a difficult process:
JustImage: Matthew Cassel
Hundreds of refugees from the camp and their supporters gathered in Tripoli, the closest major city to Nahr al-Bared. After being denied a permit to protest at the police station near the city’s center, organizers changed the location to an area far away from symbolic government buildings and people.
The camp was the centre of a bloody insurrection in 2007 when Islamist militants of Fatah al-Islam clashed with the Lebanese Army, killing dozens in the process.
Much of the camp suffered significant damage during the fighting, forcing thousands of Palestinian refugees to find shelter in neighbouring, overcrowded refugee camps and villages.
Slow reconstruction plans were dealt a further blow on August 13 this year when the Lebanese Government decided to suspend reconstruction efforts for archaeological purposes.
JustImage: Matthew Cassel
The move was spearheaded by Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) leader, Michel Aoun, who cited archaeological artifacts newly discovered under Nahr el Bared as a pretext to halt reconstruction. Critics believe Aoun's stance is politically motivated.
Two years since fighting ended at Nahr el Bared, thousands of Palestinian refugees remain stranded without homes and, along with a number of Lebanese, are simply fed up.
The blogosphere was quick to respond with the creation of a new blog dedicated to the promotion of the rights of the Palestinian refugees of Nahr el Bared.
Informative maps and updates on the progress of the reconstruction can be found on the new blog, Nahr Al Bared. This is what a blogger had to say about the halt in reconstruction work:
This action comes after two years of delaying bureaucratic procedures, where every decision concerning the reconstruction project, including planning and design decisions of the master plan, required governmental, ministerial and political approvals. More significantly this is the first time that a decision which halts actual work on site is taken, hence prolonging the displacement period of more than 20,000 Palestinian refugees.
Outrage was also expressed by blogger, Mlokheya Resistance:
After two years of destroying Nahr ElBared refugee camp, its residents were delighted to hear that the reconstruction plan was about to become a reality. However, once it was launched, the Lebanese government has suspended the reconstruction of Nahr ElBared, AGAIN!!!
Twitterers were also on the ball, retweeting and raising awareness of the plight of Nahr el Bared refugees:
Other bloggers, including Body on the Line and Green Resistance also publicised the Tripoli protest.
*Images supplied by JustImage

author: Antoun Issa


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Macedonia: Freedom Not Fear 2009 · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Information Policy cites an item on privacy-related citizen education activities that took place in Macedonia during this year's Freedom Not Fear action. The item was published on the website of Metamorphosis Foundation, a Macedonian NGO that was one of the event's organizers.


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Myanmar: Most Popular Dish · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

Mohinga (monhinga) is the most popular dish in Myanmar. This is a peppery fish broth eaten with rice vermicelli.


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Pakistan: Adventurous Eid Rides · Global Voices
Rezwan

Owais Mughal at All Things Pakistan posts pictures of some adventurous rides available in Pakistan during the Eid festivities.


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Reform or Revolution for Thailand? · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

nganadeeleg blames the elite for making it impossible to implement reforms in Thailand today.


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Russia: 2010 Census Postponed · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Window on Eurasia and Russia Blog comment on the Russian State Statistical Service's decision to postpone the 2010 census until 2013 – “on budgetary grounds.”


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Russia: Broadband & Recession; Yahoo! & Russia · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Svetlana Gladkova of Profy reports that “broadband access growth twice lower than expected due to recession in Russia.” In another post, she notes that after reading an interview with Marvin Liao, director for Yahoo!'s Sales Development, Emerging Markets Group, she got “a very strong feeling that we will see some kind of an acquisition of a local player – [by Yahoo! in Russia] – even though not exactly soon.”


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Russia: Ulitskaya-Khodorkovsky Correspondence · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Robert Amsterdam's Blog links to OpenDemocracy.net's translation of correspondence between writer Ludmila Ulitskaya and former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, published (RUS) in Novaya Gazeta earlier this month.


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Russia: Valery Shchekoldin Asylum Photos · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Russian photographer Oleg Klimov reposts (RUS, ENG) three graphic and disturbing photos of mental asylum patients in Ulyanovsk region, taken by his colleague Valery Shchekoldin in 1998 for Stern.


