Female war correspondents during World War II
(Left to right): Ruth Cowan, Associated Press Sonia Tomara, New York Herald Tribune Rosette Hargrove, Newspaper Enterprise Association Betty Knox, London Evening Standard Iris Carpenter, Boston Globe Erika Mann, Liberty magazine.
Sonia Tomara - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Tomara
The Butcher Builders : How Western Journalists Helped Create a Monster in Russia
▻https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/02/the-butcher-builders-how-western-journalists-helpe.html
Nonobstant le terme de « monstre » pour désigner Poutine,
While all of this was going on, western journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, and other publications, were enamoured with the narrative of capitalism overcoming Communism. The economic reformers—Yeltsin and his administration—were “good,” as Financial Times reporter John Lloyd put it in a retrospective blog post, and their efforts generally successful. This lasted right up until Russia’s ‘98 economic collapse, when their reporting would undergo a major shift in tone.
#MSM #Etats-Unis #Eltsine #Russie
Hurricane Harvey devastates southeast Texas - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2017/08/28/hurricane-harvey-devastates-southeast-texas/ZWm7Ln0xffqQqpglzffYxL/story.html
Trump threatens Europe’s stability, a top leader warns - The Boston Globe
▻https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2017/01/31/trump-threatens-europe-stability-top-leader-warns/DMe7CwSVWjedUaFlBQswhJ/story.html
“For the first time in our history, in an increasingly multipolar external world, so many are becoming openly anti-European, or Eurosceptic at best,” Tusk wrote. The letter was released ahead of an EU summit meeting in Malta on Friday; Tusk is responsible for setting the agenda for the meetings.
“Particularly the change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation; with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy,” he wrote.
The EU has been struggling to contend with fractious internal forces. Among them: the vote by Britain to leave the bloc, the organization’s failure to establish a unified response to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, and the debt crisis that has driven many Greeks into poverty. And then there are external pressures like Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Before the election and since taking office, Trump has lauded the vote by Britain, known as Brexit, and said the country would thrive outside the EU. He met with Nigel Farage, a populist leader of the Brexit campaign, before seeing Prime Minister Theresa May. And at one point he went so far as to suggest that May appoint Farage as Britain’s ambassador to the United States.
Trump has also praised President Vladimir Putin of Russia and indicated he would pursue friendlier relations with Moscow, even as Russia encourages chaos on the EU’s eastern border.
Tusk’s letter does not reflect a new policy for the EU, and member states of the 28-nation bloc are not required to act on Tusk’s advice when they meet on Friday. But many European leaders have made their differences with Trump known.
After the United States said it was temporarily blocking refugees from entering the country, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany felt compelled to point out to Trump the obligations of nations under the Geneva Conventions to protect refugees of war on humanitarian grounds. And President François Hollande of France said he had reminded Trump that “the ongoing fight to defend our democracy will be effective only if we sign up to respect to the founding principles and, in particular, the welcoming of refugees.”
May, of Britain, sought in a meeting with Trump last week to confirm his commitment to NATO; he was dismissive of the alliance, the bedrock of European security, during his campaign.
Now, the sentiments expressed in Tusk’s letter are pushing European leaders’ exasperation with the US president further into the public view.
Tusk has sounded the alarm about the existential crises facing the bloc before, but never with the urgency he displayed in the letter. And he has never before included a longstanding ally like the United States in the list of challenges.
“An increasingly, let us call it, assertive China, especially on the seas,” he wrote, “Russia’s aggressive policy toward Ukraine and its neighbors, wars, terror, and anarchy in the Middle East and in Africa, with radical Islam playing a major role, as well as worrying declarations by the new American administration all make our future highly unpredictable.”
Much of the frustration Tusk displayed in his letter stemmed from what Guntram B. Wolff, director of Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels, said was Trump’s “de facto supporting” of populist forces that could further upend the European order.
Far-right populist challengers in France, Germany, and the Netherlands have adopted some of his antiestablishment rhetoric in their own campaigns.
Still, Wolff said it was unwise to enter into a war of words with the Trump administration.
“We need to uphold our values here, but does it mean that we need now a declaration where we put the United States on the same level as ISIS?” he said, using an alternative name for the Islamic State group. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it that would be helpful in any way.”
The trans-Atlantic volley of opprobrium Friday included an accusation by Peter Navarro, the director of Trump’s new National Trade Council, that Germany was manipulating its currency to gain a trade advantage. Navarro told The Financial Times that Germany was using a “grossly undervalued” euro to “exploit” the United States and its partners in Europe.
