· February, 2008

Stories about Freedom of Speech from February, 2008

Russia: Election Roundup

  29 February 2008

A roundup on Russia's upcoming presidential election: Mark MacKinnon writes on the 72 percent “target” for Medvedev; Megan Case writes about the reasons NOT to vote; Robert Amsterdam writes about betting on the Russian election, writer Victor Erofeyev's pro-Putin and pro-Medvedev op-ed in the New York Times, and more election...

China: Chongqing's Pride

  29 February 2008

Zhang Xiaozhou's soccer game report has hurt Chongqing citizens’ pride. Students, representatives of people congress, and newspapers editors protested against the report and demanded the authority to punish the reporter. Blogger Wen yunchao commented that Chongqing people were over sensitive (zh). Zhao Mu criticized that the Chongqing local newspapers were...

Serbia: “Ray of Light in Tough Times”

  28 February 2008

Belgrade 2.0 posts a selection of photoshopped Kosovo-related parodies and writes: “If there’s one thing I always appreciated about Serbia and it’s turbulent times, it’s the people’s strenght to find something humorous in all that, no matter how bad the times are. It was like that during the sanctions, during...

China: Thoughts and debates on the name-calling professor

  28 February 2008

The start was in fact very simple. In 2007, Professor Zhong Hua at Sichuan Normal University issued an article entitled Cultural Studies and the Lost of Literary Theory in the 11th issue of “Literature and Art Studies”, one of the core academic journals in China, criticizing an academic work entitled...

Serbia: Where is Facebook's Belgrade?

  27 February 2008

According to Belgrade 2.0, Serbia's capital has mysteriously disappeared from Facebook: “Anyway, there are couple of groups now fighting to get Serbian cities back on the list of hometowns, since about 70 thousand Serbs that are already on Facebook just lost that option. Unfortunately, the protesters are not being very...

Morocco: Blogger Quits

  26 February 2008

A popular and well respected university professor and blogger, Pr. Mohamed Drissi Bakhakhat, decided to stop blogging out of fear for his safety after what happened to Fuad Mourtada, writes A Moro in America.

Kosovo, Serbia: A Roundup

  26 February 2008

Update on Kosovo/Serbia: Belgrade 2.0 sums things up; East Ethnia discusses the possibility of partition; Csíkszereda Musings writes on the meaning of Kosovo for Romania's Székelyföld autonomy; Greater Surbiton re-posts his article on what's “at stake in the struggle for Serbia”; Steady State writes on the implications of Kosovo for...

Russia, Ukraine: February 23

  25 February 2008

Scraps of Moscow, Ukrainiana, and Windows to Russia! write about the Defender of the Fatherland Day (formerly known as the Soviet Army Day). Feb. 23 also happens to be president Victor Yushchenko's birthday, and, as Window on Eurasia points out, it is also the day on which Stalin’s deportation of...

Russia: Lev Ponomarev; Solovetskiy Stone

  25 February 2008

Robert Amsterdam reports on an investigation launched against human rights activist Lev Ponomarev, who has been “accused of committing slander against the Russian Federation, and is currently being prevented from leaving the country.” Also, Amsterdam writes about the Solovetskiy Stone memorial and the authorities’ plans to remove it from Lubyanka...

Russia, U.S.: The New York Times’ Russian LJ

  25 February 2008

Lyndon of Scraps of Moscow provides a comprehensive review of the New York Times‘ Russian-language LJ community, a platform for a “translator-assisted online dialog” between Russian bloggers and the newspaper's regular readers and its Moscow bureau staff: “a very interesting and creative step, with the potential to realize the full...