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Serbia: No Gay Pride This Year · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Belgraded, Cafe Turco, Balkan File and Anegdote write about the cancellation of this year's gay pride in Belgrade.


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Sri Lanka: What’s Wrong With Our Democracy? · Global Voices
Rezwan

Going Global points out that a knowledgeable voter base, a strong political opposition and structural reforms in judiciary are some of the aspects which are lacking for democracy to function properly in Sri Lanka.


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St. Vincent and the Grenadines: “good hair” · Global Voices
Nicholas Laughlin

“If you are black, female from a post-colonial space you will have had this discussion at some point in your life.” Empath considers the ever-knotty question of what it means for black women to have “good hair”. “My locks … constitute a very important part of my identity and I have often had to defend them.”


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Trinidad and Tobago: a fine balance · Global Voices
Nicholas Laughlin

Jumbie's Watch shares a joke about the “balance” between Trinidad's many assets and advantages and the failings of its political leadership.


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Trinidad and Tobago: GLBT religious service · Global Voices
Nicholas Laughlin

gspottt reports on a recent Anglican religious service in Trinidad “targeted to GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender] people and their loved ones on the theme of peace, human rights and inclusion…. The sermon challenged GLBT people to not see our struggle as so unique … and to recognize that inclusion requires hard work.”


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Turkey: Next Country to Recognize Abkhazia? · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Window on Eurasia reports that “there appears to be a chance that Turkey, despite denials by its officials, might break the embargo against recognition [of Abkhazia] because of Ankara’s desire to play a greater role in the Caucasus region, its own long-standing experience as the only country to recognize the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, and the influence of its own Abkhaz and Circassian communities.”


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U.S., Europe: “R.I.P. Missile Defense” · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

A roundup of blog coverage of the Obama Administration's decision to abandon plans to build the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic: A Fistful of Euros; Edward Lucas; Poemless; Ukrainiana; FP's Passport; Leopolis – here and here; and Robert Amsterdam's Blog.


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Ukraine: Fundraising to Help Street Children · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Scenes from the Sidewalk announces a “virtual fundraiser” to help “transform the lives of [Ukrainian] street and at risk children and reintegrate them back into families and society.”


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Ukraine: Kyiv Nightlife · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Turkish Invasion writes about Kyiv nightlife.


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Ukraine: Media on Ukraine-Russia Relations · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Foreign Notes and Window on Eurasia review some of the coverage of the Ukraine-Russia-U.S.-Europe relations that have appeared in Ukrainian newspapers.


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Ukraine, Russia: “Operation Barbierossa” · Global Voices
Veronica Khokhlova

Ukrainiana reviews “two fact-meets-fantasy scenarios [of the beginning of a Russo-Ukrainian war] outlined in a Russian television program.”


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Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D · Global Voices
Ethan Zuckerman