That did not sit well with Merkel, who defended the European Central Bank’s independent role at a news conference on Friday: “Because of that we will not influence the behavior of the ECB. And as a result, I cannot and do not want to change the situation as it is.”
The value of the euro is near a 13-year low compared with the dollar, allowing German carmakers and other manufacturers to sell their goods more cheaply in the United States. But German firms also employ around 670,000 people in the United States, including many in a BMW factory in Spartanburg, S.C., the carmaker’s largest in the world, and a Mercedes factory in Tuscaloosa, Ala. These are the sort of manufacturing jobs that Trump says he wants to keep in the United States.
Jan Techau, director of the Richard C. Holbrooke Forum in Berlin, a research center dedicated to diplomacy, said Tusk’s letter was less a warning to the US president than it was a message to Europeans not to be lured away from union, or to be tempted away from the bloc by favorable bilateral ties offered by the Trump administration.
“He is encouraging everyone to fall into that trap,” Techau said of the US president.
Tusk, by contrast, is making the case for Europeans to stick together for their own survival.
“_He wants to remind them that there is something bigger at stake than just what they are going to be talking about in Malta,” Techau said.
On appréciera particulièrement la remontrance du président français qui s’y connait quant au traitement des réfugiés …
And President François Hollande of France said he had reminded Trump that “the ongoing fight to defend our democracy will be effective only if we sign up to respect to the founding principles and, in particular, the welcoming of refugees.”
The NYT’s $150 million-a-year paywall (août 2013)
▻http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_nyts_150_million-a-year_pa.php
But for now, the pile of paywall money is still growing and for the first time, the Times Company has broken out how big it is: More than $150 million a year, including the Boston Globe, which after finally tweaking its faulty paywall strategy is reaping the benefits. Digital subs there hit 39,000, up 22 percent from the first quarter and 70 percent from a year ago (but overall revenue is still collapsing, down 7 percent).
All in all, the Times Company is taking in roughly $202 a year in revenue per subscriber.
To put that $150 million in new revenue in perspective, consider that the Times Company as a whole will take in roughly $210 million in digital ads this year. And that $150 million doesn’t capture the paywall’s positive impact on print circulation revenue. Altogether, the company has roughly $360 million in digital revenue.
Avril 2015: Times Co. Reports a Loss, Tempered by Digital Growth
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/business/media/new-york-times-company-q1-earnings.html
In its quarterly earnings, the Times Company said it added 47,000 new digital subscribers, for a total of about 957,000, a 20 percent increase from the first quarter of 2014. It was the strongest quarter for these subscriptions since the fourth quarter of 2012. Digital subscriptions were responsible for $46 million in revenue in the quarter, up 14 percent from the same quarter last year.
Novembre 2013: The NYT’s paywall overtakes digital ads
▻http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_stand-alone_new_york_times.php
Even bigger, the Times’s paywall revenue has soared past its digital ad revenue. Digital subscriptions brought in $37.7 million in the third quarter, while digital ads brought just $32.9 million. When you consider the print-boosting effects of the paywall, which I’d estimate very (very) roughly at several million dollars a quarter, the paywall looks even better.
Mars 2011, introduction du #Paywall du NY Times :
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/l18times.html
This week marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform. The change will primarily affect those who are heavy consumers of the content on our Web site and on mobile applications.
Mars 2012: The WaPo Ombudsman’s Faulty Paywall Analysis
▻http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/ombudding_the_ombudsman.php?page=all
But for 95 percent or more of visitors to nytimes.com, the site is free. The NYT let casual readers read twenty stories a month for free last year before asking them to pay (it has since lowered that to ten a month). That means its stories continue to get blogged and tweeted and emailed and it sells ads to the casual readers who wouldn’t pay $16 a month for a subscription. Even if you’ve already hit the limit for the month, you can still read NYT stories linked by blogs and the like.
Because of this strategy, the Times has preserved and added all that circulation revenue done while growing digital advertising revenue at a double-digit clip (in the News Media Group, which is dominated by the NYT and the much smaller but also paywalled Boston Globe).
