by Farangis Najibullah, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - There are at least 30 hostels in the Jamal Abdul Naser area of Dubai that house Iranian immigrants. Muhammad, a young Iranian, lives in one of those pensions in a narrow back street, paying some $14 per night.
by Amy Goodman, DemocracyNow!, USA - More than 3,500 people gathered in Minneapolis last weekend for the fourth annual National Conference for Media Reform, organized by the group Free Press. The thousands of participants took part in panel discussions and strategized on efforts to fight media consolidation and democratize the airwaves. We play the electrifying keynote address by legendary journalist Bill Moyers.
by Claire Bigg, Radio Free Europe, Russia - Kamola, a 36-year-old ethnic-Uzbek woman living in Moscow, was stepping out of a metro carriage on her way to work last month when a blow sent her tumbling to the station's marble floor. The punch came without warning, dealt by a young man wearing brass knuckles. A second assailant then picked up the woman's limp body while his friend struck her repeatedly in the face and stomach.
by Gulnoza Saidazimova, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - "Women have to be more careful, since they possess stimulants," and they "have to be covered properly so as not to show their ornaments and figures to strangers." Those are two of the controversial "dos" and "don'ts" given to Turkish women in the "Sexual Life" article that appeared last week on the website of Turkey's Directorate on Religious Affairs, the Diyanet.
by Farangis Najibullah, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - With about 15 percent of the population plugged into the Internet, Iran is home to one of the largest populations of web users in the Middle East. But Mohammad says the length of time it takes to open websites is extremely frustrating and is the biggest problem for Iranians who have Internet connections at home. In Iran, only offices and companies are allowed to have high-speed Internet connections.
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, USA - War veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan came to Capitol Hill this month to testify before Congress and give an eyewitness account about the horrors of war. Like the Winter Soldier hearings in March, when more than 200 service members gathered for four days in Silver Spring, Maryland to give their eyewitness accounts of the injustices occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan, “Winter Soldier on the Hill” was designed to drive home the human cost of the war and occupation—this time, to the very people in charge of doing something about it.
by Liz Fuller, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - Although Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili pledged during his annual address to the nation on April 23 that the May 21 parliamentary elections will be "the most fair and democratic in the history of our country," opposition parties have in recent weeks repeatedly alleged pressure on their candidates by the Georgian authorities, and attempted vote-buying by candidates representing Saakashvili's United National Movement for a Victorious Georgia.
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, USA - Interview with Muslim gay filmmaker Parvez Sharma who spent five-and-a-half years documenting the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims in twelve countries. His subjects include a gay imam in South Africa, an Egyptian who fled to France after his imprisonment and torture, and a lesbian couple in Turkey.
by Farangis Najibullah, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - In the new park, called "Mothers' Paradise," women can walk, jog, and engage in other athletic activities without having to cover their heads. Men can reportedly not see inside the park since it is surrounded by green walls and covered by bright-colored materials. Some Tehran residents welcomed the launch of the park as an opportunity for women to act freely. Many others, however, criticized it as yet another step in what they call widespread discrimination against women.
by Danila Galperovich, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - Medevedev's inauguration ceremony, throughout which he stood shoulder to shoulder with his mentor, was a powerful statement that Putin is still a force to be reckoned with. Putin has already been named prime minister by Medvedev -- he is due to be confirmed by the State Duma as soon as May 8 -- and was recently appointed leader of the ruling Unified Russia party.
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, USA - A US military judge dismissed the argument Friday that Guantanamo’s youngest detainee, Omar Khadr, was a child soldier when captured in Afghanistan and therefore in need of protection and not prosecution. US Army Colonel Peter Brownback’s ruling clears the way for Khadr’s trial, which will be the first war crimes trial in history of anyone under the age of eighteen.
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, USA - Arrested in Pakistan in December 2001, Sami al-Haj spent nearly six-and-a-half years at Guantanamo without charge or trial. He had been on a more than a year-long hunger strike to protest his imprisonment. We hear al-Haj’s first public remarks from his hospital bed in Sudan and speak to his brother, Asim al-Haj.
by Anneliese Rohrer, BBC, UK - Soon the hordes of international journalists will pack up their cameras and tape recorders and leave Austria again.