Canada's International Development Research Center and Harvard's Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who's around the table and what we're planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage page, which includes links to the background papers prepared by participants.
We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts – we'll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.
The Harvard Forum event is convened by Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Michael Spence along with Randy Spence and Matthew Smith, who developed IDRC's position paper, framing the discussion.
Professor Sen reminds us of the long history of ICT and international development with the story of a gift made to the Dehli School of Economics in the 1960s. Someone asked him, “Would you like to have an IBM 1620?” He didn't know whether this was a personal gift, perhaps to put on his desk. So he asked, “How big is it?” The answer: “You'll need a couple of rooms.”
The computer was transformational for his students, he tells us, because theywere mathematically skilled but had no access to technology. At the same time, he wonders whether technology can function as a replacement for schooling. “Anything that keeps you at home in front of a box doesn't put you in front of the children from other families that don't share the prejudices your family had.”
Michael Spence outlines two critical factors that have transformed many developing economies, leading to 7-10% economic growth in some societies, poverty reduction at astonishing rates – though not everywhere – but prospectively for 3.5 billion people. These inputs are political leadership that establishes inclusive governance, and access to a global economy. This global economy includes the influence of entrepreneurship, bottom-up and market based innovation, as well as a gigantic global market where businesses can expand, and most critically, knowledge.
Michael offers us a choice – would we rather see a society face complete destruction of its infrastructure while retaining its knowledge, or face some sort of massive amnesia which destroyed accumulated knowledge but left the buildings standing? His answer – it's easy: choose to lose your buildings. “The state of an economy is what it knows how to do.” Countries that are engaging in very rapid growth, like China and India, have found ways to learn very quickly as well.
Prior to our event, participants have submitted two-page papers (you can read them here), and Randy Spence offers a quick overview of the themes identified, focused on the question of “What's changed?” in the past six years of ICT and development. His highlights:
- We've seen a dramatic increase in mobile phone usage. Usage is up to 90% in some developing economies, and there doesn't seem to be large gender or income gaps in usage. That's the good news. But we're seeing monopolization and increasing prices. And there's no guarantee that mobile phones are a smooth path towards full inclusion in the internet.
- Issues of digital rights raise key questions about openness of knowledge. There are open questions about what needs to be done in terms of policy to ensure expansion of apropriate access and protection of the ability to participate.
- We're starting to see the benefits of increased access to ICT. There's more evidence and these benefits seem to be substantial, even if they are uneven. The ability to communicate and organize is particularly important in political terms.
- ICT has become holistically integrated into other development and community action projects, recognizing that ICT is a critical part of development strategies, not a stand-alone activity.
- We need to be careful about cybercrime and other vulnerabilities associated with our digital age and need to minimize these negative impacts.
Michael Spence offers the observation that what's important is not just access, but “access to capability services… what we used to call ‘applications.'” He wonders what the obstacles are to building these useful applications – what's really getting in the way. Bill Melody offers his diagnosis. Discussions about the regulatory environment in the Asia Pacific region show that a protectionist logic are coming into play, especially as regards the US's inflexibility on intellectual property rights.
Yochai Benkler, who's been studying the access to knowledge movement, suggests that we need to consider more than technological structures, but also social structures that encourage experimentation and making mistakes. The focus on ICT4D, he tells us, tends to focus us on technical structures – we need to focus on flows of knowledge, the social and intellectual structures that support learning and innovation. This, in turn, means that patents and copyrights need to be introduced into our debate, as well as the development of  a clear understanding of how ICT for development becomes embedded in social structures.
Michael Spence suggests that we need a practical set of solutions to intellectual property questions. We might go down a road that encourages intellectual property owners to engage in multi-tiered property systems as well as government subsidy to encourage this new pricing flexibility.
Rohan Samarajiva urges us not to forget “the basics” as we move into discussions of intellectual property. He points out that Myanmar has only 375,000 mobile phones, fewer lines than fixed telephony lines. When we consider post-cyclone recovery, it's hard to know what we can do in such infrastructure-poor environments. This isn't just North Korea and Myanmar – this includes Ethiopia, Eritrea, Papua New Guinea, Cuba and other environments.
