· June, 2007

Stories about LANGUAGES from June, 2007

Benin's fans get rowdy at the Togo-Benin match

  19 June 2007

Togo played Benin in Cotonu this Sunday, the fifth day of qualifying matches for the 2008 Africa cup. Benin won (4-1), but not before their supporters engaged in what Togo-iTunes calls “gratuitous violence” (Fr). Togo-iTunes has photographs of the match and the rowdy fans, taken by a Togolese journalist posing...

Japan: Confidential Police Files Leaked, Again

  16 June 2007

What do a group of sex crime victims, police informants, traffic violators, members of Japan's largest crime syndicate and a man being stalked by his girlfriend all have in common this week? They all had their personal information -- including names, addresses, photos, bank account numbers, private testimony, and interrogation reports -- leaked from a police officer's personal computer onto Japan's hugely popular bulletin board 2channel Tuesday morning. Japanese bloggers have responded to the leak with outrage and frustration.

Bookcovers from Tahiti

  15 June 2007

Tahiti: Litterature, Musique et… has been posting retro covers of Tahitian novels and books about Tahitian history, culture and society.

Gabon: Libreville mermaid hoax (via St. Petersburg, Florida)

  15 June 2007

Association des gabonais d'Amiens dispels a mermaid hoax [Fr]. Photographs of a mermaid supposedly discovered dead on a beach in Libreville were actually downloaded from an eBay auction for a mermaid sighting in St. Petersburg, Florida. The St. Petersburg photographs sold for US$1500 to a French natural history museum.

Japan: The Disappearing Pension Accounts

  13 June 2007

For the past few weeks, pressure has been intensifying against the Japanese government over its apparent mismanagement of over 50 million public pension accounts belonging to millions of Japanese citizens. While the government has attempted to deflect attacks by issuing flyers pinning the blame on a former member of the opposition, many Japanese bloggers are not buying it.

Senegal: In Memory of Ousmane Sembene

  12 June 2007

Togolese writer Kangi Alem has a short tribute [Fr] to famed Senegalese filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene who passed away this weekend in Dakar. “I used to read the greats of African literature in my literature textbook in the 1980s, and I imagined all these authors were dead. What it...

Algeria: On the Kurds in Iraq

“With the situation between Turkey, the PKK, and Iraqi Kurdistan heating up, with regular engagements between Turkish and PKK forces along the Turco-Iraqi borderlands and the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Kurdistan regional president Massoud Barzani claiming that a Turkish invasion of Kurdistan “would be first of all an attack...

Japan: The Matsuoka Suicide

  7 June 2007

The story is now over a week old, and yet the sensational suicide of Agriculture Minister Matsuoka Toshikatsu, who hung himself in his apartment on May 28th and later died in hospital, is continuing to ripple through Japanese society. As others have noted elsewhere, while the rate of suicide within...

Chávez, Lula and the media: is it a samba or a waltz?

  6 June 2007

It was a funny week that passed by here in Brazil, in the wake of the implementation of the Chávez government decision not to renew the broadcasting license of Radio Caracas Television. The Brazilian Senate debated the issue in one of its sessions this week and decided to ask the...

AIDS in Japan: Blame it on gays?

  1 June 2007

Since the first case of AIDS in Japan was officially reported in March, 1985, official figures have indicated that the number of cases of HIV/AIDS among Japanese has been steadily increasing over the years (this despite the difficulty of making assessments due to the low rate of HIV testing among...