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Speedy Trains Transform China - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-huge-success-for-china.html trains china development economic
shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States.
  • The trains hurtle along at 186 miles an hour and are smooth, well-lighted, comfortable and almost invariably punctual, if not early.
  • China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • it has not been without costs — high debt, many people relocated and a deadly accident. The corruption trials this summer of two former senior rail ministry officials have cast an unfavorable light on the bidding process for the rail lines.
  • Chinese workers are now more productive. A paper for the World Bank by three consultants this year found that Chinese cities connected to the high-speed rail network, as more than 100 are already, are likely to experience broad growth in worker productivity. The productivity gains occur when companies find themselves within a couple of hours’ train ride of tens of millions of potential customers, employees and rivals.
  • New subway lines, rail lines and urban districts are part of China’s heavy dependence on investment-led growth.
  • Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young, highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and Changsha.
  • “More frequent access to my client base has allowed me to more quickly pick up on fashion changes in color and style. My orders have increased by 50 percent,”
  • China’s high-speed rail program has been married to the world’s most ambitious subway construction program, as more than half the world’s large tunneling machines chisel away underneath big Chinese cities. That has meant easy access to high-speed rail stations for huge numbers of people
  • Businesses are also customizing their products more through frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move up the ladder toward higher value-added products.
  • Another impact: air travel. Train ridership has soared partly because China has set fares on high-speed rail lines at a little less than half of comparable airfares and then refrained from raising them. On routes that are four or five years old, prices have stayed the same as blue-collar wages have more than doubled. That has resulted in many workers, as well as business executives, switching to high-speed trains.
  • Airlines have largely halted service on routes of less than 300 miles when high-speed rail links open. They have reduced service on routes of 300 to 470 miles.
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A Step, if Modest, Toward Slowing Iran's Weapons Capability - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ack-irans-nuclear-program.html iran weapons capability US
shared by grayton downing on 24 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The interim accord struck with Iran on Sunday interrupts the country’s nuclear progress for the first time in nearly a decade, but requires Iran to make only a modest down payment on the central problem.
  • The most immediate risk to the interim agreement comes from hard-liners in Washington and Tehran who, after examining the details, may try to undo it.
  • The Saudis have been equally blistering, hinting in vague asides that if the United States cannot roll back the Iranian program, it may be time for Saudi Arabia to move to Plan B — nuclear weapons of its own
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  • Such warnings are part of the expected theater of these negotiations, in which the United States must look simultaneously accommodating enough to a new Iranian leadership to keep fragile talks
  • Lengthening that period, so that the United States and its allies would have time to react, is the ultimate goal of President Obama’s negotiating team.
  • “Rollback may be a step too far for the Iranians,”
  • “because he can’t been seen at home giving up such a huge investment or abandoning national security.”
  • The North Korean example has become Exhibit No. 1 in Israel’s argument that the deal struck on Sunday gives a false sense of security. “There are two models for a deal: Libya and North Korea,” Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and intelligence, Yuval Steinitz, said in an interview during a recent trip to Washington. “We need Libya.”
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Reports: North Korea publicly executes defense chief - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...h-korea-executes-defense-chief
shared by sgardner35 on 13 May 15 - No Cached
  • North Korea has publicly executed the country's defense minister after the regime accused him of treason, according to reports from South Korea.
  • l in front of hundreds of people in Pyongyang, the South Korean Intelligence Agency was reported to have told parliament members in a closed door session
  • expressed discontent towards leader Kim Jong Un, and failed to follow Kim's orders on several occasions, according to Kim Gwang-lim
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Hyon was a longtime Kim family loyalist who spent years working under North Korea's former leader Kim Jong Il as a high-ranking military official.
  • A spokesman for South Korea's Unification Ministry said the government considered the execution to be another display of "fear politics" in North Korea.
  • Hyon was seen nodding off during a meeting organized by Kim Jong Un
  • During 2014, Hyon was promoted again to the National Defense Commission (NDC), described as a supreme organ of the state which has authority over the Ministry of People's Armed Forces and Ministry of People's Security.