David Malone, the president of IDRC, talks about a proposed project to create a “university of the north”, connecting people in circumpolar regions. Politicians were excited about the idea because they saw it as cheap way of delivering education. Unfortunately, these projects often demand huge investment – we need politicians to be realistic about the costs.
Malone suggests that students around the world are often ill-served by professors at second and third-tier universities who “haven't had an original thought since their graduate studies.” These students turn to the Internet to feed their curiosity, and he warns that few people have the knowledge to navigate the poorly organized universe of online knowledge.
Alison Gillwald notes that countries know about the solutions associated with ICT4D and have “rhetorically committed” to pursuing them, but haven't liberalized markets or created independent regulators that would enable these solutions to be deployed. Connectivity is critical for any of these interventions, especially in Africa where home internet penetration is below 1% – “Can we have discussions about internet governance if we don't have internet?” On the other hand, developing countries need to be involved with debates around intellectual property, or they risk being locked out of these discussions in the long run.
Hernan Galperin offers a distinction between tacit and codified knowledge. He wonders whether IP is really a critical issue on the ground in all the countries we're considering. He points to software and media businesses in the developing world that aren't based on patenting and copyrighting. Intellectual property addresses a specific set of codified knowledge issues – this may not be as relevant in all nations and economies as in some where codified knowledge is the key point.
Ophelia Mascarenhas and Michael Best continue this line of questioning – is intellectual property the key set of issues to consider when we think of ICT4D? Mascarenhas notes that we need to be considering the capacity for developing local knowedge, not just accessing knowledge from the outside. Mike Best references some past research he's conducted in Tamil Nadu that suggests that communication technologies like instant messaging and voice calls are 2 to 4 more times as popular as knowledge-seeking activities online. In Ghana, his evidence suggests that email is the number one activity.
Amartya Sen wonders whether we run the risk of overemphasizing the importance of culture in isolation. He notes that UNESCO had previously emphasized the development and preservation of local culture over global, which “ended up being disastrous.” There is “no such thing as ‘unaided culture’,” culture that exists in isolation.
He goes on to suggest we might consider success stories involving technology and governance. There was widespread apathy about Pakistan's deal with the Taliban in the Swat valley, he tells us – people consider Swat to be very far away and almost irrelavent. But when an activist shot video of a young woman being caned on a mobile phone, that video forced action from the Pakistani human rights commission, and went onto national television, generating a great deal of interest and anger. He references Mo Ibrahim, a succesful telecoms entrepreneur on the African continent, who argues for the importance of governance, offering a prize for good governance. But Ibrahim's story suggests that we dismiss the view that nothing can happen until political leadership changes – the massive profitability of his own operations suggest the possibility of positive change through technology.
Reflecting on his childhood in Burma, Sen wonders whether Myanmar might be surprisingly well positioned to engage in a future internet revolution. Not only does the country enjoy a high rate of literacy, but it's been the most literate country in Asia for centuries. He wonders what transformations are possible through “monks wielding internet-connected telephones.” At the same time, he acknowledges that the governing regime is well aware that this level of connection would threaten their authority and is therefore unlikely to allow it to happen.
Yochai is concerned that some “talking past” is taking place regarding intellectual property. There's both local knowledge and learning across borders. IP is important in the wrong ways, he argues – it's important to let a software service company in Argentina or Brazil to compete with a US company because both companies use open source software. As for Mike Best's point about the importance of communications over content – Yochai argues that this demands protection from overagressive IP laws of the ability to innovate and create new communication forms.
Anita Gurumurthy argues that it's a false dichotomy to oppose the importance of access and the terms of access. She takes a swing at Mike Best, arguing that saying that people want communications not content is like saying that Indian girls want to learn to cook and clean, not to learn in school. Randy Spence defends Mike's distinction, listing several critical forms of interaction that involve little knowledge transfer – the transmission of money across a network, the phonecall that includes a job offer. This is clearly a complex issue – Michael Spence offers a closing comment, wondering if there are really policy issues associated with recognizing the importance of communication as well as content. “My own personal view is that, unlike the intellectual property sector, this [communications] is a sector that's doing just fine.”
More live-blogging by Ethan Zuckerman
- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and
- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus


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USA: Pilgrimage into the Wild · Global Voices
Lester Bolicenni

On August 24, two young hikers, a 19 year-old American and a 21 years-old Chinese man were found lost on Stampede Trail, near Fairbanks, Alaska. Troopers who discovered them said they wore only urban clothes and carried little food. It's not the first time unprepared travelers have been found in this wild and inhospitable area.
Like others before them, they had set out to see the “Magic Bus”, one of the two main characters of a best-selling book, Into the Wild from 1996. It was later adapted to screenplay by Sean Penn who also directed the movie in 2007.
The book, by Jon Krakauer, tells the true story of Christopher “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless, a college graduate who left behind friends and family for an odyssey through American roads that would lead to his fateful goal: Alaska. He was found dead in 1992 in a converted public bus that used to be a hunters’ shelter.
There are still questions about the actual cause of death, ranging from starvation to poisoning or injury that lends mystery to the story.
Christopher McCandless in the front of the "Magic Bus" (photography found in his own camera)
According to The Star newspaper in Canada, about 100 people from around the world follow in McCandless’ footsteps on pilgrimages every year. He is considered a symbol of freedom and man's return to nature.
Pilgrimages to the bus
Adventure traveler and blogger Dan of The road chose me, describes the difficulties he had journeying all the way to the spot where McCandless died.
I met two cool Austrian characters, Thomas and (roll the ‘R’) Roland on the Dalton Highway and it took all of 10 seconds to convince them to join me on a trip to ‘The Bus’. We were able to drive about 12.5 miles down Stampede Road before we had to leave the vehicles behind and continue on foot. The first hour and a half of hiking the next morning saw us travel on a really good quad trail, through some small swamps, through a couple of shin-deep river crossings and spat us out at the edge of the Teklinika River.
They wandered upstream, and found a place to cross the river. “I was more than a bit scared when it reached mid-thigh in depth and began to really push hard,” writes Dan. Eventually they reached “Fairbanks Bus 142″:
When bus 142 appeared on the side of the trail, seemingly out of thin air I was quite startled […] but somehow wasn’t ready to be there yet. I paused on the edge of the clearing for a moment, then again in the doorway, trying to take everything in. Even though I’d never been there before, it was very familiar – from the description in the book, the movie and also from the pictures I’ve seen online.
I thought The Magic Bus would be a quiet, sad place to spend time – I was quite surprised to find the opposite was the case.
Desecration of the bus
It seems some visitors don't respect this ‘mausoleum’. Fairbanks, Alaska blogger Ed Plumb describes this in his blog The Edventures. About his second visit to the bus, he wrote:
So we arrived at the bus to find it in complete disarray. A handful of windows had been bashed in, broken glass was scattered about, and most of the items in the bus had been overturned. Garbage was strewn all around the perimiter and into the adjacent stand of spruce trees.
Of course, the bus doesn't only attract fearless adventurers or spoilers. Painter and blogger Heather Horton exhibits a painting on her website inspired by her visit to the bus:
"Fairbanks Bus 142", courtesy of Heather Horton
Chris McCandless was on my mind when I worked on this painting as much as he was when I was actually at the bus. Fortunately I took a lot of photo reference which helps to bring the emotions and memories back in a flood. I thought of the 113 days he spent at the bus, what he might have thought about, the windows he looked through, the reflections he saw within himself as much as through the panes of glass. This painting is the beginning of my own journey by examining where he experienced the last, fateful part of his own odyssey.
Unfortunately, these numerous expeditions can be a strain on the local community when costly rescue missions are involved. Consequently, there has been talk among Alaskans of one day moving the “Magic Bus” to somewhere that would be easier for visitors to access.

author: Lester Bolicenni


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USA: Video Contest Promotes “Swine Flu” Prevention · Global Voices
Juhie Bhatia

In anticipation of flu season, which officially kicks off October 4, the U.S. government announced the winner of a video contest today to encourage flu prevention, including stopping H1N1 or swine flu.
H1N1 was first detected in mid-April and has since made its way around the world. In the U.S., laboratory-confirmed cases of the virus have led to 9,079 hospitalizations and 593 deaths, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was anticipated that cases would increase as students returned to school this month. So far 21 U.S. states are reporting widespread influenza activity, mostly related to swine flu, which is unusually high for September.
To help combat a rise in all types of flu, including H1N1 cases, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a video contest on July 9 asking people to create a PSA (public service announcement) on flu prevention. The videos could be 15, 30 or 60 seconds and had to be submitted on the department's YouTube channel. Over 200 videos were entered from across the country and the top 10 entries were chosen and put to a public vote. The winner, who received $2,500 in cash and is featured on national television, was announced, on September 22.
Dr. John Clarke of New York came out on top with his video entitled “H1N1 Rap by Dr. Clarke.” In it, he creates a rap song clearly laying out steps to stop the virus:
Besides the winning rap video, there were also nine runners up in the contest, with videos featuring everything from wit to animation to straight up seriousness to get the message of stopping swine flu across. This runner up, entitled “Chainsaw,” uses humor to encourage people to stay safe. In it, a man uses a chainsaw as a form of prevention against the virus:
In the video “Toothbrush” you see a toothbrush being used to clean the surface of objects, ranging from an ATM machine and a computer mouse to a public pay phone. The analogy is gross, but effective:
The video “Simply Fighting” is one of two runners up to use animation. Throughout it a white line morphs into four simple steps for H1N1 prevention: get vaccinated yearly, stay home if you're sick, cover sneezes and coughs, and wash your hands frequently:
Other runner up videos also focus on vaccination as a tool for prevention. The H1N1 flu vaccine is expected to be available in the U.S. in early October, though you can already get the seasonal flu vaccine, which protects against the flu that arises in the fall. Researchers recently determined that a single injection of the swine flu vaccine is enough to protect against the virus.
Health officials are urging certain groups of people to be among the first in line for the H1N1 vaccine when it becomes available, including pregnant women, school-age children and anyone with underlying health conditions, like diabetes and heart disease, or compromised immune systems.
Thumbnail photo of Swine Flu Panic by Y on Flickr.

