Blogs & Ecology

Mahefa Rakotomalala writes at L'express de Madagascar that the alleged land deal with South Korean company Daewoo has been officially rejected by the Malagasy government. The minister of land reform explained in a press release to local newspapers that anyone can request to lease an unlimited amount of land but it has to be approved by the state cabinet (fr).

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.”

As the economic crisis continue to worsen, both US presidential candidates, European leaders and heads of international organizations predict that international aid will have to be reduced.

This last segment of the Deaf Awareness Week (part 1, part 2) shows us how the deaf use their videos to organize their communities and strenghten their offline ties.

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:

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.

One of the most active zones at the Global Village in the AIDS conference was certainly the Youth Action Zone, where youth from many different parts of the world got together to talk about their experiences, their hopes, their dreams and how change should come about taking their participation seriously. Their YouTube Channel has a series of videos from the AIDS conference, interviews and commentary about their role in taking control of the AIDS epidemic.

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.

Pedro Dória [pt] reports that a contestant in the local elections for Porto Alegre, Brazil, was forced to close down her Orkut account and suspend her videos on YouTube. “They are being censored: they can't express themselves using all the resources allowed by the Internet allows. They can not use the Web to communicate in complete freedom with their supporters”. Read more about elections regulations in Brazil.