The family of Josef Fritzl, the father/grandfather who kept his own daughter in the dungeon for 24 years, will have to deal with their broken lives. The town, the region, the country and all of the authorities will have to begin intense soul-searching.
by Claire Bigg, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - Just over one year after President Vladimir Putin handed him the Chechen leadership, Ramzan Kadyrov has taken innumerable steps to tighten his grip over the war-battered republic. But the recent standoff between his forces and a rival pro-Kremlin clan underscores the volatile situation in Chechnya as it rebuilds from more than a decade of war against separatist rebels.
by Kathleen Ridolfo, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - Al-Sadr claimed that despite his efforts to encourage peace through a cease-fire he declared for his militia in September, the government has been ungrateful and is now acting as "the third side" to target the Sadrists, after the Sunnis and the Americans. Reminding the government of its attempts to defeat the militia in May and August 2004, he asked, "Do you want a third uprising?" This is the strongest statement yet from the cleric, who remains in hiding in Iran.
by Salome Asatiani, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - For Georgians and Georgia-watchers, it's a familiar scene that plays out every few years: Tbilisi unveils its latest proposal offering its breakaway region of Abkhazia a promise of political, economic, and cultural rights in exchange for reintegrating with Georgia. Abkhazia strenuously refuses. And the dialogue begins anew.
by Kathleen Moore, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - In the last few years, biofuels have been viewed as a way to meet rising energy demands, as well as climate-change goals to reduce harmful emissions. But amid skyrocketing food prices and food riots in several poor countries, those benefits increasingly are being questioned.
by Kathleen Moore, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - Skyrocketing food prices have sparked protests around the world, as well as riots in places like Egypt. The World Bank says wheat prices have doubled since 2000. Since January this year alone, rice prices have shot up 20 percent.
by Chloe Arnold, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - Five years ago, she was the talk of the Russian publishing world: a sassy young reporter unafraid of spilling the beans about what really goes on behind the walls of the Kremlin. Today, Yelena Tregubova lives in a secret location in the United Kingdom, where she fled after her writing made her many new enemies.
by Alexa Dvorson, BBC News, Germany - With their playful jostling, they seemed like teenagers in any Western backdrop, except for one thing: they swore they would kill their own sisters if any of them had sex before marriage.
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, USA - In a major address, Noam Chomsky says there has been little change in the conventional debate over a US invasion abroad: from Vietnam to Iraq, the two main political parties and political pundits differ only on the tactics of US goals, which are assumed to be legitimate.
by Farangis Najibullah, Radio Free Europe, Prague - For nearly three decades, Afghans have endured war and foreign occupation, extreme poverty, and the Taliban. Yet some suffer more than others. Not all Afghans are created equal. Fatima Nazari wants to change that.
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, USA - The 9/11 trials for the six Guantanamo prisoners charged by the Pentagon last week with conspiracy to commit war crimes might have been rigged from the start to rule out the possibility of any acquittals, this according to the latest statements to The Nation magazine from Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo’s military commissions.
by Suzanna Koster in Islamabad, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Netherlands - The PPP and PML-N have a common goal: to oust the PML-Q. The chairman of the polling bureau Gallup Pakistan, Ijaz Shafi Gilani predicts that the words ‘general pardon' and ‘dismissal' will soon be heard frequently in Pakistan.
by Sylvia Poggioli and Andrea Seabrook, NPR, USA - The move comes nine years after the United States and NATO began airstrikes against Serbian military targets in the former Yugoslavia.
by Heda Bayron, VOA, Hong Kong - The assassination attempts shocked the fledgling nation and some residents feared violence would break out again. The United Nations spokeswoman in East Timor, Alison Cooper, says the security situation has so far been stable.
by Emma Jane Kirby, BBC News, France - Lourdes is a massive Roman Catholic pilgrimage site with more hotels than any other French city, except Paris.
by Claire Bigg, Akhmed Sultanov, and Amina Umarova, RFE, Chechnya - Throughout the North Caucasus republic, currency traders wave fistfuls of banknotes to attract customers. A popular joke in Grozny holds that the surfeit of currency traders, waving their bills, explains the city's windy climate.
by Bridget Kendall, BBC News - As ties between London and Moscow grow increasingly frosty over the role a cultural organisation, BBC diplomatic correspondent looks back at the history of the British Council in Russia.
by Gulnoza Saidazimova, RFELR, Czech Republic - The 26-year-old tells her life story in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. It includes surviving a drug-addict father, two rapes, and a stint as a Tashkent stripper before meeting British Ambassador Craig Murray, who left his wife to take her back to London with him.
by Sylvia Poggioli, NPR, USA - When I first started reporting on Muslims in Europe more than a decade ago, I soon learned that women, more than men, want to be a part of European societies.
by Claire Bigg, RFELR.org, Czech Republic - North Ossetia's Voice of Beslan believes federal forces are to blame for the deadly violence that ended a three-day school siege with 330 men, women, and children dead. Prosecutors, however, have countered the group's claims with accusations of their own: extremism.
by Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR, USA - With violence down to the lowest levels since 2005, Iraqis are enjoying the holiday season out in the open. Popular marketplaces in Baghdad are jammed with shoppers.
Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han, FRA, Hong Kong - According to the propaganda department, there are 21 bans: no stories on unemployment, no stories on the upsurge of migrant workers…Radio stations are not allowed to report on workers’ strikes in foreign countries.
by Claire Bigg, RFE/RL, Belarus - A woman stands in a bustling train station in this Belarusian border town, laden with parcels. Fresh from a short jaunt to Poland, she recounts the highlights of a successful shopping run.
by Claire Marshall, BBC News, UK - In 1999, the Swedish government brought in legislation to criminalise the buying of sex, while decriminalising its sale. Has it worked?
by Linda Pressly, Crossing Continents/BBC - Trafficking around Central America is endemic and often women and children are forced into prostitution.
by Liz Fuller and Aslan Doukaev, RFE, Russia -
Since his appointment as pro-Moscow Chechen Republic head in early March, Ramzan Kadyrov has energetically promulgated a revival of Chechen popular or "folk" Islam.
by Julia Rooke, BBC/Crossing Continents - Sold into prostitution aged nine, condemned by an Iranian judge to hang at 18, Leila was saved by a group of human rights activists.
by Louise Dunne, Radio Netherlands, The Netherlands - A Dutch insurance firm plans to offer special healthcare policies for gay and lesbian clients. A spokesperson for the Agis company said the policy had been worked out in co-operation with the COC Dutch gay rights group, and will be available from the beginning of 2008.
by Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate
Reverend Billy wants you to stop shopping. "Black Friday" is the name retailers have given to the day after Thanksgiving in their attempt to make Christmas synonymous with shopping. On Black Friday, Americans are expected to flock to the malls and shopping centers, eager for discounts, armed with plastic. Business analysts fill the airwaves with predictions on how the fickle consumer will perform, how fuel prices and the subprime mortgage crisis will impact holiday shopping. Black Friday is followed by "Cyber Monday," a name coined by the retail industry to hype online shopping. Listening to the business news, one would conclude that the future not only of the U.S. economy but of humanity itself depends on mass, frenzied shopping for the holidays.
In the movie, Talen and his amazing Stop Shopping Gospel Choir cross the country in two biodiesel buses, holding public faux-gospel revivals denouncing the "Shopocalypse," our crass, corporate, credit-driven consumerist culture and its reliance on sweatshops abroad and low-wage retail jobs at home, while celebrating small-town, Main Street economies, the strength and value of fair-trade shopping, and making do with less.
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, USA - How a band of true believers seized the executive branch, started the Iraq war, and still imperils America’s future.
by Salome Asatiani, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - Mikheil Saakashvili made a controversial move in approving a violent crackdown on opposition protesters and a near-total media blackout last week. But the Georgian president still looks likely to win a second term when voters cast their ballots in early presidential elections on January 5.
by Ayesha Walker, NPR, USA - Homicides and gun assaults have spiked alarmingly in Richmond, Calif., over the last few years.
by Dheera Sujan, Radio Netherlands, Netherlands - Teak is a beautiful, and expensive wood. Burma has 80 % of the world's teak forests.
by Mona Ghuneim, VOA, New York - An Ethiopian publisher who gave birth to a son while imprisoned, a group of Iraqi women reporters who risk their lives to cover the war, a Mexican journalist who receives threats to her life, and a VOA contributor from Zimbabwe are the recipients of this year's "Courage in Journalism" awards.
by Golnaz Esfandiari, RFE, Czech Republic - Baqi’s arrest is the latest sign of an intensifying government crackdown on civil society. "Unfortunately, pressure on Iran's civil society continues,” Shirin Ebadi told Radio Farda.
by Somini Sengupta and Steve Inskeep, NPR, USA - The accord would reverse three decades of American anti-proliferation policy by allowing the U.S. to send nuclear fuel and technology to India, which has been cut off from the global atomic trade.
by Nancy-Amelia Collins, VOA, Jakarta - In Indonesia, which has the world's largest population of Muslims, the celebration centers around family, food, and home.
by Heather Maher, RFE/RL, Czech Republic - Tom Lantos, a native of Hungary who chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called Politkovskaya "a passionate fighter for freedom who loved Russia" and was fighting for a free and open society.