Radioactive #Fukushima - The Big Picture - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2015/03/31/radioactive-fukushima/tt50tcUhg1DPhd5C9rb4kN/story.html
Many residents of Okuma, a village near the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant, are angry about government plans to dump some 30 million tons of radioactive debris raked up after the March 2011 nuclear disaster in a sprawling waste complex on their doorstep. Few believe Tokyo’s assurances that the site will be cleaned up and shut down after 30 years. In the four years since the disaster, Japan has allocated over $15 billion to lower radiation levels around the plant. Every day, teams of workers blast roads with water, scrub down houses, cut branches and scrape contaminated soil off farmland. That radiated trash now sits in plastic sacks across the region, piling up in abandoned rice paddies, parking lots and even residents’ backyards.—By Reuters
Children of war - The Big Picture - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2015/03/13/children-war/7FrhDO4GhmMrBrHqlzPCmO/story.html
The United Nations children’s agency reported this week that 14 million children in Syria and Iraq are in crisis due to war. The number of children needing aid has greatly increased from the previous year and there are fears that living with the severe violence will permanently scar the young generation. Here is a look at recent photos depicting the lives of children during this conflict.—By Leanne Burden Seidel
Slate’s podcast audience has tripled in a year, and its bet on audio over video continues to pay off » Nieman Journalism Lab
►http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/slates-podcast-audience-has-tripled-in-a-year-and-its-bet-on-audio-over-v
Slate’s podcast audience has tripled in a year, and its bet on audio over video continues to pay off
With 6 million downloads a month and a growing set of live events, Slate is showing one potential path for publishers in the post-Serial world: using conversation to build connection.
Slate made a very early bet, long before the mainstream adoption of podcasting was a forgone conclusion, by investing heavily in the audio format, positioning itself to ride the wave as millions of new consumers purchased smartphones and eventually realized that they could download audio files for on-demand listening.
It made that bet while many of its news media competitors shifted much of their focus to online video.
its podcast offerings are much more substantial, having developed fervent, almost fanatical followings from listeners, many of whom are willing to line up around the block just to attend a live recording. So why did Slate see so much success while other news outlets, like The New York Times and Boston Globe, scaled back their audio offerings in favor of video?
“John and his colleagues in Washington had hilarious conversations that sounded like how I was used to hearing reporters talk at the bar or after they appeared on the Sunday talk shows,” he said. “And I thought, ‘If I just put microphones in the conference room, this would be really entertaining. People would hear the honest conversation that reporters have.’” That insight eventually became the Political Gabfest, an hour-long show — hosted by Dickerson, former editor David Plotz, and Emily Bazelon — that’s among Slate’s most popular podcasts.
“We decided to do a live show thinking there would be a lot of people in town for the inauguration. So we booked a venue and we literally had no idea if 10 people or 100 people would show up. It ended up having a line around the block.”
This fervent fandom is why Slate and other podcast networks are able to charge such high advertising rates, much higher than what you could typically demand for online display advertising. Because the ads are often read out by the hosts themselves, often in a creative way, listeners don’t feel the urge to skip ahead. “During one of our earliest live shows that had been sponsored by Audible.com, David Plotz was doing the Audible ad in front of the audience,” said Bowers. “He said, ‘Political Gabfest is sponsored by…well, you know who it’s sponsored by,’ and the whole audience yelled ‘Audible.com!’ When that happened I was like, OK, that’s pretty effective advertising.”
Any consistent listener of podcasts has likely noticed that most podcast sponsors are direct-response advertisers — it’s easy to track the ROI of their sponsorships because listeners are encouraged to plug in a special promo code to receive discounts. The challenge Slate has now is to lure brand advertisers — the kind trying to raise brand awareness rather than direct sales. According to Bowers, Slate is in a unique position to attract these companies because, unlike other podcast networks, Slate’s is affiliated with an established media entity. “Because we’re connected to a larger website, for many years we have had advertisers who were on the Slate site and on the podcasts.” For instance, Acura sponsored a recent live tour of Gabfest, in some cases offering test drives to audience members. Another podcast hosted by Plotz was sponsored by Delta.
▻http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/podcasts/2005/07/slates_podcasting_guide.html
▻http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts.html
The terrorist bureaucracy: Inside the files of the Islamic State in Iraq - Ideas - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/12/14/the-terrorist-bureaucracy-inside-files-islamic-state-iraq/QtRMOARRYows0D18faA2FP/story.html?event=event25
By Jacob N. Shapiro and Danielle F. JungGlobe correspondents December 14, 2014
Since its seemingly recent arrival on the world stage, the Islamic State, or IS, has set itself apart even from other radical groups in the Middle East. In short order, it has become perhaps the most pressing security concern in the region, a powerful and unpredictable new kind of jihadi threat with a reputation for exceptional public brutality, slick propaganda, and military success.
