24 January 2013

Stories from 24 January 2013

Opposition Party Attacks Russian eDemocracy

RuNet Echo

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 reputation for rebelliousness, after several of its high profile members began moonlighting as leaders of the unofficial opposition. The party's leadership is now demanding an end to the rebellion.

24 January 2013

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 point on the country's congested roads. Visiting the city of Salvador in Brazil, Global Voices contributor, Thiana Biondo talked to Critical Mass local activists Roque Junior and Rosa Ribeiro. Check out the first part of the interview.

24 January 2013

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...

24 January 2013

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!...

24 January 2013

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...

24 January 2013

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 Amr elaborates in this second post of a two-part series in the argument for F/OSS

24 January 2013

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 open source software and arguments in its favour in this first post of a two-part series

24 January 2013

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, the Russian language has proven to be more in demand [than Latinized Uzbek].

24 January 2013

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 on geopolitics. Yet some others say the country has a right to restrict the rights of its citizens.

24 January 2013

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...

24 January 2013