Blogs & Ecology

Egyptian blogger Asmaa Yasser - Dawn -  writes here about her experience at the Mubarak Public Library:

A whole month of posts and photos featuring street children in Ukraine - at Scenes From the Sidewalk.

Al Azhar English Training Center is funded through a partnership agreement between Al Azhar University, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Global Opportunities Fund and the British Council. The Center was supposed to provide English Language courses in its first semester to 125 students from various disciplines until Ali Laban, a Muslim Brotherhood deputy, decided otherwise.

Fatma Sabit - a graduate of Al Azhar university and an instructor there - wrote on Facebook:

“Egyptian police announced last Wednesday that they had arrested 550 boys in Cairo on suspicion of sexually harassing schoolgirls. The police reportedly focused their raids on Internet cafes near schools,” writes Elijah Zarwan, from Egypt.

Angola was recently shaken by terrible news of abandoned, ill-treated, tortured and killed children accused of witchcraft. One of the recent cases was in the municipality of Sambizanga in Luanda. According to local newspapers, the National Police rescued dozens of children who were locked inside a room where a bonfire was lit burning jindungo (a type of chilli). One of them faces the danger of losing an arm due to gangrene caused by blade cuts. The abusers believe that through this method the evil living in the children's bodies can be released.

There are several sites that provide a list of blogs in Myanmar. Myanmar Blog Directory contains an alphabetical listing of blogs. Sharbar offers a list of blogs according to category.

Myanmar Space is a new social networking site for Myanmar speaking people all over the world. There is a chat room, photo and video upload, forum, polls. There is also a blog section where members can post articles.

Using the excuse of financial instability, new graduates in Japan, after being hired initially, are finding that unofficial promises of employment are then being revoked, a trend that blogger Akinori Nakamura [中村昭典] uses as a starting point for making observations on recent changes in the Japanese employment system. Nakamura-san compares today's employment situation with the system after the collapse of the bubble economy [en] about two decades ago, and makes some remarks about the new categories of irregular and temporary workers that are emerging in Japan.

Jamaican Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt has been chosen as the International Athletic Foundation's ‘Athlete of the Year'; regional bloggers congratulate him.

The Syrian blogosphere has been embroiled in a heated debate over the weekend. It is a debate that is quite reflective of some of our modern disagreements as Syrians, over a wide range of basic issues: identity, religion, state and personal freedom.

The casus belli came in the form of a post, by Syrian blogger Ahmad Edilbi, that called for professional hackers to destroy Syrian blogs he deems are “immoral” [Ar]:

Voice of Egypt is ashamed of Egyptian Lawyer Nagla Al Imam, the same lawyer who made Egyptians angry, for encouraging Arab men to sexually harass Israeli women during her interview on Al Arabia TV (Ar).

The Egyptian blog says:

Five bloggers from different countries have joined Indonesia's Pesta Blogger 2008, a blogging trip and festival.

A short video pays tribute to a young activist and nursing graduate who was killed while attending to the heath needs of a rural town in the Philippines.

Tunisian blogger, Sami Ben Gharbia, published a video explaining the role of the Egyptian blogsphere in exposing human rights abuses and the role of the social-networking website Facebook and the micro-blogging platform.

Here's the video:

And here's what Ben Gharbia, who is Global Voices Advocacy editor, wrote:

Yuko Shimonakamura at Yuko no Jinsei to Tigers [勇皇の人生とタイガース] comments with enthusiasm [jp] on the birth of a new baseball heroine, Eri Yoshida, the 16 y.o. high school student who will likely debut as a pitcher in the Kansai Independent League (関西独立リーグ) starting next spring and will play together with her male colleagues. Like many other bloggers [jp], Shimonakamura-san is forward to admiring the feats of the “new Yuki Mizuhara”, whose specialties include the “knuckleball” and the “underhand pitch”.