position:author

  • Is There a Smarter Path to Artificial Intelligence? Some Experts Hope So par Steve Lorh, New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/technology/deep-learning-artificial-intelligence.html

    “There is no real intelligence there,” said Michael I. Jordan, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of an essay published in April intended to temper the lofty expectations surrounding A.I. “And I think that trusting these brute force algorithms too much is a faith misplaced.”

  • A Future Forecaster on Habit-Forming Technology
    https://hackernoon.com/a-future-forecaster-on-habit-forming-technology-dbd0f5e7b0dc?source=rss-

    Nir’s Note: Jane McGonigal is a game designer at The Institute for the Future and bestselling author of Reality is Broken and SuperBetter. In this interview with Max Ogles, McGonigal discusses impact of future technologies on behavior, habits, and the way we #design products.Q: You recently worked on a project designed to visualize the future of technology. The idea was that using some future, not-yet-existent product, nicknamed FeelThat, people could actually share emotions with each other. (Here’s a link to the video.) What was the thinking behind it?Jane McGonigal: This is a project with Institute for the Future to look at some of the emerging technologies that are being prototyped, tested, and innovated right now. We try to imagine where technologies might take us in a decade or more (...)

    #habit-forming-tech #future-tech #startup #future-forecaster

  • How #blockchain Can Help Artists’ Resale Rights
    https://hackernoon.com/how-blockchain-can-help-artists-resale-rights-8178f4e058e1?source=rss---

    By Jacqueline O’Neill, Executive Director at Blockchain #art Collective. Originally published on Quora.Resale rights already exist in a number of creative industries.To use a song in a commercial, a company has to license it and pay royalties to the musician. Every time a book is purchased, the author gets a small percentage of the sales.But for many visual artists, once they’ve created and sold a work of art, that’s the last they ever hear about it. Their resale rights are essentially non-existent. If the piece is sold for a few thousand dollars, and then goes for several hundred thousand a decade later, the artist is out of luck.Fortunately, that’s starting to change. The blockchain is making waves in the art world, and artist resale rights is one area where those waves may end up having an (...)

    #blockchain-artist #artists-resale-rights #quora-partnership

    • How and Why We Invented the CryptoSeal

      “We can now put a tiny computer chip with cryptographic identity into a slim adhesive seal strip form factor to secure a package,” said one of our software engineers, Maksym Petkus, “enabling mathematically- and cryptographically-closed loop integration with the blockchain and secure high-value assets with this tamper-evident technology.”

      Today, at the ID Tech Expo in Santa Clara, we announced the release of our CryptoSeal prototype, representing a major step forward in immutable supply chain provenance and the secure movement of physical assets.
      What is a CryptoSeal?

      The first in what will be a line of blockchain-registered and tamper-evident hardware products, CryptoSeals each contain a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip embedded with unique identity information. This identity data is then immutably registered and verified on a blockchain (we currently offer support for Ethereum and plan to expand to other blockchains, including Bitcoin, Zcash, Hyperledger, and Symbiont).

      The tamper-evident form factor, developed in collaboration with Cellotape Smart Products, registers not only the identity of an object onto the blockchain, but also records the identity of its registrant and packaging or asset metadata. And, with their customizable size allowing application to a variety of packages, from envelopes to shipping containers, CryptoSeals have the ability to securely verify sender identity and timestamp shipment deliveries, and provide a secure chain of custody in the supply chain.
      Why do you need a blockchain?

      Our CEO, Ryan Orr, likes to compare the CryptoSeal to the King’s Signet Ring: “you can think of it like the old system of the Signet Ring stamping a wax seal on a letter. The signet holder is analogous to the registrant of the CryptoSeal, the wax to the chip inside of the seal, and the stamping of the signet is like the signing of the CryptoSeal to the Blockchain. On its own each component, from the cryptographic chips to the tamper evident seals and blockchain registration, is necessary but insufficient to solve the problem. Together the three technologies create a strong solution.”
      Who can benefit from using CryptoSeals?

