24 January 2013

Stories from 24 January 2013

Spain: An Airport Without Planes?

  24 January 2013

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 absurd problems.

Opposition Party Attacks Russian eDemocracy

RuNet Echo  24 January 2013

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.

Hungarian Journalist Kidnapped, Then Released in Aleppo

  24 January 2013

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 a 12-hour kidnapping ordeal in Aleppo. Yesterday morning me, a Mexican and a Basque journalist were abducted by unknown gunmen...

Argentina: Suggestions for a better life

  24 January 2013

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 my proposals, following up you'll find a list, an incomplete one, by the way”. He then presents a 45-item list...

Critical Mass: Wheels of Activism Come to Brazil's Salvador City

  24 January 2013

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.

A Destitute Women And Her Dogs

  24 January 2013

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 her meager earnings from collecting and selling reusable garbage.

Cuba: Internet Change Coming?

  24 January 2013

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! Translating Cuba explains that “this situation of disconnect could be about to change…the great World Wide Web may be closer...

Parallels Between Religious and Copyright Wars

  24 January 2013

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 information through overbearing legislation related to copyright and freedom of expression: The religious wars were never about religion as such....

France: NGOs Condemn Privatisation of Public Domain

  24 January 2013

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 large amount of Public Domain works and privatize them with an exclusivity period of commercialization of ten years. Activist Philippe...

Guyana: Literary Controversy

  24 January 2013

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 the recent launch of young Ashley Anthony’s book Mysterious Association and the Virtu Gems [sic] I declined to publicly point out the...

Egypt: Why Open Source Software?

  24 January 2013

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

Free and Open Source Software

  24 January 2013

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

Uzbekistan's Useless Latin Script

  24 January 2013

[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].

Turkmenistan: Human Rights? What Human Rights?

  24 January 2013

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.

Jamaica: Hitting the Paywall

  24 January 2013

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 have more nuanced discussions about. Active Voice blogs about the late Aaron Swartz, JSTOR and academic paywalls…