International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

Today is the U.N International Day for the Elimination of violence against Women. Held annualy since 1981 in commemoration of the murder of the three Mirabel sisters in the Dominican Republic in 1960, on orders of Dictator Rafael Trujillo.


There will be a seminar/festival held by the Cairo Institute for Human Right Studies and al Takaieba artistic & Cultural Development Center from 7 P.M, it´s free of charge and the address can be found here.

I will update this post during the night, but i will give you the excellent study by al Nadeem Center for the rehabilitation of victims of violence and torture, their work and contribution is invaluable. The study is called: Once again.. Women speak out, it´s a PDF.

Threatened Voices

One of the core issues on Fustat during it´s 50 something months has been Egyptian bloggers, their rights and violations against them. During the same period, Global Voices among many others has been a true friend of the Egyptian bloggers,taking over the torch from the Committee to Protect Bloggers if i remember correctly, in trying to track and provide help in form of a platform, being one of the hubs in fighting censorship, protect the written word online, and those bloggers/online journalists whom constitutes 45 per cent of all media workers in prison worldwide.

Those of you who follow my twitter account, might have noticed that my interest for free speech online, and bloggers rights is stretched around the globe, and not only to Egypt and the Arab World, so it will really be interesting to follow the new Global Voices advocacy project that is being launched today - Threatened Voices - described on it´s website as:

A collaborative mapping project to build a database of bloggers who have been threatened, arrested or killed for speaking out online and to draw attention to the campaigns to free them.

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I´m looking forward to follow how this progress, and want to wish Sami Ben Gharbia and all at Global Voices involved in this ,as well as their network of partners the very best of luck!

This will be cross posted at Diwan of Democracy.

Egypt´s next President

Al Jazeera English inside story from 2 November on Gamal Mubarak, the NDP and the future, A discussion with Maged Reda Boutros(really not my favourite, but the best gift the NDP could give the opposition in foreign media), Ikhwan´s Essam al Erian and Hany Amr from the Brookings Institute in Doha.

I got this via @Gemyhood http://twitter.com/GEMYHOoOD , Thanks!