  • North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been accused of ordering the executions of as many as 15 top officials so far this year. However, during a rare trip by CNN to Pyongyang last week, a top official dismissed the allegation as "malicious slander."
  • North Korea is one of the most closed and repressive countries on Earth.
  • "Kim Jong Un has shown a ruthless side that we haven't seen since his grandfather consolidated power back in the 50s and 60s -- going after rivals and potential rivals and having them executed."
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Germany Offers Lukewarm Welcome to Egypt's Leader | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...s-egyptian-president-sisi.html egypt germany politics history
shared by qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The uneasy relationship between European economic interests and foreign policy ideals was on full display Wednesday in the German capital.
  • Standing by Sisi at a joint news conference in Berlin, Merkel said that Germany and Egypt have many common interests but maintain different views on issues such as the death sentence and other human rights matters. “I think that if one wants to be partners and solve complex issues, we have to be able talk about these things,” she said.
  • Despite Merkel’s criticism and the ideological sparring, the the trip has been a big success for Sisi, whose regime “presides over the gravest human rights crisis Egypt in decades,” according to a joint statement by Amnesty International and other nongovernmental organizations. She previously stated that she would not host him in Berlin until Egypt held fair parliamentary elections. Such elections have not yet taken place.
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  • Germany’s Parliament Speaker Norbert Lammert took a stand against the visit, saying there were no grounds for a meeting with Sisi because Sisi contributes neither to domestic peace nor to the democratization of his country.
  • “After El Sisi took over power in Egypt, they became a very strong partner of Israel —which is also a very important issue for Germany — containing the situation in Gaza,” Boehnke told Al Jazeera. “I think [Germany] wants to push Egypt to its more traditional role as one the stakeholders in the Middle East and one of the partners.”
  • qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15
     
    Egypt and European relations
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Marco Rubio Struggles With Question on Iraq War - First Draft. Political News, Now. - N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gles-with-question-on-iraq-war iraq war US politics history crisis policy culture
shared by jlessner on 17 May 15 - No Cached
  • Senator Marco Rubio of Florida struggled on Sunday to give clear answers about whether it was a mistake for the United States to go to war against Iraq in 2003, becoming the latest Republican presidential candidate to trip on the wisdom of the military invasion.
  • Mr. Rubio repeatedly said “it was not a mistake” for President George W. Bush to order the invasion based on the intelligence he had at the time.
  • Mr. Rubio chose instead to criticize the questions themselves, saying that in “the real world” presidents have to make decisions based on evidence presented to them at the time.
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  • At one point Mr. Rubio, in discussing the importance of hindsight on the Iraq war, raised a recent boxing fight to make a point. “Based on what we know, a lot of things — based on what we know now, I wouldn’t have thought Manny Pacquiao was going to beat, uh, in that fight a couple weeks ago — — ” Mr. Rubio said before Mr. Wallace interrupted.
  • Mr. Rubio’s readiness for the presidency has been questioned among some Republican voters, given than he is a 43-year-old first-term senator, and moments like the boxing reference seemed discordant on a subject like the Iraq war.
  • Last week, former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida was the one in the hot seat, giving four different answers to whether he thought President Bush, his brother, made a mistake going to war in Iraq. The former governor ultimately said he would not have ordered the invasion in hindsight given that intelligence about Iraq’s chemical weapons turned out to wrong. Mr. Rubio, in his interview on Sunday, chose not to pile on Mr. Bush.
  • “I think any president, regardless of party, probably would have made a similar decision to what President Bush did at the time with the information he had available,” Mr. Walker said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” That said, Mr. Walker added that knowing now that the 2003 weapons intelligence was flawed, “we probably wouldn’t have taken that tack” in invading Iraq.
  • “You can’t be on the fence on this one: You’re either for it or against it,” Mr. Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Mr. Sanders opposed the trade authority and has drawn support from liberals for his stances to the left of Mrs. Clinton. “No fence-sitting on this one,” he added.
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Rice Offers a More Modest Strategy for Mideast - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dest-strategy-for-mideast.html mideast US politics obama strategy
shared by grayton downing on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Critics say the retooled policy will not shield the United States from the hazards of the Middle East. By holding back, they say, the United States risks being buffeted by crisis after crisis, as the president’s fraught history with Syria illustrates.
