Monika’s Pensieve

The world depends on China in a multitude of ways (which I, personally, find a bit unsettling), but this angle is not often mentioned and it’s rather major.
If you own any sort of electronic device, the substances in it were probably mined in China. This is especially true for Japanese brands, apparently, as 100% of [...]

News stories about North Korea are very rare, but there’s one which has been making the rounds for about a month now. Ever since Kim Jong-il’s stroke in 2008 (or at least it is thought he had one, but we are unlikely to ever get official confirmation on that), speculation about who his successor would [...]

Apparently, it was copyright’s 300th birthday 10 days ago! I thought this was a pretty cool article about the history of copyright and how different its original intentions were.
Also, there’s been an interesting development in the fight against piracy recently. The US government has admitted that most piracy studies are complete nonsense. More about this [...]

This is a totally ancient draft…
Siddiq Barmak, without exaggerating too much, basically is Afghan cinema nowadays. Almost any Afghan film project intended for cinema is somehow associated with him. In the interview he talks about his award-winning film Osama (which I reviewed in April), but he also says a lot of stuff about the Taliban. [...]

The Day After Peace is a film that had a huge impact on me. Ever since I watched it (which was in October last year), I promised myself that I would somehow support the efforts of Peace Day.
The 21st of September is a very special day because it aims to be a day of global [...]

Algeria is still a country I’d like to understand a whole lot better, but this is a very good (albeit long) video report to start with - it really explains a lot.

Sometimes, when I read about the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, I cannot help but think it is some weird Monty Python kind of reality, even if what I’m reading is very gruesome. Some of the rules and customs are just that absurd.
This is the first time I’ve had that feeling when watching a video, even [...]

20 years ago, 20 million Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians joined hands to form an almost unbroken 650 kilometre long human chain. This was meant as a symbolic protest against their occupation by Soviet Russia.

Two Muslim women murdered. One killed when protesting against the regime in Iran, the other stabbed in a German courtroom for being Muslim. Which one receives a lot of coverage and which one receives hardly any at all?

This report made me think how odd it is that I know about women having to have their hair covered and all that in certain Muslim communities and yet I never realized the same was true for some Jewish communities…