Un simple blog sur la blogosphère de langue française, anglaise et espagnole/ A simple blog to reflects on the french,english and spanish speaking blogsphere./ Un blog sencillo sobre la blogosfera de idioma francés, inglés y español.
Twitter can be very useful to get the lastest updates about hot news. So, on Firefox, I also have two more tabs, one with the Twitter search page, the other woth Tweet Grid, both with swine flu as key words.
You can also follow the spread of the disease through this special Google map.
Newsy.com takes a look at Twitter which has been playing a key role in national and global protests in Moldova.
Zalmox3s:"Alex Grigorievs, US official in Moldova, risks expulsion from RM http://unimedia.md/ #pman #Beck #Hannity #glennbeck "
Moscovici: "Natalia Morari, one of the organizers of flashmob on April 6 in Chisinau, charged for instigation to violence & usurpation of power. #pman "
Frontline: "Frontline blogger Daniel Bennett digs yet deeper into the #Moldova 'Twitter revolution' in #Chisinau - http://bit.ly/55VcI - #pman " "Investigative journalist who helped organise the #Moldova 'Twitter revolution' is in hiding - http://bit.ly/dEZOr - #pman #chisinau "
Zalmox3s: "The Moldavian Communist party's website is down, no confirmation of a cyber-attack form Chisinau. #pman "
vdement: Natalia Morari, one of the organizers of Chisinau protests charged for instigation to violence & usurpation of power. #pman via @Moscovici"
ciberplai: "#pman Another murder: Ion Tabuleac (22 yr). Voronin & Co should be made responsible for crimes against humanity. " "Alexandru Olevschi, reader at Technical University (Chisinau, Moldova) was arrested at 2 p.m. He participated at post-election meetings." "Basescu said Romania will bring people responsible for crime againts people in Chisinau before International Court! "
For instance:
Moldovan History student Vadim Ungueanu does not leave his dorm room as of Friday night and not because he is afraid to, but because he is confined to his room by a police warrant. His body is full of bruises and he confesses he has been severely beaten. According to Moldovan Interior ministry official data, some 200 people were arrested in the last week alone. Opposition newspapers however reveal that the numbers amount to at least 800. (via HotNews.ro)
Hundreds of young people detained after anti-government protests in Moldova have been subjected to "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment and denied access to legal advice, a United Nations official says. (via FT.com)
RNW reports today that the recount of the votes in the recent parliamentary elections in Moldova has been scheduled for Wednesday. On Sunday, the Constitutional Court ordered the election commission to recount the votes within nine days. President Vladimir Voronin had called for the recount to safeguard stability in the country.
Meanwhile, Natalia Morari (Morar), the reporter blamed for the riots on last Thursday, is persona non grata in Russia and on a wanted list in Moldova, according to Russia Today. Moldova's authorities believe neighbouring Romania could be behind anti-government protests which followed the parliamentary election - but they have also set their sights on a local journalist as one of the ringleaders.
Robert Amsterdam on is blog explains that she was once one of Russia's most intrepid young investigative journalists, working for the news magazine The New Times. She uncovered a few blockbuster stories about connections between an Austrian bank, a money laundering scheme which may or may not have been related to the government, and the murder of central banker Anderi Kozlov.In an interview with Grigory Pasko for Amterdam's blog, Morari said that she believed she was exiled back to Moldova in relation with her investigative reporting on corruption, where she named names like Bortnikov, Sobyanin, and Surkov.
Zalmox3s posted on Twitter that the opposition coalition in Moldova is bringing serious charges to president Voronin , including involuntary manslaughter. Other charges include : torture and rape of detainees terror of Moldavian citizens illegal detention of media representatives. Finally, he also reported that President Voronin approved the hiring of his son's construction company to repair the Parlament & Presidency using money from education funding.
The protest I was writing about yesterday happened today with between 10000 to 20000 participants.
On Twitter, Spooky ET has been writing about torture, rape and murder of students while in the custody of the friendly Moldovian police:
"Hundreds of youth are beaten with bestiality in police precincts. No access is given to parents. #pman "
"Medical examiners reported that girls who resisted interrogation were raped and molested in police custody. Their age was not reported #pman "
"The lists of youth arrested do not contain the names of those that have been tortured. #pman "
"Even the Chinese are reporting about the stalinist human rights abuses in Moldova. Will Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea follow? #pman "
"Hole on Valeriu Boboc's frontal lobe, blunt-force-trauma, and it is probably what's killed him Commie Police=Rapist=Pedophile=Murderer #pman "
So far, only the latter was confirmed by the Press.
(AFP)Authorities confirmed the death of Valeriu Boboc, 23 and a father of one, during riots earlier in the week, although the cause was not immediately clear.
His parents told opposition websites they had picked up his body from a morgue covered in bruises after he was beaten in custody.
At around 1.00 AM local time on Thurday or Friday, two young protesters have filmed on camera (phone?) how police was arresting somebody using force and beating him. That happened while intense automatic gunfire was heard few hundred meters away, on the other site of the square.
The people filming are saying: look, are they (the police) beating him up? .. in blood … Maybe they have killed him. Let's get out of here, …we are the only witnesses.
Some call it, the Twitter or Web 2.0 based Revolution ; others, like the President blame Romania for a hypothetical underground involvement. In the following report from AP, the author writes about the generation gap as the main cause for the protests:
"With one-quarter of the population working abroad to eke out a living, impoverished Moldova has become a country of the young and the very old.