  • “You can have your agenda, but you can’t control what happens,”
  • Egypt is still the test case of whether there can be a peaceful political transition in the Arab world
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  • Some priorities were clear. The election of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran presents the West with perhaps its last good chance to curb its nuclear program.
  • lready, the government shutdown forced the president to cancel a trip to Southeast Asia — a decision that particularly irked Ms. Rice, who was planning to accompany Mr. Obama and plunge into a part of the world with which she did not have much experience.
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Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-in-a-bruising-workplace.html amazon lifestyle career workplace
shared by Javier E on 18 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
  • The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”
  • his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
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  • Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-wealthiest person on earth.
  • Others who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in their brief stints helped their careers take off. And more than a few who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s way of working.
  • Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.
  • “Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,”
  • At its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by stress test. Employees often say their co-workers are the sharpest, most committed colleagues they have ever met, taking to heart instructions in the leadership principles like “never settle” and “no task is beneath them.”
  • In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime
  • “You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders
  • mazon, though, offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority. Compensation
  • As the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. “My main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,”
  • perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (
  • According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.
  • Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.
  • But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.
  • As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects
  • Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.
  • many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster.
  • A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year, among the briefest in the Fortune 500
  • To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do:
  • Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.
  • Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.
  • many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue
  • The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat
  • Resources are sometimes hoarded. That includes promising job candidates, who are especially precious at a company with a high number of open positions. To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes “you drown someone in the deep end of the pool,” then take his or her subordinates. Ideas are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear speaking up.
  • David Loftesness, a senior developer, said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others.
  • Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.
  • Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.
  • “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.
  • A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
  • A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
  • Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years.
  • In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. A
  • “One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done. “These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”
  • Recruiters, though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is “Amholes” — pugnacious and work-obsessed.
  • By the time the dust settles in three years, Amazon will have enough space for 50,000 employees or so, more than triple what it had as recently as 2013.
  • just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace: fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum.
  • “Amazon is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians. “It will only change if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense.”
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From the Expat Blog, Decoding the Air Quality Index in Beijing - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ty-index-in-beijing-1441654380 pollution china
shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • I learned that the Air Quality Index, which is used all over the world, goes from 1 to 500, with 1 being Vermont and 500 being Hades.
  • Here’s how Deb characterized the AQI rankings, in layman’s terms:Advertisement 1 to 50: “Good,” according to the AQI. On such days in Beijing, you look at the sky with an appreciation you’ve never had before. Life is good. 51 to 100: “Moderate.” The sky still looks OK, but stepping outside makes your eyes water. Something is a little off.
  • 101 to 150: “Unhealthy for sensitive groups.” There’s a faint smell in the air. You find yourself sneezing more than usual. There’s gunk in your nose. You get ticked off easily. 151 to 200: “Unhealthy.” You step outside and find a metallic taste in your mouth. Buildings 50 feet away appear in a haze. You clear your throat a lot, as if you’ve been laughing. You’re not laughing.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 201 to 250: “Very Unhealthy.” Throat-clearing brings up a lot of phlegm. The sun looks dim through the haze, like a 30-watt bulb. This must be the way sun looks from Mars, you figure. 251 to 500: “Hazardous.” You can taste the air the moment you wake up, even though you are inside your apartment and the windows are closed. Your cat’s fur smells funny. Outside, the world seems muffled, and the tickle in your throat extends down into your lungs and rests there like a tiny gremlin. You plan a trip to Tokyo or any city outside China.
  • Above 500: Yes, it actually goes beyond the scale. In Beijing, these are called “crazy bad” days
  • In the U.S., on the worst day in the worst city—usually somewhere in California—the AQI is typically about 125.
  • Expats and increasingly Chinese often wouldn’t let their small children outside if the AQI was more than 150. Schools called off games at around 200. I wouldn’t jog above 165, and Deb thought I was crazy for running at that level. When you breathe more deeply, the tiniest particles,─the ones that can do the most damage,─can lodge more deeply in your lungs.