      Our CryptoSeals can be affixed to any physical item, guaranteeing its identity and authenticity in an unforgeable way. There are more than a handful of business use cases for our new product, which combines the best of blockchain technology and Internet of Things (or Everything, as we like to call it): medical equipment, fine art, electronics, cold chain, and forensic evidence tracking, to name a few. Individual consumers also benefit in being able to verify and protect their artistic creations, secure luggage, ship high-value items internationally, as well as prove authenticity of items they buy and sell on secondary markets.

      One of the most exciting use cases of the CryptoSeal for us at Chronicled is pharmaceutical tracking, where a secure chain of custody and immutable provenance are needed but often lacking. The high monetary value, along with the human suffering, associated with fraudulent pharmaceuticals necessitates new solutions for tracking authenticity. According to Interpol, Operation Pangea, their pharmaceutical investigation, seized 2.4M fraudulent pills in 2011; four years later, in 2015, that skyrocketed to 20.7M.

      The estimated monetary value? $81M USD.

      We can directly address this problem. Chronicled’s CryptoSeals can be customized to fit and seal shipments of pharmaceuticals, including individual cartons and containers. If the antenna in the adhesive seal is broken at any time, it will be impossible to verify the chip inside the CryptoSeal, ensuring that patients have confidence when they receive legitimate, untampered-with pharmaceuticals.
      When will CryptoSeals be available?

      Our CryptoSeals will begin entering the market late this year with standard offerings and unique solutions, with customizable sizing and adhesives, for clients.

      You can learn more on our website or contact us! And, to stay up to date with our work, sign up for our mailing list below.

      https://blog.chronicled.com/how-and-why-we-invented-the-cryptoseal-6577d8633a2

  • « Devant le gros cul et l’allure de crétin de Hitler passant en revue son armée défilant au pas de l’oie, ou face aux postures titanesques et ridicules d’un Mussolini survolté, nous n’éprouvions que la fascination morbide des enfants exposés pour la première fois à la folie des hommes. Voulant disparaître au fond de nos sièges, un faible sourire aux lèvres dans la salle obscure, nous ressentions gêne et compassion pour ces hommes manifestement malades. Nous inspirant des aînés et de quelques modèles (Mencken – qui détestait le baratin parce que cela lui renvoyait sa propre image – et d’autres nous convainquirent que ces messieurs grotesques en uniforme n’étaient que des sales gosses), nous rîmes et plus tard, hilares, nous nous levions, raillions et tapions bruyamment sur les sièges branlants situés devant nous. Tandis que nous nous esclaffions, nous ne pouvions imaginer que mon frère, qui se moquait aussi ouvertement que les autres, serait bientôt engoncé dans un uniforme ridicule, au beau milieu de plusieurs millions d’Américains mobilisés afin de payer un lourd tribut pour n’avoir pas su déceler, derrière la folie, le mal. »

    Le dernier stade de la soif , Frederick Exley

  • Climate Change Is Making Plants Behave Like Costco Shoppers - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/climate-change-is-making-plants-behave-like-costco-shoppers

    Not having to endure costs radically changes behavior, in humans and in plants.Photograph by Thomas Hawk / FlickrPlants have their own form of money: carbon dioxide. For decades, our fossil fuel industry has been artificially inflating their currency. What happens to plants during inflation—when CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise?The same thing that happens if you drop money from the sky over Times Square, leaving everyone there with $1,000 in their pockets, says Hope Jahren, a geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo, and author of Lab Girl, a personal memoir of her life in science.* “Some people would save it; some people would run out and buy clothes; some people would gamble it away within 5 minutes,” she told Nautilus editor in chief Michael Segal. Plants face similar (...)

