Freedom

Blogging in Beirut

- Vanessa King 1 Comment

People on blog sites such as livejournal are telling their personal stories about living with war and many are even engaging in civil and informative conversations with people on opposite sides of the conflict. In a recent article in Wired News there is a story of a young woman living in the center of Beirut whos has been doing just that.

“We have opportunities of directly talking to the person on the other side and figuring out what they want,” she said. “I get a lot of questions like: ‘Why didn’t your government kick out Hezbollah? Why didn’t your army stop them?’ Now people get a chance to find out.”

Through discussions and journal entries bloggers are reaching a new level of communication that would have been impossible throughout history during armed conflicts. It is allowing citizens to converse and relate to one another. This is an awesome story of people working to reach each other and tell personal accounts of what life is like when living in the heart of a war zone.
“A five-minute walk and I’ll be right in the middle of it,” she said. “I can hear everything very loudly — the building shakes. I can see the smoke, and so I know where they’re hitting exactly.”

India Continues to Blog

- Adam Clare

The Indian Government recently tried to stiffle free speech of many of its citizens by blocking their access to certain blogs and blogging sites. This was in reaction to the recent terror attack in Mumbai, the blogosphere and many people around the world felt that India reacted too strongly.

India has announced that they wanted to selectively censor some pages and that “Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs.”

Well, today, the Indian Government has said that itwon’t ban bloggers. Free speech online can continue in India!

Google Does Good

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Some recent news about that massive search engine Google. The company has announced that it has joined a US lobbying group, the ODF Alliance, that supports the Open Document file format. Open Document is a Free (as in free speech) document format, an alternative to the standard Microsoftâ„¢ .doc format. It is nice because it allows for a more accessible document than propriety software formats.

Having Google throw it’s weight behind supporting ODF will hopefully have a positive impact on the adoption of the open file format. ODF is also supported by Sun Microsystems, IBM and Novell, among others.

Google has also decided that they want to try to save the world with their vast wealth through their charitable organization Google.org. Wired has a nice interview with the man who is in charge of this billion dollar initiative from Google.

Google makes Adsense, which we use here at ThingsAreGood.

1000’s of Ethiopians Emmigrate to Israel

- Benny Powers

Israel Coat of Arms
In 1984 and again in 1991, the IDF air-lifted thousands of Ethiopian jews to Israel under the Law of Return. Called Falashas (strangers) by their neighbors but more properly known as Beta Israel, the immigrants were secretly flown out of famine and rebellion to the Holy Land.

Today in Ethiopia, there is a group of people called the Falash Mora. They are the christian descendants of ethiopian jews who converted out of fear of persecution. They are returning to Isreal now in a much slower process than their relatives the Beta Israel, the Canadian Jewish News reports. The Falash Mora are able to return because of family reunification laws in Israel.

These people will be leaving their dirt-floored huts and their $1US/day jobs for life in the only true liberal democracy in the middle east. It will be a difficult adjustment, but the Israeli ministry of Immigrant Absorption is on the job.

Many of the Falash Mora have converted back to Judaism. They are seen to practise the faith with a strong piety not seen amongst many jews. The chief Rabbi in Israel has declared them as jews, because they originally converted out of fear and persecution.

As with almost everything that occurs in the middle east, the immigrations are controversial. They are certainly taxing on Israel, and as the process drags on, it becomes less and less clear who are really jews and who have taken up the mantle in order to gain entry to Israel.

Kuwaiti Election: Mixed Results

- Adam Clare

Kuwait just had its first election that women could run and vote in, which is more than a little late. Better late than never I guess. Not only did women get the vote (and were 57% of the electorate), the people of Kuwait has send a clear message to their government by electing reformists. There has been some corruption in the government and the reformists want to change that.

“By electing reformist candidates, the voters have sent a clear message to the government that they want change in Kuwaiti society, our correspondent says.”

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