But observers have also noted something else: a surprising level of structure. The group takes a bureaucratic, systematized approach to maintaining power that makes it look in some ways more like a settled government than a fly-by-night band of extremists. Whether under the flag of the Islamic State, or ISIS before that, the group organizes the territory it administers into well-defined geographic units, levies taxes in areas it controls, and manages large numbers of fighters across a sparsely populated territory roughly the size of the United Kingdom
When island nations drown, who owns their seas? - Ideas - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/when-island-nations-drown-who-owns-their-seas/hyH9W5b1mCAyTVgwlFh7qO/story.html
Kiribati, like other island nations, controls hundreds of thousands of square miles of the ocean that surrounds it. Kiribati’s land area is about that of Kansas City, while the ocean territory it controls is larger than India. Within these “exclusive economic zones,” to use the UN term, island nations possess the power to regulate, tax, or disallow any economic activity, including mining or drilling for oil. The tuna fishing alone in the domain of Pacific island nations is worth an estimated $4 billion a year.
“An equitable and fair solution,” (...) “would be the recognition in international law of a new category of State, ‘the deterritorialized state.’” (...) Remarkably, such a landless state does exist today. The Knights of Malta (not to be confused with the country of Malta) are a 900-year-old lay Catholic order who today have no land, but do have a nonvoting seat at the United Nations. Their example, Rayfuse suggests, provides a seamless way to incorporate submerged nations into the international community.
Des professeurs d’Harvard demandent le retrait des mesures contre le #harcèlement_sexuel | Slate.fr
▻http://www.slate.fr/story/93473/universite-harvard-harcelement-sexuel
A Harvard, la lutte contre le #harcèlement_sexuel fait un pas en arrière. Mardi, dans une tribune publiée sur le Boston Globe, 28 professeurs de la prestigieuse université américaine ont demandé l’abrogation de la politique de prévention du harcèlement sexuel et de toutes formes de violences sexuelles fondées sur le genre, l’orientation sexuelle et l’identité de genre.
Adoptée par Harvard en juillet, cette politique pose pour la première fois une définition du harcèlement sexuel. Au sein de l’université, elle est incarnée par un Bureau de règlement des différends, qui reçoit et traite les plaintes des étudiants.
L’argument à la noix
La délimitation des comportements sexuels serait selon eux trop simpliste et unilatérale, puisqu’elle ne prend pas en compte les cas de handicap, ni « les problèmes complexes dans les situations malheureuses qui impliquent une consommation abusive de drogue et d’alcool par nos étudiants ».
Ah non @rastapopoulos tel que tu le formule, ça ne marche pas dans les deux sens. Dans les deux cas c’est la victime qui est méprisée et le coupable excusé.
@odilon, oui, c’était parfaitement voulu, qu’on parle du mec ou de la fille, ça marche dans les deux cas pour les dominants.
Living with Ebola in West Africa - The Big Picture - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2014/10/08/living-with-ebola-west-africa/vTCGB1bQTSbQitjUkSsTWI/story.html?p1=BP_MainPhoto
Galerie de 25 photos
The shoes of a suspected Ebola patient are seen after being cordoned off with stones by local residents in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on Sept. 24. U.S. health officials Tuesday laid out worst-case and best-case scenarios for the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, warning that the number of infected people could explode to at least 1.4 million by mid-January or peak well below that, if efforts to control the outbreak are ramped up. (Michael Duff/Associated Press)
Après la personnalisation… la #personnification
▻http://www.internetactu.net/2014/09/29/apres-la-personnalisation-la-personnification
L’équipe de Taezoon Park, du programme de recherche d’ingénierie des facteurs humains à Singapour, a construit deux robots, rapporte le Boston Globe. L’un était une infirmière conçue pour prendre la tension et prendre rendez-vous avec un médecin, l’autre un système de surveillance. Dans leur expérience, les chercheurs ont donné deux personnalités différentes à chaque robot. Une version extravertie : le…
#économie_comportementale #économie_de_l'attention #bodyware #corps #cyborgs #design #identités_actives #informatique_affective #intelligence_artificielle
Sierra Leone begins 3-day lockdown to fight Ebola outbreak - World - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2014/09/19/sierra-leone-begins-day-lockdown-fight-ebola-outbreak/ZdV9KkOHSr9dDxnvP0LCUJ/story.html
One of the most stringent anti-Ebola measures to date began here Friday as Sierra Leone imposed a three-day national lockdown, ordering people off the streets and into their homes in an effort to stamp out the deadly disease.