  • On a day when the AQI reached 746, as it did in January 2013, I couldn’t decide whether the sky over Beijing looked more like it was filled with the smoke from an encroaching forest fire or like the residue of a giant cigarette butt.
  • Some people left Beijing, which tied for 21st out of 199 Chinese cities for bad air, for Shanghai, which was tied for 121st in the bad-air rankings
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Migrants Clash With Police in Hungary, as Others Enter Croatia - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pe-refugee-migrant-crisis.html hungary clash police croatia
shared by jlessner on 17 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • In one of the worst bursts of violence that this tense refugee summer has seen, Hungarian riot police responded on Wednesday to rocks, taunts and small fires set by agitated migrants at the border crossing here with water cannons, head-cracking batons and both tear gas and pepper spray.
  • But Hungary did not change its mind — prompting a grim demonstration of what can happen when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.
  • Tension had been building through the afternoon. About 2,500 migrants had set up camp along the narrow, two-lane road leading to the small crossing here — nothing more than a cluster of battered buildings and two lines of fence, topped with razor wire.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But having gotten this far from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other desperate countries, they grasped at hopes that the Hungarians would relent — just as they did when a huge migrant encampment sprouted outside the main train station in Budapest this month.
  • “Open! Open!” the crowd chanted. Excited young men clambered on top of that first gate, which had been broken open, and began bouncing up and down on it, trying to knock it off its hinges.All of a sudden, an invisible, noxious gas began to pour into the crowd from the Hungarian side. In a panic, the people nearest the gate began to scramble backward, pushing people aside as they flailed, tears streaming from their eyes. Children grabbed for their parents. Some tossed oranges and apples they had been carrying back at the riot police, ineffectually. People ran into one another, tripped, fell.
  • The crowd collapsed into chaos and ran back into Serbia. Then, the crowd re-formed and slowly moved forward again. And again, there was a gas attack.
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App Quietly Creates a Personal Journal on Your Phone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-journal-on-your-ph-76243.html electronic data tracking lifestyle surveillance mobile
shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Imagine if you could keep a log of everything that you do on your mobile phone. The phone calls that you make (or receive), your emails and text messages, the various places that you visit, and even the music tracks that you listen to on your phone.
  • At first glance, I suspect many readers will be taken aback by how intrusive the software can be as it captures all smartphone activities in the background. It’s a valid concern. But the Internet, combined with smartphones and mobile broadband devices, is pushing us slowly in this direction. The way I see it, we can fight the change unsuccessfully or we can cautiously embrace it. You might not ever subscribe to providing a greater amount of information to the cloud, but within reason, I’m willing to bet your kids will. It’s just a matter of time before more of your personal data is more online than offline. It may take years or decades yet, but it will happen for most.
  • Want to see all of the conversations you had with a particular contact? No problem. Curious what you did and where you were on a certain day in the past? Friday has you covered. Planning a trip and want to associate all of the events to the excursion? Friday supports automatic tagging, which you could enable for a “Family Vacation 2011″ tag before leaving and disable upon your return home. The software also includes analytics to gain insights on how many calls you take or make at various times of the day. var galleryData = [{"title":"friday-events","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-events.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"friday-map","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-map.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"friday-map-filtered","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/friday-map-filtered.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"Phone Activity Log","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/phone-activity-log.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}, {"title":"What do you want to track","caption":"","thumbnail":"http:\/\/gigaom2.files.wordpress.com\/2011\/04\/what-do-you-want-to-track.jpg?w=48&h=48&crop=1"}];
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Android app is clever, not only because it captures your smartphone and app usage profile, but makes it searchable and ties together events with the context of both location and time.
  • Intelligent software such as Friday, my6Sense and others like reQall Rover can help cut through the data clutter by indexing or surfacing important information without raising our stress levels. Yes, that could mean enabling devices to capture our every move, but that’s a price I’m personally willing to pay for easier access to the data I’m looking for.
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Three American teens, recruited online, are caught trying to join the Islamic State - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html muslim terrorism recruiting internet social media islamist
shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • This year alone, officials have detained at least 15 U.S. citizens — nine of them female — who were trying to travel to Syria to join the militants. Almost all of them were Muslims in their teens or early 20s, and almost all were arrested at airports waiting to board flights.
