28 February 2012

Stories from 28 February 2012

Pakistan: Congratulating Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy

  28 February 2012

Hina Safdar At Chowrangi celebrates the Oscar award winner, the internationally renowned Pakistani documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy. She won the award for her documentary ‘Saving Face, which is based on the story of acid attack survivors.

Trinidad & Tobago: Carnival is My Time

  28 February 2012

“In an attempt to imitate art…culture in T&T seems to have perverted itself and in trying to become something else, may have succeeded all too well; the business model of Tribe and the other new ‘Rio’ styled bands seems to be built on encouraging excess for profit”: Plain Talk suggests...

Video Highlights: Defending Human Rights

  28 February 2012

A selection of Global Voices' recent and interesting stories on video advocacy including indigenous rights and recent news from Latin America, East Asia, Western Europe and Sub Saharan Africa selected by Juliana Rincón Parra.

Cuba: Dialogue with the Opposition?

  28 February 2012

“It might be paranoia. In totalitarian states, suspicion and the absurd become habit. But it isn’t insane to think that to give the dissidents a space if circumstances force their hand, could become a part of the island’s mandarin’s calculus”: Iván's File Cabinet puts forward a compelling theory.

Jamaica: Inmate Beatings

  28 February 2012

Following reports that several high-profile inmates are being beaten, Active Voice wants to know “what’s going down at the Horizon Adult Remand Centre”, which seems to be “a virtual Guantanamo Bay.”

Pakistan: Fighting the Great Firewall

  28 February 2012

The recent blow to the internet freedom in Pakistan has been the announcement of a request for proposal (RFP) for national “URL filtering and blocking system” by the ICT R&D Fund under the Ministry of Information Technology (MoIT). The $10 million system is required to be able to ”handle a block list of up to 50 million URLs".

Africa: Vote for the Most Influential African Thinker Alive

  28 February 2012

Africa is a Country blog wants readers to vote for one influential African thinker from a list of 12 candidates. The list includes Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Mahmood Mamdani (Uganda), Mamdouh Habashi, (Egypt), Kwame Anthony Appiah (Ghana/United States), J M Coetzee (South Africa/Australia) and Issa Shivji (Tanzania). Voting is open until 5 March, 2012.

Brazil: Visually Impaired Dancers Become Ballet Professionals

  28 February 2012

Pierre Larose, on his blog Discovering São Paulo, shares a video report on ‘a ballet school in São Paulo which has developed a method of “teaching by touch” in order to develop professional ballet dancers who are blind or visually impaired’. He adds that in 12 years approximately 300 dancers...

Haiti: Joining the African Union

  28 February 2012

Mackendie Toupuissant writes [fr]: “The news went almost unnoticed. Until now,  Haiti was a mere “observer” in the African Union.  Since early February, the first black republic in history became  a” full associate member “of the African Union (AU).  This decision, the first of its kind for a country of the African Diaspora...

El Salvador: Hunnapuh, a Pioneer of the Salvadoran Blogosphere

  28 February 2012

We talk with Omar Nieto, a pioneer in the Salvadoran blogosphere. His blog Hunnapuh is one of the oldest and longest-lived in this Central American country. In this interview, Omar talks to us about his blog and about the Salvadoran blogosphere. He also shares some advice about maintaining consistency and quality in a blog.

France : Who is French and who is not?

  28 February 2012

Abdellali Hajjat, author of the book The Boundires of National Identity: The Injunction to Assimilation in France and its Territories, explains in an interview [fr] on the blog Contretemps the ideological seeds of Islamophobia and the institutional logic that reinforces it. “Racism needs a crutch to provide the principle of...