Police officers patrolled the streets of the densely populated capital, telling stragglers to go home and stay indoors. Volunteers in bright jerseys prepared to go house-to-house throughout the country to warn people about Ebola’s dangers and to root out those who might be infected but were staying in hiding.
The normally busy streets of Freetown were empty Friday morning, stores were closed, and pedestrians were rare on the main thoroughfares.
The lie that charted New England’s future - Ideas - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/06/14/the-lie-that-charted-new-england-future/qLDvF4PTlo1EetZbtUh4rI/story.html
Exactly 400 years ago this month, a small boat plied the coastline of Massachusetts with a few English explorers on board. Among them was one of the most familiar names in early American history: Captain John Smith.
Smith is not normally associated with New England—he’s known to history as one of the English cofounders of Jamestown, in Virginia. But in 1614, after a dramatic decline in his personal fortunes, he found himself in new waters, researching a map that changed American history.
At first glance, Smith’s map looks like what you’d expect for the period: a roughly accurate picture of the New England coast, populated by little British towns. But in fact, this is one of the strangest documents from the age of exploration. Much of it is fictitious, and deliberately so. It renamed the region and filled it in with Smith’s own vision of New England’s destiny. Today it offers a stark example of what scholars see as the many uses of cartography: that a map can do many more things than document a place. It can also chart the course of the future.
#cartographie #histoire #états-unis #nouvelle-angleterre #manipulation #propagande #représentation
US hospital to screen all patients for substance abuse
▻http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/health/2014/06/30/us-hospital-screen-patients-substance-abuse/11782923
Patients at Massachusetts General Hospital will soon be asked questions about their alcohol and illegal drug use, no matter why they’re at the hospital.
The program, scheduled to start this fall, is part of a broader plan to improve addiction treatment at the Boston hospital and its community health centers.
Caregivers will ask patients how often they have had six or more drinks on one occasion, and whether they have used an illegal drug in the past year, according to a report in The Boston Globe.
If the questioning reveals a possible addiction, doctors can summon a team to conduct a “bedside intervention” and, if needed, arrange treatment.
Some hospitals already ask emergency room patients about alcohol and drug use, and the American College of Surgeons has required hospitals to ask all trauma patients about their alcohol use since 2006. But standardized hospital-wide substance-abuse screening of all patients is not tracked.
MGH officials say the practice will reduce costs and improve care.
The hospital recently studied more than 2,500 patients with identified substance abuse disorders who were in the hospital for various medical problems and found they had longer stays and higher readmission rates. The cost of their care averaged 40 to 50 percent higher than the cost of treating patients with other chronic conditions.
Are human rights activists today’s #warmongers ? - Opinion - The Boston Globe
By Stephen Kinzer | MAY 25, 2014
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/24/are-human-rights-activists-today-warmongers/gef04rpPxgEdCEdx4DQ87J/story.html
ALMOST EVERYONE likes the idea of human rights. The phrase itself is freighted with goodness. Supporting human rights is like supporting world peace.
The modern human rights movement began as a band of outsiders, fighting governments on behalf of the faceless and voiceless. President Jimmy Carter brought it into the American foreign policy establishment by naming an outspoken assistant secretary of state for human rights. This meant that concern for the poor, the brutalized, and the imprisoned would be heard in the highest councils of government.
Now, several decades after the human rights movement traded its outsider status for influence in Washington, it is clear that this has produced negative as well as positive results. The movement has become a global behemoth. Sometimes it functions as a handmaiden to the power it was once dedicated to combating.
The most appalling result of this process in the United States is that some human rights activists now regularly call for using force to resolve the world’s problems. At one time, “human rights” implied opposition to war. Now some of the most outspoken warmongers in Washington are self-proclaimed human rights advocates.
(...)
This is a radical development in the history of the human rights movement. Once it was generals, defense contractors, and chest-thumping politicians who saw war as the best solution to global problems. Now human rights activists play that role. Some seem to have given up on diplomacy and statecraft. Instead they promote the steady militarization of American foreign policy.