author: Juhie Bhatia


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Africa: Africa Code Camp · Global Voices
Ndesanjo Macha

An announcement of AfricaCodeCamp next month: “So on the 4th of October we'll get as many of these innovators as possible together in one place in San Francisco, to problem solve and work together to make all of our hacking even better.”

author: Ndesanjo Macha


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Africa: Volunteer for BikeTown Africa · Global Voices
Ndesanjo Macha

BikeTown Africa is heading to Tanzania and South Africa: “Over the next two months, BikeTown Africa will be delivering 640 Kona AfricaBikes to South Africa and Tanzania and Kona needs your help.”


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Bangladesh: Can A Journalist Throw Shoes To A Leader? · Global Voices
Rezwan

“I cannot undermine the sentiment of Al- Zaidi and ordinary Iraqi people who are the sufferer of invasion and war. But he has misused his access and accreditation rights by throwing shoes. I would be happy if Al-Zaidi were a member of any other community except journalist,” comments Bangladeshi blogger and journalist Mahadi754.


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Barbados, Guyana: forest outpost? · Global Voices
Nicholas Laughlin

Living in Barbados examines an audacious 16-year-old proposal to establish a Barbadian outpost in the interior of Guyana, thus addressing the problems of overpopulation in one country and underdevelopment in the other.


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Botswana: Churches targeted by crime syndicates · Global Voices
Ndesanjo Macha

Are international criminals targeting churches in Botswana?: “There are fears that some churches in Botswana may fall prey to international crime syndicates who launder money under the guise of donations and sponsorship.”


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Botswana: River flows again since 1988 · Global Voices
Ndesanjo Macha

Boronyane River in Botswana flows again since 1988: “Local dignitaries and politicians gather on the banks of the Boronyane River to watch it flow down to the Thamalakane River. Local knowledge says it last flowed in 1988 and 1974 – so this is a big occasion.”


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British Virgin Islands: conservation victory · Global Voices
Nicholas Laughlin

Repeating Islands reports on a legal victory for environmentalists in the British Virgin Islands, who oppose the construction of a hotel and golf course in a protected area.


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China: Is Bo Xilai’s corruption crackdown good for China? · Global Voices
John Kennedy

