Monday Global Blog Roundup · Global Voices
Paul Frankenstein

The Middle East
The famous “should women drive in Saudi Arabia” debate gets a hearing at Crossroads Arabia. Verdict? Well, since women can drive everywhere else, what’s the big deal?
The Syrian News Wire on the Hezbollah victory in the Lebanese elections: “This is proving to be an even more
predictable election than when Lebanon was under
Syrian influence.” That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?
Subzero Blue is annoucing plans for the third Tunisian blogger meetup. Sounds like fun, though I don’t think that I can get GV to send me there to cover the event. In other news from Tunisia, the first Tunisian blog in Spanish has been sighted.
In reporting on the murder of a Libyan journalist, Abu Aardvark suggests that “if Moammar Qaddafi is going to be drinking tea with Tony Blair, and celebrated in Washington for giving up his non-existent nuclear program in order to vindicate the invasion of Iraq, Libyan journalists who criticize official corruption shouldn’t  be showing up dead, riddled with bullets and their fingers cut off.”
Photo by Aaron Schaub
Africa
This Is Zimbabwe reports from the site of a so-called police ‘clean-up’ operation. As the title says, if selling flowers was illegal, then why didn’t they stop it 100 years ago?
“Where are you really from?” asks Black Looks. What’s she’s really asking is, of course, “What makes you the nationality that you are? Where does that line end and where does it begin?”
South-East Asia
The Sassy Lawyer takes wonders why the government, since it’s so intent on censoring TV and film, does nothing about suggestive advertising.
The fact that Singapore has one of the highest numbers of bloggers of any country in the world (on, of course, a per-capita basis) was a topic of much discussion at the first Singapore Indian Blogger’s Meet, according to Kaps of Sambhar Mafia.
South Asia
Over the weekend, Nepalese lawyers staged a rally in Kathmandu, protesting the royal family’s seizure of power. United We Blog! has photos of the protest. The comments are running mostly royalist, however…
India Uncut takes a gander at a badly-abbreviated headline and lets his imagination take over from there.
Europe
In the wake of the French and Dutch defeats of the EU constitution, the group blog A Fistful of Euros notes that this may slow the Turkish drive to enter the EU while also observing that the UK has taken the opportunity to shelve Britain’s vote on the EU constitution. Elsewhere, the site also ponders what impact Kurdish national ambitions might have on Turkey’s EU application.