These trigger-happy human rights activists rotate in and out of government jobs. This month more than 100 scholars, activists, and Nobel Peace Prize winners protested against this revolving door in an open letter to #Human_Rights_Watch, which, thanks to an astonishing $100 million gift from the financier George Soros, has become king of the human rights hill.
Their letter says that, although Human Rights Watch claims to defend and protect human rights, its ties to the American military and security establishments “call into question its independence.” It names prominent Human Rights Watch figures who have served in the State Department and #CIA; condemns the group for supporting “the illegal practice of kidnapping and transferring terrorism suspects around the planet”; and asserts that it produces biased reports exaggerating human rights abuses in countries the United States dislikes, like #Venezuela, while being gentler to American allies like #Honduras.
“#HRW ’s close relationships with the US government suffuse such instances with the appearance of a conflict of interest,” the letter says.
(...)
The world needs fearless truth-tellers. Some human rights advocates are. Others have succumbed to the temptations of power. Their movement is in danger of losing its way.
#droits_humains #va-t-en_guerre #porte_tournante #pouvoir #caution_morale
Human Rights Watch’s Revolving Door | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/human-rights-watchs-revolving-door
Let’s pretend that we want to start an organization to defend the rights of people across the globe that has no affiliation to any government or corporate interest. Which of the following characters should we therefore exclude from intimate roles in our organization’s operation? (You may choose more than one answer.)
1. An individual who presided over a NATO bombing, including various civilian targets.
2. An individual who was formerly a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, a speechwriter for Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright and a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff who in 2009 declared that, under “limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place” for the illegal CIA rendition program that has seen an untold number of innocent people kidnapped and tortured.
3. A former US Ambassador to Colombia, who later lobbied on behalf of Newmont Mining and J.P. Morgan — two US firms whose track records of environmental destruction would suggest that human wellbeing falls below elite profit on their list of priorities.
4. A former CIA analyst.
If you answered “all of the above,” you’re one step ahead of Human Rights Watch, which has played institutional host not only to persons matching descriptions A–D but to many others with similar backgrounds.
#Javier_Solana, for example, was NATO secretary general during the 1999 assault on Yugoslavia, an event HRW itself described as entailing “violations of international humanitarian law.” Solana is now on the group’s Board of Directors.
Mass. General researchers to build next generation of brain implants - Health & wellness - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/2014/05/26/mass-general-researchers-build-next-generation-brain-implants/A3uGYuNJkRYPN1sECgJERM/story.html
Boston researchers will build a generation of brain implants under an ambitious Defense Department program aimed at pioneering more precise ways to treat mental illnesses suffered by combat veterans, including post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, and depression.
The $30 million, five-year project being announced Tuesday is one of the first pieces of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative, unveiled last year in an attempt to foster a revolution in neuroscience similar to the one that occurred when the human genome was sequenced a little more than a decade ago. A second team at the University of California San Francisco will receive $26 million, also for work on brain implants.
The research is inspired by a technology already used in tens of thousands of patients: deep brain stimulators that trigger electrical impulses in part of the brain to quell tremors in Parkinson’s disease. But unlike those simple technologies, the new implants will be responsive, including a network of sensors that can read what is happening in the brain and stimulate multiple brain areas if abnormal activity is detected.
Un grand classique : comme il n’y a pas de fric pour s’occuper des anciens combattants (conditions d’accueil désastreuses, délais d’attente hallucinant pour les consultations, scandales répétés,…) on va trouver une solution technique en leur implantant des électrodes dans le cerveau.
Ça, c’est de la recherche pas de (erk !) l’aide sociale, on peut financer.
The botmaker who sees through the Internet - Ideas - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/01/24/the-botmaker-who-sees-through-internet/V7Qn7HU8TPPl7MSM2TvbsJ/story.html
Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back.
Pour une nouvelle rubrique #photoreportage sur un site d’info alternatif, je cherche de l’inspiration.
Seenthis, aurais-tu des idées ?
Pour l’instant, j’ai noté, via la Society of News Design, le travail du Washington Post ▻http://www.snd.org/2014/03/snd35-judges-award-silver-medal-to-washington-post-long-form-overall-portfolio
Effectivement, le portfolio et les articles sont superbes :
►http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/syrian-refugees/story/refuge
J’ai également repéré le boulot fait par Slate, qui propose un long scroll et une navigation au clavier assez géniale :
▻http://www.slate.fr/grand-format/camp-miliataire-cosaque-crimee-83861
Enfin, le Boston Globe propose deux alternatives : le #diaporama plein écran ou l’article « scrollable », visibles sur cet article sur Aaron Swartz :
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside-story-mit-and-aaron-swartz/YvJZ5P6VHaPJusReuaN7SI/picture.html
Est-ce que vous auriez repéré d’autres pratiques de mise en ligne de photoreportages ?