  • French police cut soles off migrant children’s shoes, claims Oxfam | World news | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/14/french-border-police-accused-of-cutting-soles-off-migrant-childrens-sho

    French border police have been accused of detaining migrant children as young as 12 in cells without food or water, cutting the soles off their shoes and stealing sim cards from their mobile phones, before illegally sending them back to Italy.

    A report released on Friday by the charity Oxfam also cites the case of a “very young” Eritrean girl, who was forced to walk back to the Italian border town of Ventimiglia along a road with no pavement while carrying her 40-day-old baby.

    The allegations, which come from testimony gathered by Oxfam workers and partner organisations, come two months after French border police were accused of falsifying the birth dates of unaccompanied migrant children in an attempt to pass them off as adults and send them back to Italy.

    “We don’t have evidence of violent physical abuse, but many [children] have recounted being pushed and shoved or shouted at in a language they don’t understand,” Giulia Capitani, the report’s author, told the Guardian.

    “And in other ways the border police intimidate them – for example, cutting the soles off their shoes is a way of saying, ‘Don’t try to come back’.”

  • #Seymour_Hersh on spies, state secrets, and the stories he doesn’t tell - Columbia Journalism Review
    https://www.cjr.org/special_report/seymour-hersh-monday-interview.php

    Bob Woodward once said his worst source was Kissinger because he never told the truth. Who was your worst source?

    Oh, I wouldn’t tell you.

  • TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the “American Taliban”

    http://whistlebl0wer.com/traitor-whistleblower-american-taliban

    This is the the memoir of the Justice Department legal ethics advisor, Jesselyn Radack, who blew the whistle on government misconduct in the case of the so-called “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh–America’s first terrorism prosecution after 9/11.

    About the Author

    Jesselyn Radack is currently the director of National Security & Human Rights at the Government Accountability Project, the nation’s leading whistleblower organization. Previously, she served on the DC Bar Legal Ethics Committee and worked at the Justice Department for seven years, first as a trial attorney and later as a legal ethics advisor.

    “The Justice Department forced me out of my job” she writes, “placed me under criminal investigation, got me fired from my next job in the private sector, reported me to the state bars in which I’m licensed as an attorney, and put me on the ‘no fly list.’”

    Her offense? She believed, erroneously as it turned out, that the Department would not want to use illegally obtained evidence in its prosecution of John Walker Lindh, an American convert to Islam. He had been imprisoned by Afghan warlords in November 2001 soon after the U.S.-led NATO invasion of the country after 9/11.

    Lindh, then 20, was a California-born convert to Islam. He had travelled to Yemen on a spiritual quest in 2000, and went to Afghanistan in June 2001 to join the Taliban army at a time when the Taliban government, a United States ally in the 1980s, was still receiving United States aid. Lindh survived a harsh POW camp in which more than three quarters of his 400 fellow Taliban POWs died in chaotic conditions along with an American interrogator.

    Radack advised against further federal interrogation of Lindh without a lawyer present because his parents had retained counsel. Later, she blew the whistle when she learned that the department destroyed evidence of her advice, and then withheld the evidence from a Virginia federal court, where Lindh faced charges of murder and treason in a high-profile prosecution helping inflame the public in the earliest stages of the war.

    Radack’s gripping tale describes a culture clash at the Justice Department between due process advocates and conviction-hungry zealots.

    #Jesselyn_Radack

  • “When it was hype time, the community team had been working for 16 hours per shift” — Simon Sergeev
    https://hackernoon.com/when-it-was-hype-time-the-community-team-had-been-working-for-16-hours-p

    Simon Sergeev expressing his view on community buildingContinuous working with the community is of crucial significance for the success of an ICO. The support team plays an important role acting as a connector between startup initiators and potential customers, preventing any outflow of potential investors’ moneys and engaging new ones. How to build up efficient relationship with the community, explains Simon Sergeev, Ex-Head of Community Crypterium, who in January managed to raise through ICO $51.6 M, overrunning the hard cap (i.e. the targeted maximum) by 10%. Interview was made by Kirill Bezverhi, author of the FinPR blog.You’d been in the digital marketing, before you came to the industry. What differences do you see between the classic and the ICO marketing?Actually, there are more (...)

