Stories from 24 January 2013
Spain: An Airport Without Planes?
Spain has an airport that has made both print and online headlines since its opening: Castellón airport. Netizens share their opinions on this airport that has an endless number of...
Opposition Party Attacks Russian eDemocracy
Just Russia has always been a conflicted political entity. Nominally, it's a social-justice-oriented opposition party with members in the Russian parliament. During the past year, Just Russia has gained a...
Hungarian Journalist Kidnapped, Then Released in Aleppo
Bálint Szlankó, a Hungarian foreign correspondent, was kidnapped – and later released – in Aleppo, Syria. He wrote this [en] on his Facebook page on Jan. 23: Just been through...
Argentina: Suggestions for a better life
Hernán Haines, from blog El espacio de Hernán Haines [es], provides his readers with some suggestions for a better life in Argentina due to “the constant enquiries I get about...
Critical Mass: Wheels of Activism Come to Brazil's Salvador City
The international cycling movement Critical Mass - or Bicicletadas as it is been known in Brazilian Portuguese - has won the hearts of Brazilians, since cars have reached a saturation...
A Destitute Women And Her Dogs
Jabberwock shares this amazing story about an animal loving old woman living in a small makeshift shanty in Delhi. She has been looking after street dogs for years now, on...
Trinidad & Tobago: Proper Procurement Practice
In part one of a two-part series on governance and integrity in Tobago, Afra Raymond examines the Tobago House of Assembly project.
Cuba: Internet Change Coming?
If you took a poll in our streets about Cubans’ most serious problems, the youngest…would list…lack of access to the Internet. They want to dive into that sea of kilobytes!...
Mexico: Florence Cassez, Guilty of Kidnapping or Victim of a Staged Process?
A great fuss has taken over the cyberspace after the French citizen Florence Cassez was released from a Mexican prision where she stayed seven years charged with kidnapping, illegal gun...
Parallels Between Religious and Copyright Wars
Rick Falkvinge, the founder of Pirate Party, reinterprets the wars of religion that devastated Western Europe in the XVI and XVII centuries in terms of the current struggle to control...
France: NGOs Condemn Privatisation of Public Domain
Seven European free culture associations issued a statement [fr] protesting against a public-private partnership between the French National Library BNF and Proquest database [fr], whose aim is to digitize a...
Guyana: Literary Controversy
Writer Ruel Johnson has expressed concern at what he considers to be possible case of nepotism at Caribbean Press, a publishing company owned by the government of Guyana: When I saw...
Commuted Sentence for Driver Who Killed Young Man Causes Outcry
The Spanish government just commuted the 13-year sentence of a driver who left one person dead and another in critical condition. The pardon has produced an outcry across Spain.
Egypt: Why Open Source Software?
After introducing to Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) in the previous article, one might still wonder why corporates and governments need to adoption it or encourage its adoption. Tarek...
Free and Open Source Software
We received an email from Richard M. Stallman (RMS), after publishing the article about the Egyptian demonstration calling for the government to adopt Free Software. Tarek Amr digs deeper into...
Uzbekistan's Useless Latin Script
[Over the almost twenty years since Uzbekistan switched to Latin script] it has become clear that the new script in itself does not create the knowledge of foreign languages... Besides,...
Turkmenistan: Human Rights? What Human Rights?
In Turkmenistan, which ranks among the world's "worst of the worst" human rights abusers, the very existence of such rights is seen as 'fiction'. Some netizens blame Ashgabat's repressive regime...
Jamaica: Hitting the Paywall
I hear Swartz and others who maintain that information can and must be free. But to simply equate academic articles with useful information is misleading…these are issues we need to...
Hungarian Student Protesters Face Punishment, Keep Fighting
In December 2012, Hungarian university and high school students united to protest against the large cutbacks in higher education admission quotas. Their fight for tution-free slots continues.