« Les Quatre Heures » pourrait être un exemple :
►http://lequatreheures.com
cc @albertocampiphoto
Je consulte chaque jour le blog du New York Times, Lens :
▻http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/?scp=1-spot&sq=lens&st=cse
Et celui de Time Magazine, Lightbox :
▻http://lightbox.time.com
qui héberge le blog de Mikko Takkunen, photojournalism links
(le meilleur du photojournalisme, deux fois par mois, je crois)
▻http://lightbox.time.com/category/photojournalismlinks/?iid=lb-pjl
J’aime beaucoup Burn aussi, créé par David Alan Harvey - le genre sobre...
▻http://www.burnmagazine.org
US a full partner in #Ukraine debacle - Opinion - The Boston Globe
By Stephen Kinzer
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/columns/2014/03/03/cold-war-over-russia-isn-zero-sum/Df9VSHeJFpKUz3tRKDjUXJ/story.html
FROM THE moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States has relentlessly pursued a strategy of encircling Russia, just as it has with other perceived enemies like China and Iran. It has brought 12 countries in central Europe, all of them formerly allied with Moscow, into the NATO alliance. US military power is now directly on Russia’s borders.
(...)
As protests mounted in Kiev last month, many in Washington found it difficult to break the old habit of shaping US policy to punish Russia. Several European leaders suggested resolving the Ukraine crisis through negotiation with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. This enraged the United States, which wants to isolate Putin, not accommodate him.
Eventually, Yanukovych fled Kiev, which is in the portion of Ukraine traditionally tied to Western Europe, and went to to Crimea. Now Putin has sent Russian forces to guard him. This has set off a new crisis, including stern warnings from President Obama.
Putin’s decision to deploy troops reflects his loss of control over Ukrainian politics. US officials recognize this, and are pressing their anti-Russia campaign. Last week President Obama received the prime minister of Georgia. The prime minister of Moldova is due this week. These meetings are aimed at honing a strategy for further isolating Russia; it is called “Western integration.”
Much has been made of the fact that Ukraine is deeply divided between its pro-Europe western provinces and the pro-Russian east, of which Crimea is a part. A “velvet divorce” dividing Ukraine into two countries might be the best solution, but border changes, even when they seem sensible from far away, are always difficult to engineer.
If Ukrainians cannot agree to divide their country, Russia may do it for them. It already occupies part of Moldova and part of Georgia. For it to keep an army in Ukraine would anger the United States — and many Ukrainians — but it would be nothing new. Military occupation is, in fact, one of the few weapons Russia has to oppose the “Western integration” of neighboring countries.
Although Russia is not powerful enough to emerge from the Ukraine/Crimea crisis with a full victory, neither is the United States. Diplomatic pressure and covert action supporting pro-Western factions in Ukraine will continue, but President Obama will not risk military confrontation with Russia. This crisis will not produce the grand westward realignment of which many in Washington dream.
Any solution short of partition will have to take Russia’s interests into account. Thus far the United States has shown no interest in doing that. The likely geopolitical outcome, therefore, is a stalemate.
Inside Ukraine, the story is different. Protesters there, encouraged by the United States, have used the power of the street to depose a deeply corrupt — though legally elected — president. But soon they may find they have little to celebrate.
Egyptians, Libyans, Syrians and others have learned to their immense pain that upheavals like these rarely end well. Ukraine is not only deeply divided geographically and politically. It is dominated by a clutch of gangster “oligarchs” powerfully motivated to prevent the emergence of a pro-Western regime. Splits within the opposition are deep. The possibility that a stable Ukraine will emerge anytime soon are dim.
This crisis is in part the result of a zero-sum calculation that has shaped US policy toward Moscow since the Cold War: Any loss for Russia is an American victory, and anything positive that happens to, for, or in Russia is bad for the United States. This is an approach that intensifies confrontation, rather than soothing it.