  • Google Removes ’Don’t Be Evil’ Clause from Its Code of Conduct (htt...
    https://diasp.eu/p/7181615

    Google Removes ’Don’t Be Evil’ Clause from Its Code of Conduct

    HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106037 Posted by axiomdata316 (karma: 523) Post stats: Points: 155 - Comments: 4 - 2018-05-19T00:50:47Z

    #HackerNews #clause #code #conduct #dont #evil #from #google #its #removes HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 104 - Loop: 26 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 66

  • Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project (ht...
    https://diasp.eu/p/7166145

    Google employees reportedly quit over military drone AI project

    HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17075222 Posted by senoroink (karma: 149) Post stats: Points: 176 - Comments: 142 - 2018-05-15T16:35:22Z

    #HackerNews #drone #employees #google #military #over #project #quit #reportedly HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 164 - Loop: 166 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 53

  • The Deep Time of Walden Pond - Issue 60: Searches
    http://nautil.us/issue/60/searches/the-deep-time-of-walden-pond

    A careful reading of Walden; or, Life in the Woods makes it clear that Thoreau never intended his cabin to be a solitary hermitage, although fans and detractors alike often misunderstand this. It was more an author’s workshop than a fortress of isolation, and throughout his lakeside residency he often visited family and friends in Concord and entertained guests at Walden. Ice-cutters and woodcutters, anglers and boaters, and even a noisy train were as much a part of his surroundings as the lake, woods, and wildlife. He retreated to the cabin largely in order to write in a quieter setting than he could find in town and to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not (...)

  • The remarkable disappearing act of Israel’s car-bombing campaign in Lebanon or: What we (do not) talk about when we talk about ’terrorism’
    http://mondoweiss.net/2018/05/remarkable-disappearing-terrorism

    Indeed, from 1979 to 1983, that is to say precisely the period between the Jerusalem and Washington conferences, very senior Israeli officials conducted a large-scale campaign of car-bombings that killed hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians. In fact, by the time his New York Times OpEd was published Sharon had been personally directing this “terrorist” operation for a full year. Even more remarkably, one of the objectives of this covert operation was precisely to goad the PLO into resorting to “terrorism” so as to provide Israel with a justification to invade Lebanon.

    These claims are not the product of a feverish, conspiratorial mind. A barebones description of this secret operation was published by Ronen Bergman, a well respected Israeli journalist in the New York Times Magazine on January 23, 2018. This article was adapted from Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, where a much more detailed account of the operation, entirely based on interviews with Israeli officials involved in or aware of the operation at the time, is provided.

    As Richard Jackson explains in Writing the War on Terrorism, a political discourse is a way of speaking that attempts to give meaning to events and experiences from a particular perspective. Analyzing the discourse on “terrorism,” Jackson argues, involves “appreciating the rules guiding what can and cannot be said and knowing what has been left out as well as what has been included.” “The silences of a text,” he adds, “are often as important as its inclusions.”

    The secret car-bombing operation Israeli officials conducted in Lebanon in the early 1980s represents a remarkable historical example of such “silences,” and of the “rules” that underlie the discourse on “terrorism” and ensure that certain things simply “cannot be said,” certain facts simply aren’t ever mentioned. Rise and Kill First has received the highest praise from reviewers in the American press. Over the last three months, its author has participated in countless media interviews and given high profile public talks around the country. And yet, in these reviews, interviews and public talks this secret operation has not been mentioned a single time. In fact, the public discussion that has surrounded the publication of Rise and Kill First has taken place as if the revelations contained in that book had never been published.

    “Our” opposition to “terrorism” is principled and absolute. “We” by definition do not resort to “terrorism.” If and when evidence to the contrary is presented, the reaction is: silence.