  • Authorities are closely monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks, where recruiters from the Islamic State aggressively target youths as young as 14.
  • “This was not a spur-of-the-moment trip but rather a carefully calculated plan to abandon their family, to abandon their community, and abandon their country and join a foreign terrorist organization,” Hiller told the judge.
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  • Hamzah Khan grew up in a suburban American home with pretty shrubs out front and a basketball hoop in the back yard. He earned a Presidential Physical Fitness Award in the eighth grade and loved Naruto, the Japanese manga. He volunteered at his local mosque and represented Argentina in the National Model United Nations.
  • The process is often called “cocooning” — shielding children from as much American culture as possible by banning TV, the Internet and newspapers and sending them to Islamic schools.
  • Omer Mozaffar, a Muslim community leader who teaches theology at Loyola University Chicago and the University of Chicago, said many Muslim families appear to have sheltered their children from the culture around them.
  • When Hamzah Khan was about 8 years old, the family got rid of the TV, because by then they had a computer with Internet access, which the parents carefully monitored. The children were allowed to watch cartoons and read news online, but they were not allowed to browse the Internet by themselves. “We didn’t want to expose them to adult stuff,” Zarine Khan said. “We wanted to preserve their innocence. We wanted to channel their intelligence into their studies and to becoming good human beings.”
  • He said that since the 1991 Persian Gulf War and especially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, some Muslims have felt “under siege” in the U.S. communities where they live. “There’s a defensiveness that compels parents to pull their kids out of everything,” Mozaffar said. “A lot of parents feel overwhelmed and don’t know what to do, so they try to isolate their children.”
  • “Parents send them less for the Islamic tutelage and more for the sense of protecting them,” Mozaffar said. “They think ‘American’ equals ‘immoral,’ and there’s a common belief that if it’s more strict, it’s more pious. This is something I have to preach against all the time.”
  • The result is often that American Muslim children find themselves caught between two worlds. They are American, but they feel their parents and their religious leaders trying to steer them away from American culture.
  • That can leave them vulnerable to those who promise something better, a place where they are celebrated for their religion. And, recently, that message has often come in the form of the network of anonymous, persuasive recruiters on social media who lure youth to join the Islamic State. Quadri calls them “Sheik Google.”
  • The evening before the teens tried to fly away forever, Zarine Khan said, she and her daughter sat together putting henna dye on each other in celebration of the upcoming Eid al-Adha holiday.
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Starting Friday, U.S. Will Ease Restrictions on Travel to Cuba - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-rules-on-travel-to-cuba.html cuba travel US economics
shared by dpittenger on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • They had to justify their trips to a government agency, apply for licenses, sign up with a firm organizing “people to people” exchanges, or circumvent the law altogether by flying somewhere else first.
  • While ordinary tourism remains banned by law, new rules put in place by President Obama will make it easier for Americans to visit the island than it has been for most of the last half-century
  • The rules will usher in a new era of contact between neighbors that have been estranged for longer than most of their citizens have been alive.
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  • “Cuba has real potential for economic growth,” Mr. Lew added, “and by increasing travel, commerce, communications and private business development between the United States and Cuba, the United States can help the Cuban people determine their own future.”
  • dpittenger on 16 Jan 15
     
    Traveling to Cuba will now be slightly easier. This could help Cuba economically and it is a big step in the right direction.
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The Fading Spectacle of Black Friday - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...383240 commercial holiday class
shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Black Friday is insulated, in a way many other pseudo-holidays are not, from the Culture Wars, because what could be more implicitly agreeable to an American—or to anyone, for that matter—than the simple promise of a good deal?
  • "Black Friday highlights the contrast between rich and poor." As a spectacle, it may be celebrated by all, but it is participated in, increasingly, by a few.
  • But Black Friday is also, as pseudo-holidays go, more class-conscious than most. It is thus more divisive than most. If you can't normally afford a flat-screen/iPad/Vitamix/Elsa doll/telephone, Black Friday discounts could offer you the opportunity to purchase those items. If you can normally afford those things, though, you may well decide that the trip to the mall, with its "throngs" and its "masses" and its sweaty inconvenience, isn't worth the trouble.