Stephen Kinzer is a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
How blind people see race - Ideas - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/01/19/how-blind-people-see-race/0pdBKGzv9y2P53BXWke0oO/story.html
“We are all socialized to see race. But it’s only by talking to blind people that we really get a true understanding of how strong that socialization practice is,” Obasogie said. “What this study highlights is how the things that we think are obvious are often things that society works very hard to teach us.”
colorblindness [has...] been used as an ideology to prevent the state from engaging in forms of affirmative action or other forms of government-based assistance programs that would help make up for past forms of discrimination (...) By looking at how blind people actually think about race, it can provide an empirical basis for us to rethink some of the policies we’ve developed on the back of that metaphor.
Interactive version of EFF’s NSA crossword - Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2013/12/22/interactive-version-of-effs.html
Here’s a nice little Christmastime Creative Commons and free/open source software success story: yesterday, I posted the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s NSA-themed crossword puzzle ▻http://boingboing.net/2013/12/21/celebrate-the-crosswords-cen.html, which was CC licensed. Shortly after, TheDod posted an interactive version of the puzzle to Github, forking an interactive crossword program written by the Boston Globe’s Jesse Weisbeck.
Interactive edition of EFF’s Xmas 2013 NSA crossword puzzle ▻http://thedod.github.io/nsa-crossword
Aux #Etats-Unis et au #Canada, le #père-Noël est #escorté par l’ #armée, et c’est un problème | Slate.fr
▻http://www.slate.fr/monde/81263/pere-noel-escorte-militaire-polemique
▻http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GhTLGBq-Uyg
Cette année, lors de son passage en Amérique du nord, le père Noël sera sous la bonne garde de deux avions de chasse de l’armée canadienne. Une précaution qui provoque la colère d’une association de protection de l’enfance, accusant le Norad (le Commandement de la défense aérospatiale de l’Amérique du Nord) d’encourager l’endoctrinement militaire des enfants, comme le rapporte le Boston Globe.
Cette mesure de sécurité apparaît dans une vidéo (visible ci-dessus), postée dans le cadre de la campagne de communication que l’organisation américano-canadienne chargée de la défense de l’espace aérien des deux pays mène chaque année à l’approche des fêtes. Depuis près de soixante ans, raconte le site web spécial Noël du Norad, lisible en huit langues dont le français, l’organisation assure également la sécurité du père Noël. et de la surveillance militaire de la tournée du père Noël.
Dans la vidéo de cette année, on peut voir pendant quelques secondes deux CF18 Hornet escorter le traîneau du père Noël.
C’est ce petit détail, absent des vidéos du Norad les années précédentes (LCI y avait consacré un sujet en 2011), qui a semé « la consternation parmi au moins quelques défenseurs de l’enfance », selon le Boston Globe :
« “Les enfants associent le père Noël aux cadeaux, à la joie et à tous les autres aspects positifs de Noël”, a déclaré Allen Kanner, pédopsychologue californien et cofondateur de Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood [campagne pour une enfance sans publicité], une association basée à Boston. “Ils [le Norad] associent tout ça aux militaires dans l’esprit des enfants. C’est totalement inapproprié.” ».....
In wake of bike fatalities, government’s response demonstrates support for cyclists - Metro - The Boston Globe
▻http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/09/21/wake-bike-fatalities-government-response-demonstrates-support-for-cyclists/WGxTPDNw1pBm5ZUAP4IP9K/story.html
- Marco Gehlen, a Hague police traffic investigator, said real-life accident reenactments are required for every bike fatality or serious injury. In the case of high-speed crashes, the effort is outsourced to a company in Germany, which videotapes the test crashes with slow-motion cameras. The service costs the Hague police more than $13,000 for each case.
Rigorous accident investigations in the Netherlands are also used to quickly redesign streets in the aftermath of a fatal crash.
– The legal system automatically places all of the responsibility for crashes on the motorist, not the cyclist. Even if a driver proves the crash occurred because of a bicyclists’ wrongdoing, the motorists’ insurance company is still responsible for at least 50 percent of the damage to the bike and its rider — and it’s automatically 100 percent if the cyclist is a child.
“The car is always wrong, by law,” said Amsterdam urban planner Rob van der Bijl.
– About a decade ago, Gehlen said, truck-on-bike right-hook collisions like the one in Zoetermeer resulted in dozens of deaths per year, most of them among children. But the hazards of riding alongside trucks began to be taught to children in their school bike-education programs. Ten years later, he says, that number is down to 10 to 15 deaths per year from right-hook collisions, mostly among middle-aged cyclists.
“Sometimes,” Hamelink said, “the best solution is something other than the police solution.”