    Et donc: How Arafat Eluded Israel’s Assassination Machine - par Ronen Bergmanjan, 23 janvier 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/magazine/how-arafat-eluded-israels-assassination-machine.html

    The nation’s security forces tried for decades to kill the P.L.O. leader. Now, former officials tell the story of how they failed — and how far they almost went to succeed.

  • Our Approach to Employee Security Training (https://www.pagerduty.c...
    https://diasp.eu/p/7122365

    Our Approach to Employee Security Training

    HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17002168 Posted by Corrado (karma: 1941) Post stats: Points: 157 - Comments: 22 - 2018-05-05T15:21:41Z

    #HackerNews #approach #employee #our #security #training HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 112 - Loop: 178 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 26

  • One day we will find a language for this.
    https://africasacountry.com/2018/05/one-day-we-will-find-a-language-for-this

    e are bombarded daily with news of capsized boats and vast numbers of dead migrants as they traverse deserts and oceans. In the midst of our constant attempt to redefine ethics against the backdrop of shame, photographer Mario Badagliacca assembles, photographs, and re-renders objects left behind by migrants and refugees in the “boat cemetery” in Lampedusa, Italy. It is displacing to contemplate a child’s milk bottle, tattered t-shirts or a pair of worn-out shoes, as they cannot help but mapping vividly a poetic of loss. “One day we will find a language for this,” the author Maaza Mengiste writes in her accompanying lyric response piece to Badagliacca’s work which reflects on the migrant crisis.

    Badagliacca’s gut-wrenching artwork, titled “Frammenti” (fragments), and Mengiste’s reflection appear together in Mediterranean, the first print volume published by Warscapes magazine. Cumulatively Mediterranean is an attempt to explore an archeology of memory and the travels of migrants and refugees, well beyond mainstream portrayals of these desperate experiences.

    Warscapes, an online initiative that was started seven years ago, has always shown a powerful instinct for spotting new frames of reference and allowing for urgent ideas to emerge. I had the privilege of collaborating with Warscapes very early on and have always bowed to the idea that Warscapes never tended to be determined too much by monetary logic or internet trends. Founded by New York duo Bhakti Shringarpure and Michael Bronner, and sustained by the unwavering commitment of Shringarpure as editor-in-chief and a gang of talented editors, Warscapes has remained a gentle, artistic and politically committed presence in a rapidly changing and ideologically wavering digital zeitgeist.

    Mediterranean defies framing; it is fresh and ever-changing with each page. The mix of disciplines, the complex juxtapositions within and between pieces, and the sparks of deep humanity underscoring the work make this collection a potent tool for reinventing our way of reading the horror of a crisis that has been fed by shameful and recurring stereotypes for far too long. Beautiful to touch and feel, this first Warscapes print text seems located somewhere between magazine and book. It resembles periodicals such as Granta and n+1, yet it could be a stand-alone volume that’s easy on the eye. and which shows great attention to detail and design.

  • Deep Learning on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Without the Agonizing Pain
    https://hackernoon.com/deep-learning-on-amazon-ec2-spot-instances-without-the-agonizing-pain-4c

    In my previous article I briefly described SageMaker — generic Machine Learning service from Amazon, launched in November 2017. Although SageMakes is a great service, it may not suit everyone. At least it did not work for us due to the way it handles the data and, most importantly, due to its high pricing. So, we turned to #aws EC2 and its Spot Instances.First I am going to explain what Spot Instances are, how to use them for Deep Learning, and what does it take. Then I will introduce a tool that attempts to automate routine tasks associated with Spot Instances and hopefully makes the overall experience more pleasant. I am the author of the tool, so any feedback is very welcome.I assume that you are familiar with AWS in general and EC2 service in particular. If not, please, take a look at (...)