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  • Black Friday stands, both temporally and culturally, in stark contrast to Thanksgiving, which is not a Hallmark holiday so much as a Williams-Sonoma one, and which involves, at its extremes, people who can afford heritage turkeys/disposable centerpieces/vessels designed solely to pour gravy congratulating themselves on how wonderfully non-commercial the whole thing is.
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NBC Cameraman Leaves Hospital After Beating Ebola - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-mukpo-hospital_n_6031970.html Liberia Ebola journalism disease NBC
shared by Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 23 Oct 14
     
    American video journalist, Ashoka Mukpo, contracted Ebola during a business trip with NBC to Liberia. Both he and another patient, Rick Sacra, have recovered completely from the disease under the care of hospital workers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Mukpo recognizes his privilege, addressing the fact that "so many Liberians die [of ebola] alone with minimal care" every day.
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Remembering 9/11: A warrior's unexpected gift to America - Global Public Square - CNN.c... - 0 views

globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/...-an-unexpected-gift-to-america gift america cnn US history crisis
shared by Emilio Ergueta on 26 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • s America looked inward in the days, weeks and months after September 11, 2001, others around the world made extraordinary gestures toward the United States.  28We were all so focused on ourselves – understandably so – that many probably missed the fact that Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami condemned the attacks, that Ireland and Israel held full national days of mourning, that the Afghan Taliban told “American children [that] Afghanistan feels your pain”.
  • You are even less likely to have heard what could be one of the most touching reactions of all.  This is the story of how a destitute Kenyan boy turned Stanford student rallied his Masai tribe to offer its most precious gift to America in its time of need.
  • According to Kimeli, his family (or lack thereof) was so destitute that his Masai tribe didn’t even consider them people – they were sub-human. Moreover, nobody that Kimeli knew from his tribe had gone to high school, let alone college or medical school.
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  • same elders who had once considered Kimeli to be sub-human had done a complete reversal.  Kimeli says his people were now were so impressed by what he had achieved that he was not only considered human again, they were invested in helping him achieve his goals.  They raised $5,000 for him
  • Kimeli enrolled at the University of Oregon in 1996.  A few years later, Kimeli heard about Stanford University (after Chelsea Clinton enrolled there) and decided after seeing the school that that was where he belonged
  • So, on a trip back home in May of 2002, he asked to meet with the elders of his tribe. 28  28First, Kimeli told them of the horrors he had witnessed in New York.  Many of Kimeli’s people had never even heard of 9/11.  They couldn’t even fathom buildings that tall and most people in the village had never seen a plane except way high up in the sky.
  • He wanted to buy a cow (something this formerly homeless boy had never been able to do) and turn right around and give that cow to America. In Kimeli’s tradition, a cow is the most precious property one can own.  And it is believed to bring great comfort to its owner.  As one elder told a reporter, a cow is a “handkerchief to wipe away tears”.
  • On June 3rd, 2002, U.S. charges d’affairs William Brencick travelled to Enoosaen to formally accept the cows.  He says it took him more than half-a-day to get there - a flight and then a long drive over treacherous terrain.  But after he heard Kimeli’s story, he wanted to go.
  • Four years later, on the 5th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, all was made right.  Then-U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger traveled to Enoosaen to cement a deal for Kimeli’s tribe to take care of “America’s” herd in perpetuity.  And, as a way of saying thanks, the Ambassador announced the establishment of a scholarship for 14 boys and girls in the village to go to local school
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Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...t-at-sea-436-days-book-extract lost at sea
shared by sarahbalick on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months
  • s they motored across the lagoon in the Marshall Islands, deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the policemen stared at the specimen laid out on the deck before them.
  • Salvador Alvarenga, a 36-year-old fisherman from El Salvador, had left the coast of Mexico in a small boat with a young crewmate 14 months earlier. Now he was being taken to Ebon Atoll, the southernmost tip of the Marshall Islands, and the closest town to where he had washed ashore. He was 6,700 miles from the place he had set out from. He had drifted for 438 days.
