Wanna let your daughter go with this one? It's King Mswati III, already having three wives, and if you are from Swaziland, you probably have to give him another one from your children, if he wants: A woman who sued Swaziland's monarchy to prevent the king from marrying her daughter postponed her lawsuit indefinitely Tuesday, saying she doubted she had any chance of winning, writes Wired.

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There's a very ambitious project trying to archive all languages of the world, called the Rosetta Project. I was very surprised to find also information on seldom languages like shipibo, although it's not much. But for a lot of indigenous languages like Sirion, Pampanagan or Tadaksahak (no, I don't know them either ;-) they even have short word lists. And it's an open source project, so they need assistance. More information about the project in an recent article at Wired.

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There are two articles at latinamericapress [.org] about indigenous peoples and current elections in Peru and Ecuador. Ecuador: "Indigenous candidates aim for Congress " - While most Ecuadorans were apathetic about the elections, the indigenous movement saw it as an effort to further establish its political legitimacy, despite internal rifts that resulted in two indigenous candidates running for president on different tickets. Peru: "Indigenous candidates" - For Peru’s indigenous people, participating in politics is both an individual and a collective right. It's also about the electoral quota for native communities.

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Munich: Tonight the "Workgroup ethnological film" -- a workgroup powered by students of our institute -- shows two movies on the topic "Aids". Both films were made on location in Mauretania by Stephanie Benyr, who collaborated with mauretanian youths to get the movies done. Miss Benyr will be present tonight, give an intro speech on her films and translate, as the films are in the languages Pular and Hassanyia. The films are shown at our institute in room Nr. 1.05 and start at 19.45h.

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Forarea, a bavaria-based, interdisciplinary community of about 200 scientists, concerned with the understanding of 'other cultures', has launched a computer game called Xenophilia [= "the liking of the other"]. The game's aim is to mediate an understanding of people who were socialized in cultures different from the 'western' one. Children and teenagers are to be reached by the game's message. Xenophilia was presented at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair and instantaneously was awarded the Giga-Maus, a german software award. Two versions of Xenophilia are available: One for everyone and one specially designed for the use in schools.

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