    #open-source #amazon-ec2 #deep-learning #amazon-ec2-spot-instances

  • Qui est Cunégonde ?

    https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Candide,_ou_l%E2%80%99Optimisme/Beuchot_1829/Chapitre_27

    Cunégonde et la vieille servent chez ce prince dont je vous ai parlé, et moi je suis esclave du sultan détrôné. Que d’épouvantables calamités enchaînées les unes aux autres ! dit Candide. Mais, après tout, j’ai encore quelques diamants ; je délivrerai aisément Cunégonde. C’est bien dommage qu’elle soit devenue si laide.

    Une première réponse
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide#Cun%C3%A9gonde

    Voltaire était ami avec une dame allemande, comtesse dans une minuscule principauté endettée. Ses déboires et son caractère auraient servi de source d’inspiration quand Voltaire inventa le personnage de Cunégonde. En réalité ce fut une femme extraordinaire féministe avant le mot.

    Charlotte Sophie von Bentinck Aldenburg
    http://www.correspondance-voltaire.de/html/bentinck.php

    Bentinck, Charlotte Sophie Gräfin von
    * 5.8.1715 Varel (Oldenburg), † 4.2.1800 Hamburg. (reformiert)
    https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz3764.html

    Charlotte Sophie, countess Bentinck, her life and times, 1715-1800 : Le Blond, Aubrey, Mrs : Internet Archive
    https://archive.org/details/charlottesophiec01lebliala

    Full text of "Charlotte Sophie, countess Bentinck, her life and times, 1715-1800"
    https://archive.org/stream/charlottesophiec01lebliala/charlottesophiec01lebliala_djvu.txt

    CHARLOTTE SOPHIE, Countess Bentinck, nee Countess of Aldenburg, Sove-reign Lady of Varel, Kniphausen, etc. (to give her, once for all, her full title), lived in an extremely interesting period of European history. During the eighty-five years of her life from 1715 to 1800 France passed from Louis XIV
    through the age of Voltaire and Rousseau to the Revolution, and when Charlotte Sophie died Napoleon held all Europe in his grip. The Empire, under Marie Therese, and Prussia, under Frederick the Great, entered on the long struggle of the Seven Years* War, and Russia was for many years in the hands of Catherine II. Of what transcendent interest passing events must have been to a woman who was personally acquainted with all the people involved

    Charlotte Sophie von Aldenburg Bentinck (comtesse de, 1715-1800) : nom d’alliance
    http://data.bnf.fr/13174416/charlotte_sophie_von_aldenburg_bentinck

    Charlotte Sophie Bentinck – Wikipedia
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Sophie_Bentinck


    L’article en allemand est assez complèt contrairement à l’entrée en anglais.

    In Hamburg (ab 1768)
    Nachdem sich Charlotte Sophie mit mehreren deutschen Höfen überworfen hatte, zog sie 1768 nach Hamburg, wo sie über dreissig Jahre wohnte - länger als an keinem anderen Ort. Hier wohnte sie in prominenter Lage am Jungfernstieg Nr. 3, Ecke Neuer Wall und zog später ins ländliche Eimsbüttel. Wegen der engen persönlichen Beziehungen zur aristokratischen Gesellschaft der Generalstaaten und wegen ihrer zahlreichen Verwandtschaft in England verstand sie sich als Repräsentantin des Adels. In ihrem Salon, den sie aufgrund ihrer vielseitigen literarischen Bildung veranstaltete, verkehrten Diplomaten, die in Hamburg akkreditiert waren und dem Adel angehörten und nach 1789 Angehörige des französischen Adels, die vor den Schrecken der Revolution geflohen waren. Mit ihrem Salon bildete sie einen anerkannten Gegenpol zu den bürgerlichen Zirkeln in Hamburg. Einer dieser Zirkel, genauer der von Elise Reimarus und Margaretha Büsch, gab sich zum Zwecke der Abgrenzung den Namen „Theetisch“.