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  • I was so hungry that I was eating my own fingernails, swallowing all the little pieces Salvador Alvarenga Days later, Alvarenga faced the world’s press. Dressed in a baggy brown sweatshirt that disguised his reedy torso, he disembarked from a police boat slowly but unaided. Expecting a gaunt and bedridden victim,
  • a ripple of disbelief went through the crowd. Alvarenga cracked a quick smile and waved to the cameras. Several observers noted a similarity to the Tom Hanks character in the movie Cast Away. The photo of the bearded fisherman shuffling ashore went viral. Briefly, Alvarenga became a household name.
  • Later, I would sit with Alvarenga for many hours, back at his home in El Salvador, as he described in detail the brutal realities of living at sea for more than a year. Over the course of more than 40 interviews, he described his extraordinary survival at sea. This is his story.
  • Alvarenga’s boat, at 25 feet, was as long as two pick-up trucks and as wide as one. With no raised structure, no glass and no running lights, it was virtually invisible at sea. On the deck, a fibreglass crate the size of a refrigerator was full of fresh fish: tuna, mahimahi and sharks, their catch after a two-day trip. If they could bring it ashore, they would have enough money to survive for a week.
  • “Calm down, man, give me your coordinates,” Willy responded, from the beachside docks in Costa Azul. “We have no GPS, it’s not functioning.” “Lay an anchor,” Willy ordered. “We have no anchor,” Alvarenga said. He had noticed it was missing before setting off, but didn’t think he needed it on a deep-sea mission. “OK, we are coming to get you,” Willy responded. “Come now, I am really getting fucked out here,” Alvarenga shouted. These were his final words to shore.
  • Furious, he picked up a heavy club normally used to kill fish and began to bash the broken engine
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News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...EU_REL_POPE_TRUMP news associated press pope francis donald trump christianity isis immigration politics US
shared by katyshannon on 19 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Thrusting himself into the heated American presidential campaign, Pope Francis declared Thursday that Donald Trump is "not Christian" if he wants to address illegal immigration only by building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • Trump fired back ferociously, saying it was "disgraceful" for a religious leader to question a person's faith.
  • underscored the popular pope's willingness to needle U.S. politicians on hot-button issues.
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  • Francis' comments came hours after he concluded a visit to Mexico, where he prayed at the border for people who died trying to reach the U.S. While speaking to reporters on the papal plane, he was asked what he thought of Trump's campaign pledge to build a wall along the entire length of the border and expel millions of people in the U.S. illegally.
  • "A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," he said. While Francis said he would "give the benefit of the doubt" because he had not heard Trump's border plans independently, he added, "I say only that this man is not a Christian if he has said things like that."
  • Immigration is among the most contentious issues in American politics. Republicans have moved toward hardline positions that emphasize law enforcement and border security, blocking comprehensive legislation in 2013 that would have included a path to citizenship for many of the 11 million people in the U.S. illegally.
  • Trump also raised the prospect of the Islamic State extremist group attacking the Vatican, saying that if that happened, "the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened."
  • Francis, the first pope from Latin America, urged Congress during his visit to Washington last year to respond to immigrants "in a way which is always humane, just and fraternal." He irked Republicans on the same trip with his forceful call for international action to address climate change.
  • Trump, a Presbyterian and the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, responded within minutes. "For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful," he said at a campaign stop in South Carolina, which holds a key primary on Saturday. "I am proud to be a Christian, and as president I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened."
  • Hispanics, an increasingly large voting bloc in U.S. presidential elections, have flocked to Democrats in recent years. President Barack Obama won more than 70 percent in the 2012 election, leading some Republican leaders to conclude the party must increase its appeal to them.
  • However, the current GOP presidential primary has been dominated by increasingly tough rhetoric. Trump has insisted that Mexico will pay for his proposed border wall and has said some Mexicans entering the U.S. illegally are murderers and rapists.
  • While Trump's words have been among the most inflammatory, some of his rivals have staked out similar enforcement positions. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson are among those who have explicitly called for construction of a wall.
  • Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the few GOP candidates proposing a path to legal status for people already in the U.S. illegally, said Thursday he supports "walls and fencing where it's appropriate." Bush said that while he gets his guidance "as a Catholic" from the pope, he doesn't take his cues from Francis on "economic or environmental policy."
  • Marco Rubio, another Catholic seeking the GOP nomination, said that Vatican City has a right to control its borders and so does the United States. Rubio said he has "tremendous respect and admiration" for the pope, but he added, "There's no nation on Earth that's more compassionate on immigration than we are."
  • Cruz said he was steering clear of the dispute. "That's between Donald and the pope," he said. "I'm not going to get in the middle of them." Ohio Gov. John Kasich, on the other hand, said he was staunchly "pro-Pope."
  • The long-distance exchange between the pope and Trump came two days before the voting in South Carolina, a state where 78 percent of adults identify as Christian, according to the Pew Research Center's 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study. Of that group, 35 percent identify as evangelical and 10 percent as Catholic, the survey found.
  • It's unclear what impact, if any, the pope's rhetoric will have, here or in other states. An October poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that most Americans had no strong opinion on the pope's approach to immigration issues, though he was overall viewed favorably.
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India Denies Visa Request From Religious Freedom Monitoring Group - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...reedom-uscirf-visa-denied.html India visa religion freedom US
shared by maddieireland334 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • ndia has denied visas to a team from the United States government responsible for monitoring religious freedom, the group said in a statement this week.
  • The organization, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, had planned a trip to India, scheduled to begin this week, to assess religious liberty in the country.
  • Robert P. George, the group’s chairman, said that the team was “deeply disappointed” by the Indian government’s action.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In a report published last year, the commission said that religiously motivated violent episodes reportedly increased for three consecutive years in India, and that the struggle to provide justice to victims “perpetuates a climate of impunity.”
  • The group has traveled to China, Myanmar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, “among the worst offenders on religious freedom,” he said.
  • India has had a checkered history with religious violence, and the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014 raised concerns about the potential for increased religious tensions.
  • The Indian Embassy in Washington said in a statement on Friday that there had been no change in policy regarding such visits and that the Indian Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion for its citizens.
  • A delegation from the commission was denied visas to India during the previous administration in 2009, according to the local news media.
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Donald Trump: UK 'should be thanking me' for Muslim comments but Muhammad Ali condemns ... - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...petition-latest-news-live.html donald donald trump trump muslim comments ali politician
shared by redavistinnell on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump cancels Israel trip 'until I'm president' and insists UK in denial about 'massive Muslim problem'
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Donald Trump wins more support in US as petition to ban him from the UK passes half mil... - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...petition-latest-news-live.html donald donald trump trump wins support petition
shared by redavistinnell on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump wins more support in US as petition to ban him from the UK passes half million signatures
  • "There is somebody called Donald Trump running in your presidential campaign, and he again spoke this morning about the UK, saying that we were busy disguising a massive Muslim problem," he said, despite the accepted diplomatic norms that prevent ambassadors commenting on domestic politics - particularly during a campaign. “That’s not the way we see it. We are very proud of our Muslim community in the United Kingdom.”
  • Meanwhile, the number of signatures on a petition calling for Mr Trump to be banned from the UK continued to grow, passing the half million mark just after 5am GMT.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Several hundred protesters turned out at an event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Mr Trump was speaking to a police union.
  • “When I made my announcement in June I mentioned immigration and the heat was incredible,” he told a cheering crowd. “But within two weeks people started saying: ‘Wow this is a problem, he is right.'"
  • Earlier in the day he cancelled a trip to Israel, shelving what was shaping up to be an awkward visit following comments that managed to offend Muslims and Jews alike.
  • Three polls showed Republican voters broadly backing his stance on banning Muslims entering the US until security can be improved.
  • Can Donald Trump actually win?
  • The New York Times has a new poll showing that fear of a terrorist attack has risen to its highest level in the US since the aftermath of 9/11, helping explain how Donald Trump has managed to ride the polls so well.
  • Ruth Sherlock, our US editor, reports from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Donald Trump spoke to police union leaders:
  • Hillary Clinton took aim at fellow White House hopeful Donald Trump over his call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, saying the joke had worn thin.
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