While results from the ongoing crackdown on corruption in central China's Chongqing municipality have shown the campaign's effectiveness and boosted the popularity of Bo Xilai, the high-ranking CCP official heading it, online discussion has also featured several questions.
Such as questioning of the CCP internal discipline ‘double regulation’, through which has already led to the death of one high-ranking police official suspect. Also, Bo's motives, whether the crackdown is spurred more by his political ambitions and an eye on the top spot than a commitment to transparency and rule of law. There's also the problem of how the CCP might effectively curb corruption when it's the biggest player in it.
The easiest posts to come across are those like Sina blogger Zhang Xiaofeng‘s from September 20, supportive of Bo and eager to see more tough action taken against the omnipresent corruption:
黑恶势力的发展，不仅威胁到人民群众的生命、财产安全，而且影响到全面小康社会和和谐社会建设；不仅影响到党在人民心目中的形象，而且任其发展下去，将危及共产党的执政地位。
薄熙来在重庆发动的打黑除恶斗争，表现了他对党和国家长治久安的高度的责任感，表现了他清正廉洁、执政为民的公仆心，表现了他疾恶如仇、无私无畏的英雄气概。深得党心，深得民心。
尽管有些人对薄熙来打黑扫恶行动，有这样那样的议论，但绝大多数的人民群众并不以为然。一个领导干部不管他有什么样的追求，只要他真心实意地“弯下腰来为人民扛活”，只要他真心实意为人民谋福祉，他就是好官，就会得到人民群众衷心的爱戴，衷心的拥护。愿中国所有的官，为官当如薄熙来！
Clearly, crusading high-ranking technocrats aren't sufficient when those being rounded up this year are the rank-and-file as well as the leadership of China various judiciary bodies; writes the Safe Ocean Sohu blogger on September 20:
过去，一些领导在谈论自己防区内的反腐倡廉成效时，总是说廉政建设大方向是好的，腐败分子只是“极个别”，而普通民众眼里却有截然不同的印象。重庆此次对腐败分子给予暴风骤雨般的打击，也告诉国家反腐败部门一个令人失望的现实，那就是中国腐败现象已经十分严重了，绝对不是“极个别”的问题。
重庆此次“打黑”也好，“肃贪”也罢，挖出了如此多的贪官，就是硬道理。 “打黑”行动让众多腐败的党员干部落马，不但没有给党抹黑，反而因为凸显出党中央的反腐决心，而给党增了光、添了彩，也算是为“建国六十周年”献上了一份大礼。
对于重庆市此次“打黑除恶”行动，全国各地的网民都期待，自己的城市何时也能效仿重庆？
How tired you are, Secretary Bo!
The image above, taken recently in Chongqing, was saved by well-known Internet personality Wang Pei before it was harmonized, and seen by many as a throwback to the displays of excessive idol worship seen during the Cultural Revolution; Bo's campaign urging Chongqing residents to ‘sing socialist songs’ and the use of mobile phones to push revolutionary Maoist memes this year have been the sort of behavior which led prominent writer and twitter Lian Yue to state this week:
重庆这么容易就发起一次小型文革，这是全体中国人的悲哀。
In a Sidewiki post alongside news today of Bo's ongoing socialist song revival, Twitter user Taoge wrote of Bo:
这家伙 脑壳有毛病
为了争夺权力 无所不用其极
当然，某些人为了保住权力，也是一丘之貉。
Is breaking the law justifiable means in an attempt to uphold it and stamp out corruption? KDNet author Wang Ce makes the case that the law must come first, in his September 21 post:
有法不依，没有法治精神，没有反腐治贪的长效机制，搞一百次“文革”、一百次“打黑除恶风暴”，其结局都只能是越打越黑、越反越腐。谁能保证今天铁面无私的反腐英雄，明天不会在不受约束的权力腐蚀下走上前任的老路？
中国人有一个“重道轻器”的恶劣习惯，提到反贪惩腐就在“正义与真理”的大道理上绕弯子，没有人肯鞠躬俯首，像英国人那样简捷严谨地遵循法治原则解决问题。所以说地痞流氓不可怕，贪官恶吏也不可怕，可怕的是我们从上到下对规则的蔑视。
At two years and running with over 2,000 arrests, how far is Bo prepared to go in his good fight? Quite possibly until 2012 if the Beijing Calling bridgeblogger is to be believed, in his post ‘Yet to be Crowned’:
Both Bo and Xi are “princelings”, whose fathers were heroes in teh 1949 revolution. Xi has the backing of former President Jiang Zemin, who seems to still hold power behind the scenes.
It'll be interesting to see what happens after October 1, when the rest and relaxation of the National Day holiday is over and the power brokering continues behind the scenes.

author: John Kennedy


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Cuba: activist arrested and released · Global Voices
Nicholas Laughlin

Uncommon Sense reports the arrest and subsequent release of Cuban activist and journalist Belinda Salas Tapanes in Havana. “Salas is president of the Federation of Latin American Women (FLAMUR), one of the more effective opposition groups in Cuba.”