    Hamburg, Jungfernstieg 4-5, la maison Jungfernstieg 3 sur la Alster a fait place à un pavillon touristique.
    https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Hamburg%20Jungfernstieg%204#map=19/53.55198/9.99343
    https://www.google.de/maps/place/Jungfernstieg+3,+20095+Hamburg/@53.5537658,9.9917507,3a,75y,48.88h,100.46t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sH2GLvHSTkbo8XIocg7cCeA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x47b

    Schloss Bückeburg
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_B%C3%BCckeburg

    Les secrets de fabrication de « Candide »
    http://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2007/11/08/03005-20071108ARTFIG00104-les-secrets-de-fabrication-de-candide.php?mode=im

    Voltaire a parlé de Ragotski dans le chap. XXII du Siècle
    de Louis XIV
     ; voyez tome XX. Ragotski est mort en 1785. B.

    François II Rákóczi — Wikipédia
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_II_R%C3%A1k%C3%B3czi


    Un admirateur et protégé de Louis XIV. , personnage dont se sert Voltaire pour ironiser la cour de Versailles et sa politique. Dans Candide il est mentionné comme le roi déchu Ragotski .

    Rákóczi, « L’Autobiographie d’un prince rebelle. Confession • Mémoires »
    https://www.notesdumontroyal.com/note/449

    Rákóczi Ferenc II Prince of Transylvania 1676-1735 [WorldCat Identities]
    http://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n80019655

    Works: 679 works in 1,228 publications in 10 languages and 4,540 library holdings
    Genres: History Sources Biography Records and correspondence Fiction Art Pictorial works
    Roles: Author, Honoree, Editor, Other, Creator, Dedicatee, Signer
    Classifications: DB932.4, 943.91

    Candide ou le détour oriental de monsieur de Voltaire, Abdel Aziz Djabali, p. 93-112
    http://books.openedition.org/cedej/234

    #histoire #littérature #philosophie #politique

  • Still Trying to Get #control-c Right?
    https://hackernoon.com/still-trying-to-get-control-c-right-d738b4de0b8a?source=rss----3a8144eab

    If you’re a loyal reader (I’m sure there are a couple of you out there) you know that the topic of timeouts, cancellation and asynchrony is a source of endless fascination for me. I came across a series of posts from Nathaniel Smith, author of the Python async library Trio that I found very interesting.Both Timeouts and Cancellation For Humans and Go Statement Considered Harmful motivate the design of Trio with a detailed analysis of the concurrency, asynchrony, cancellation and timeout mechanisms in a whole range of different languages and systems. Comparing the various systems to the mechanism he’s building in Trio helps tease out differences and issues in the various systems. This makes it an interesting analysis even if you never get anywhere near Python or Trio.I’m not going to do a (...)

    #nathaniel-smith #programming #asynchronous #get-control-c-right

  • Bolorsoft CEO and consultant discuss Unicode standard of Mongolian script – The UB Post
    27 avr. 2018
    By M.OYUNGEREL
    https://www.pressreader.com/mongolia/the-ub-post/textview
    (note : je reprends tout le texte ici car le format de Pressreader est très pénible, le UB Post n’a plus l’air d’être en ligne en version html et l’adresse ci-dessus n’a pas l’air très spécifique)

    Mon­gol News sat down with Founder of Bolor­soft Co. S.Badral and Con­sul­tant of Bolor­soft T.Jamiyansuren to dis­cuss the in­ter­na­tional stan­dard for Mon­go­lian script. Last week, they at­tended the Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion meet­ing in San Jose, Cal­i­for­nia, USA to im­prove the ex­ist­ing Mon­go­lian script stan­dard/pho­netic model.

