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The Argument Nadezhda Tolokonnikova Wasn’t Allowed to Make at Her Parole Hearing

Let her go!

chtodelat news

[Originally published by The Russian Reader]

tolokonnikova-udo3

Yesterday, April 26, 2013, a district court in Zubova Polyana, Mordovia, denied imprisoned Pussy Riot activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s request for parole. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Judge Lidiya Yakovleva agreed with arguments made by prison authorities that it would be “premature” to release Tolokonnikova given that she “had been cited for prison rules violations and expressed no remorse,” and had not participated in such prison activities as the “Miss Charm Prison Camp 14 beauty contest.” Judge Yakovleva made her ruling without allowing the defense to make a closing argument, thus allegedly violating the Criminal Procedure Code. Tolokonnikova had written her statement out in advance. The translation below is of the Russian original as published in full on the web site of RFE/RL’s Russian Service (Radio Svoboda). Photos courtesy of the Free Pussy Riot Facebook page.

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“Has the convict started down…

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States of Spanish: Why the U.S. has its own, recognized variety of Spanish | Latina Lista

The problem? The journalists and copywriters who create Spanish-language content for this industry can’t use Mexican or European Spanish, because neither fully matches the cultural reality of U.S. Hispanics, who are inundated daily with English words and grammatical structures.

English floats into the language used by even the most educated Hispanics in reports, articles, and manuals simply because Spanish speakers in the U.S. understand it. For example, Mexicans and Spaniards use the term ministerio for “department” but U.S. Spanish speakers say departamento. Mexicans called an “agency” an organismo but U.S. Spanish speakers call it an agencia. In short, U.S. Hispanics are culturally American, with their own sayings and cultural references.

What’s more, a full 98% of written material in Spanish in the U.S. comes though translations from English, whether from publishers or used in banks, schools, universities, governments, or companies. And even when newspapers produce copy directly in Spanish, the stories translate realities that mostly unfold in English, and television and radio writers face the same challenges: what’s correct U.S. Spanish and what’s just Spanglish? To solve that problem, the Associated Press published its own 486-page style manual in Spanish, with 4,900 entries, in Nov. 2012.

via States of Spanish: Why the U.S. has its own, recognized variety of Spanish | Latina Lista.

Open Letter To Mark Zuckerberg – You Can’t Have Power Without Responsibility

Pride's Purge

(Satire? I’m not really sure anymore)

Dear Mr Zuckerberg,

I hope you don’t mind me writing to you like this. I’m no-one very important – just one of the 1.06 billion little people who actively use your website every month.

Actually I’m one of those little people who happens to like writing satire – political satire to be precise – but I think perhaps I ought to explain to you exactly what that means because you seem to have got satirists like me mixed up with those horrible spammer people who like to spam.

So please allow me to help you out with some definitions:

SPAM
(noun) A canned meat product made mainly from ham.
(verb) To send the same electronic message indiscriminately to large numbers of recipients on the internet generally for financial gain.

SATIRE
(noun) The use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule or exaggeration to expose, denounce or deride vice, folly…

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IRIN Global | Europe’s undocumented migrants struggle to access healthcare | Global | Health & Nutrition | HIV/AIDS (PlusNews) | Human Rights

IRIN Global | Europe’s undocumented migrants struggle to access healthcare | Global | Health & Nutrition | HIV/AIDS (PlusNews) | Human RightsEurope’s financial crisis and rising xenophobia are complicating access to medical treatment for undocumented migrants, according to a new report by the international NGO Médecins du Monde (MdM). 


“Soaring unemployment rates, rising child poverty, people losing their homes because of insolvency every month… The social systems in Europe are quaking under the strain,” the authors say. “The crisis has generated austerity measures that have had a deep impact on all social safety nets, including healthcare provision.” 

“The economic crisis, rising unemployment and lower levels of social protection all too often lead to the finger being pointed at groups that were already facing social exclusion before the crisis, eg, sex workers, migrants and Roma [a marginalized ethnic community,” they added. 

Comparing Beirut To Dubai

Spin does not really change reality – people in Lebanon will have to do that themselves… As this essay shows

A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

An American writer for the Huffington Post wrote an article today titled: “Thank you, Beirut. Your Friend, Dubai” in which she basically paralleled the rise of Dubai to the gradual decline and possible near-demise (never ever?) of Beirut.

The writer’s opinion of the Lebanese capital was favorable – even favorable of the go-to Lebanese scarecrow for Americans Hezbollah, trying to explain its popularity among many Lebanese and the reason for its increasing political strength.

In typical fashion, Lebanese across the internet have been sharing the article fervently. It’s about Lebanon. It’s about Beirut. It’s by a very prominent publication. Click, click away.

However, the question I want to ask is the following: is comparing and contrasting Beirut to Dubai warranted?

I, for one, think drawing similarities between the two cities is comparing apples to oranges for the following reasons:

1) Beirut was never made out of money. When you talk…

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The Genocide They Want Removed From Our Collective Memory

My mother was born in 1905 and when she did not want to eat something offered at the family dinner from the time she was 10. she was told: “Think of the starving Armenians! Eat what is one your plate and be thankful you have something to eat.” She used the same warning with my brother and I. But many have forgotten and the people of Turkey would really like you to forget.

A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

I imagine life would have been much different for me had my last name ended with -ian. I’d have come from a very different place than the one I currently come from. I would have spoken yet another language.  I would have grown up listening to stories that morphed into darker and darker territory as I grew older: stories told by my grandparents, stories of my friend’s great grandparents, stories of entire families and homes and communities and towns and cities that exist no more today.

If I were Armenian, I’d have been an immensely proud person of those people who are the reason I am here today, the people who defied the cold, the heat, the hunger and the systematic killing at the hand of a ruthless sultan, the people whose stories would give me strength, enriching my view of the world, making it more and more certain each…

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Lebanon’s New War of the Bearded Enemies

Pray for Lebanon that the majority choose to not follow these two into what would be an even more bitter civil war that would leave the nation in tatters.

Nervana

Assir photo

Nasrallah

 

 

 

 

 

There was nothing more perplexing and confusing than watching the unfolding events of the Lebanese civil war. It was ruthless, ugly, and dirty, and it taught me as well as many Arabs the harsh reality that had been hidden under the veneer of elegance and glamour of Lebanon. Although the civil war was essentially a Christian versus Muslim conflict, the Lebanese Muslim religious identity politics of the ’70s and ’80s was different than what we are familiar with today. There were no religious slogans, no Takbeer, no black flags, and even no beards, with one exception: the Shiite group Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah, the man who introduced Lebanese political Islam to the wider Arab world.

For a long period, Nasrallah succeeded in transitioning his party from a small Shiite group to the most dominant party on the Lebanese messy political scene. He…

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