Mali Tuareg Rebelion and Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterlings's "Islands in the Net" (1988) remains a science-fiction book worth re-reading due to its resistance to time . Published over a quarter of century ago, it remains extremely current, in its anticipation of the influence of the Internet on the global scale. Part of the action takes place in Mali and is about the guerrilla fight of the Tuaregs/Kel Tamasheq, which recently gained prominence worldwide.

Tuareg fighter and Mali soldier.

Some time ago I noticed new Mali Tuareg-related article on Global Voices, which expanded into a continuous story after the military coup which attracted the attention of mainstream media. I decided to translate into Macedonian one of the articles, but ended up translating the sequel too, and supplemented that by translating part of the Wikipedia article on these people (as I presume most people at first glance would assume that Tuareg is just a vehicle brand).

Here are links to the original articles and their Macedonian counterparts.

• Mali: Facing Secession and Food Crisis as Elections Loom [mk]
• Mali: Citizens Stunned by Sudden Military Coup [mk]
• Wikipedia: Tuareg people [mk]

Macedonia: A Blogger Reviews “In the Land of Blood and Honey”

Vnukot joined the debate about Angelina Jolie's movie by emphasizing the technical imperfections, and was especially unnerved [mk] that

“all the characters in the film speak languages related to Bosnia, the Serbo-Croatian as it was known then, or todays Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian language. However in Angie's ‘masterpiece' all of them, from a general… to the victims that have only one line before they get a bullet in the head, literally everybody, speak like Russian mobsters in some cheap American movie filmed in a cellar for USD 5,000. If this concept is remote to you, imagine a broken English interview of a Macedonian miss/mister universe/world candidate in China [1, 2, 3] - this film is worse!”

Macedonia: ‘Be a News Blogger’ Awards Announced

On Feb 29, 2012 in Skopje, Diversity Media Production, a non-profit organization which aims to advance journalism, freedom of speech and democracy in Macedonia, announced [en, mk, sq] the winners of their competition for young news bloggers:

1. Novica Nakov, 
2. Fatlume Dervishi, and 
3. the authors of MK Demokratija blog - Monika Petrovska & Maja Peroska.

I served on the jury alongside notable professional journalists and the Diversity crew. It was interesting to read the various entries, and I hope the winners will continue writing. The first place winner is a seasoned blogger and well known member of the free and open source software community, while the others are recent arrivals to the blogging scene, and also students of journalism.

2nd place winner Fatlume Dervishi receiving a certificate from Filip Stojanovski on behalf of the jury,
with Vesna Kolovska and Nazim Rashidi of Diversity media,
and jury member Zoran Stevanovski on Skype from London in the background.

Free Resource: Animated Hitler Meme

As a reaction to the corporate efforts to enact even more draconian legislation, and the attempts by distributor of the film Downfall to take down the Hitler meme on copyright grounds, Ribaro published [mk] an animated parody of the iconic scene, free for download and reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License.