It's a generation gap that has split the country politically — and violently.
The elderly, who look to Moscow for leadership and are nostalgic for the Soviet past, recently voted to return Communists to power. The young, rallied by text messages and Twitter and eager to join Europe, seized and trashed parliament and the country's presidential offices in response."
The public television is protected by people handling Kalashnikov weapons and probably also snipers (according to eye witnesses) Here is the VIDEO.
V. Voronin, the leader of the Party of Communist agreed to the demand of re-counting the votes and made an official request at the Constitutional Court on this matter.
"The recounting of votes, will be an important reason to reinstall political stability, peace and mutual confidence in Moldova", Voronin said.
Despite the call of the opposition for a higher, intensified, anticommunist protest on friday, only about eight hundred protesters marched in the center of Kishinev.
For many observers, the low participation was caused by fear of being arrested and kidnapped on the streets by the police.
Alicia Radu, director of the Moldova's weekly newspaper, Ziarul de Garda, told CNN Friday that attacks from authorities against journalists are the worst she has seen in her 20 years of experience as a journalist.Many romanian reporters were detained, the last one was a Antena3 reporter (a few minutes ago); also a swedish reporter was interrogated by the Moldovan police.
The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) also published a 'Moldovan NGO statement': A Sustainable Solution to Political Crisis in Moldova Due to security concerns, the organisations behind it are not named.
According to Nicu Popescu, several cyber attacks were carried out against Moldovan news sites. He also reports about FT and BBC journalists that were not allowed to enter the country.
Next, two videos which are showing, according to those who recorded them, how Moldovan police is used to instigate violence and chaos among the protesters.
Reuter's analyst,Conor Humphries, wrote today that Russia's sharp reaction to the violent anti-government protests in Moldova's capital this week betrayed deep-rooted fears that the global economic crisis might spark mass protests on its own streets.
Crowds of Moldovan students denouncing alleged election fraud by the ruling Communists smashed their way into the parliament and set it ablaze last Tuesday. The authorities responded with a crackdown and mass arrests.
For Moscow's ruling class, the protests revived bad memories of street rallies in ex-Soviet republics Ukraine and Georgia that toppled pro-Moscow regimes, and raised fears that young Russian crowds might one day slip out of the Kremlin's control.
Check the following video from Youtube. It is in Romanian but there is a written English translation.
Other cops would be used as riot instigators.
According to a report translated from a Russian press release on Wired's blog, a Moldovan activist would face criminal charges for organizing demonstrations that were enabled by social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, .
In an interview with Russian news agency ITAR-TASS, Moldovan Prosecutor General Valeriu Gurbulea said Natalia Morar, one of the organizers of an anti-Communist flash mob, has been officially charged with "calls for organizing and staging mass disturbances." (Morar has not been put in jail, however -- despite some reports to the contrary.)
On her LiveJournal blog, Morar distanced herself from the riots. In an interview with The New York Times, Morar said she expected to face charges; she added that organizers had received threatening phone calls.
Morar's LiveJournal page went much of the day without updates; reports circulated that she had been locked up, following the charges filed against her. At 7:13 p.m., she posted this update: "Reports of my detention are not true. I'm O.K."
Chipnt also reports on Twitter about communist civilians attacking the protesters and gives a list of communist supporters misinforming through Twitter as well:
"List of detected communists trying to mislead you: @nordastelo @CStere @mixman2009 @mediamtv @olgaroberts #pman Report and ignore them! "
Today, according to Chipnt , Communists would have blocked students in their classrooms warning them that they would be expelled from the university if they were to protest.
According to a Twit from Andreisava, there would be a new peaceful protest tomorrow at 10 AM:
"Friday 10 April at 10 AM , Flower Revolution in Chisinau Moldova #pman No violence! Everyone will have flowers! Yes we can! Change has come! "
Some Twitters report that Chisinau would be surronded by government troops.
The President of the Republic of Moldova, Vladimir Voronin, has accused once again the opposition of attempting a civil war and said in an interview with Ria Novosti that authorities intentionally let demonstrators to ransack the Parliament headquarters, so that everybody see what they can do when holding the power of the state. In the interview, he offers his version on events in Chisinau.
He said that the Moldovan people "for the first time saw the opposition openly betray its own people and its own country" by attempting a civil war. "The whole country saw that there is no opposition whatsoever in Moldova - neither anti-Communist, nor anti-Voronin. There is only opposition to the state", Voronin said, quoted by Ria Novosti.
Moldovan students are intensively using Twitter to mobilize the opposition against the communist victory in the last elections.
According to reports, nearly 10,000 students gathered in front of the Moldovan parliament in Chisinau, the capital. Only the police were able to prevent them from entering the building. In reading the many Tweets, it appears that the event was quite violent and is gradually turning into an attempted coup d'etat.
Activists are also using the Cloudapp aggregation service to bring onto a single web page Twitter-streams, blog posts, video, and pictures from the protests.
On the other hand, mobile communications were blocked by the authorities. So, Twitter has become the best mean to communicate via GPRS. Twitter is an essential tool for broadcasting information in real time. But in that case, it has also been an interesting tool for coordinating group of people in quite extreme situations.
