12 August 2005

Stories from 12 August 2005

Saudi Arabia: Khamis Mushayt Girl

The much-missed Saudi blogger behind The Religious Policeman is back. Amongst other things, he had this observation on the Saudi Justice System: The 26-year-old mother of three, called the ‘Khamis Mushayt Girl’, convicted of murdering a man six years ago is scheduled to be executed next Thursday… The details are...

Chad: Habré Henchmen Ousted

  12 August 2005

Human Rights Watch's news blog is reporting that six henchman of Chad's former dictator Hissène Habré have been ousted from positions in government. "The Chadian government’s move follows a report last month by Human Rights Watch naming these six and 35 other leading Habré-era figures, many accused of torture and killings, who still hold key posts in Chad. Those dismissed include the powerful director of the Judicial Police who was deputy director of national security under Habré; a surveillance chief who was the director of Habré’s dreaded political police, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS); and a man described by a Chadian truth commission as one of Chad’s 'most feared torturers.' It is believed that more sackings may be forthcoming."

Bahrain: Imam on Strike!

Mohammed Elzubeir from UAE, points to the war of words between Sunni and Shiite religious scholars at Bahrain, over the right to suspend the Friday prayers where it looks like some Imam (the person who leads a prayer in a mosque) decided to suspend a Friday's prayer in protest for...

United Arab Emirates: Peaceful Journey

  12 August 2005

On his return from London to Dubai, The Secret Blog Of Arabia hopes not to get followed by the police, MI5 , MI6 , CIA , etc., on the Underground or in the Heathrow Airport, or by Dubai Police for writing blogs about the UAE or for holding a British...

Global Links, Global Influence – a Global Voices update

  12 August 2005

“This is why I read Global Voices Online. It’s the best place to find local stories from around the world blogged by people actually experiencing it.” – Mike Cohen, /dev/random, from a post titled “We Won't Hear About This in the Mainstream Media” I spent yesterday taking a close look...

Trinidad & Tobago: Bombing Suspect in Custody

  12 August 2005

Taran Rampersad posts an update about this week's bombing in Trinidad. "It seems that a suspect has been held in the explosion on George St. here in Trinidad, but with so many copycats in Trinidad and Tobago, it's difficult to say that this is also a suspect for the initial bombing," he writes.

Launch of the Mobcasting Developers Forum

  12 August 2005

Because of the positive feedback I've received around the creation of a low-cost, open source strategy for recording and receiving podcasts over mobile phones, I've set up a new email list and Web community for people interested in making this happen. There are already free tools like audioblogger and audlink that will let you post podcasts from your phone, but both require a long-distance phone call to the US, and neither let you listen to podcasts from your phone. I want to develop a tool that can be installed anywhere in the world, so all of this can be done on a local phone call. To learn more about mobcasting, please visit this blog entry I wrote last January, entitled When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting to see where this all got started. The email list will be focused solely on this project; people who join the list should be interested in mobile phone podcasting and be willing to help us make this project happen. To join the list, please send an email to mobcasting-subscribe [[at]] yahoogroups . com, with the spaces and brackets removed. Or, you can visit the Mobcasting list homepage. Meanwhile, I've also created a DDN community that we can use as a workspace. The workspace has bulletin boards, document sharing and blog posting. Group members are welcome to post web resources, blog entries or files to this public page. We can also add news, events and feature stories to the site if they become useful at some point. Looking forward to making this happen! -andy