Blogs & Ecology

South Korea has just leased half of all the arable land in Madagascar according to the Financial Times. This has stirred quite a debate in the Malagasy blogosphere about land sovereignty and economic development. It is still unclear whether the land deal has actually been signed by both parties. Meanwhile, bloggers are arguing whether this sort of deal should be considered “neo-colonialism”.

Here is an overview of what is know so far.

Serbs are hurt because the United States supported the act of Kosovo Metohia province independence early this year. They have a moderate hope for change in American diplomacy led by the new president Barack Obama. Although former State Department officials like Richard Holbrooke may be appointed, it looks like Serbs and the world outside America can expect a new age of hospitality and cooperation as a consequence of the latest presidential election in the United States.

About 500 students gathered peacefully in front of the Executive Yuan on 11/6 to protest against the current Parade and Assembly Law (集會遊行法). The government abusive use of the law has violated people's rights in protest in the past few days during the visit of Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chair Chen Yunlin.

Dotmg announces that the free Malagasy spell checker he has been developing is now operational. The software, which is, as far as I know the first of its kind, is:”opensource, and is released under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (or above). It is part of a larger project called tsipelina, and the project is available on tsipelina.sourceforge.net. It requires PHP and a webserver, as it is written in PHP.”

Did you know that most deaf people who sign, consider sign language their first language and the written language as their second? I didn´t, but thanks to the dozens of videos uploaded by members of the deaf community from all over the world, I´ve learned about this and other issues of which I was previously unaware. International Deaf Awareness Week takes place during the last week of September, so during this week I´ll be showcasing different videos from or about the deaf communities around the world, and I hope the following selection of videos provide you with a great place to start if you wish to learn more about this condition and those who live with it.

As I had mentioned back in August, YouTube and The Pulitzer Center have launched Project: Report, a contest for aspiring journalists and now the full rules and instructions are up. The contest and awards are limited to participants who are legal residents of countries where YouTube is officially launched: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Korea, New Zealand, Spain, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales), and the fifty United States and District of Columbia.

When the poisoned milk scandal goes from bad to worse and raises international concerns, China government started to increase their control over the media in China. As the scandal involved most well established brands like Yili and Mengniu, ordinary people like Boyue feel that there is nothing else can we believe in.

Indeed, the situation is very depressing especially when the government prefers to manipulate the media than encourage public monitor to safeguard people's lives. beta disclosed the details of newsroom instruction notes:

In an article published in March, economists William Easterly and Yaw Nyarko noted that in Sub-Saharan Africa, remittances (money sent by immigrants abroad back to their home countries) on average amounted to 81 percent of the foreign aid received by an individual country.

Mexicans, fed up with the increasing violence and insecurity their country has been facing this past year, as it was mentioned on this past Global Voices article, decided to have a silent march and candle-lit anthem singing throughout the country and in some other locations like Costa Rica, USA, Spain, Israel, Poland and England during Sunday August 31st, 2008.

Citizen media videos have been uploaded informing of the situation arising in Venezuela between the Yukpa Indians of the Perijá Mountains, landowners and President Chávez. This dispute over land limits is 30 years in the making, when military forces displaced the Indigenous communities of the Yukpa by force and established landowners who have cattle ranches and have been working the lands ever since.

Mexico has seen a steep rise in kidnapping for ransom cases this year, and a group of videobloggers have decided to take a stand and make videos proposing solutions for this problem.

The popular Spanish YouTube channel Pinofas has created a novel project: it's an hero adventure quest live-action game that takes advantage of the new tagging, linking and commenting capabilities that YouTube has implemented, called Tube Adventure.

Mialy, a blogger in Antananarivo, describes the plight of young married girls in rural areas who are subject to health and social concerns stemming from early pregnancy (fr). She explains that fistula, a consequence of giving birth at an early age, results in incontinences and therefore health complications compounded with social rejections. Malagasy laws allowed girls to be married as early as 14 years-old until 2007. Health care costs and lack of education are the two other main aggravating factors.

Jayne Taylor Gaubatz, a Peace Corps volunteer blogger in the southern city of Fianaratsoa, describes the impact of a well-done family planning poster, the importance of baby weighing in tandem and attending a Malagasy gospel choir [en].