Andrew Heavens has unhappy news from Ethiopia in his latest update on Global Voices: all Blogspot blogs, plus a selected set of anti-Zenawi (or pro-democracy, depending on who’s talking) blogs, including the Nazret.com blogs, are blocked within Ethiopia.

An intriguing detail - one of the bloggers quoted in Heavens’s update, “Don’t Eat My Buchela”, an Ethiopian woman living in China, notes that she can’t reach these “sensitive” blogs from China either. It’s worth checking whether this report can be replicated by other Chinese users - if so, it would suggest that some fears expressed about African internet censorship enabled by Chinese technology might be more than rumors.

As with the previous block, Ethiopia Telecommunications Corporation - the sole ISP in the country - says they’ve got no idea what could possibly be going on… This denial makes it hard for international media to report on the situation in Ethiopia without lots of caveats (”individuals report that blogs are blocked”, rather than “Ethiopia is blocking blogs”) - unsurprisingly, a search for “Ethiopia blogspot” on Google News reveals no stories on the topic.