    $The public has just re­cently be­come aware of the con­tro­ver­sial sit­u­a­tion con­cern­ing the im­prove­ment of in­ter­na­tional stan­dard for Mon­go­lian script, which is whether to en­code with Mon­go­lian pho­netic model or with graphetic, like that used to en­code Chi­nese char­ac­ters. Since you have par­tic­i­pated in these dis­cus­sions, would you please give our read­ers in­for­ma­tion re­gard­ing this is­sue?

    *S.Badral: Uni­code is a com­pany of in­ter­na­tional char­ac­ter en­cod­ing stan­dards. It’s an in­te­grated consortium of cor­po­ra­tions which de­velop the en­cod­ing stan­dards for all the scripts in the world. In other words, it pro­duces one com­pre­hen­sive stan­dard which identifies the com­puter codes for Latin “a”, Cyril­lic “a”, Mon­go­lian “a”, and Chi­nese char­ac­ters. If the script in ques­tion is not en­coded by Uni­code stan­dards, all the global play­ers, such as Face­book, Google, Adobe, Ap­ple, Mi­crosoft, and IBM, would not sup­port it. That means the script will not be sup­ported on any op­er­at­ing sys­tem, com­puter, or phone. Al­though Mon­go­lian script was first en­coded based on a pho­netic model in 2000, small un­solved is­sues have caused it to drag out with­out a so­lu­tion for 17 to 18 years.

    So, dur­ing the Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion meet­ing in Ho­hhot last Septem­ber, it was al­most de­cided that the cur­rent model is com­pletely wrong and a graphetic model de­vel­oped by Chi­nese ex­perts Liang Hai and Shen Yilei was nearly adopted. At that time, we flatly op­posed, say­ing, “Mon­go­lian script has let­ters, and it’s writ­ten by its pho­net­i­cally.

    ...In this last meet­ing, we have achieved our ob­jec­tive for the past few years and de­fended our her­itage...

    There­fore, we need to im­prove the ex­ist­ing pho­netic model in­stead of adopt­ing graphetic en­cod­ing”. With sup­port from the In­ner Mon­go­lian party, the graphetic model was not ap­proved. In this meet­ing too. Our dis­cus­sion re­volved around aban­don­ing the pho­netic model and chang­ing to the graphetic model.

    T.Jamiyansuren: Had we ap­proved the Uni­code stan­dard for Mon­go­lian script as the graphetic model that the Chi­nese de­vel­oped, it would’ve then been dis­cussed and ap­proved at the ISO in­ter­na­tional stan­dard meet­ing, and ev­ery­thing would’ve been over. Be­cause these two meet­ings were sched­uled right af­ter an­other, we tried very hard to not take it to the ISO meet­ing. That Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion meet­ing was al­most like war.

    Do any state rep­re­sen­ta­tives take part in these im­por­tant meet­ings? What is the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the Mon­go­lian state and govern­ment in this in­ter­na­tional dis­cus­sion con­cern­ing na­tional script and cul­ture?

    S.Badral: Pre­vi­ously, rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Agency for Stan­dard­iza­tion and Metrol­ogy and the In­sti­tute of Lan­guage and Lit­er­a­ture at the Mon­go­lian Acad­emy of Sci­ences reg­u­larly at­tended these meet­ings. But we don’t know why the is­sue has got­ten to this point. Be­fore we went to Ho­hhot in Septem­ber 2017, we viewed that the fu­ture of Mon­go­lian script re­lates to the na­tional in­ter­ests and in­tel­lec­tual in­de­pen­dence of Mon­go­lians and con­tacted the pres­i­dent. Pres­i­dent Kh.Bat­tulga then met us within 10 days of our re­turn, called the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of rel­e­vant or­ga­ni­za­tions, and or­dered them to ur­gently take nec­es­sary mea­sures. We de­ter­mined that an ac­tion plan to im­prove the Mon­go­lian scripts pho­netic model will be de­vel­oped by the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Author­ity (CITA) and ap­proved by the Agency for Stan­dard­iza­tion and Metrol­ogy, and formed a work­ing group.

    How­ever, the work­ing group did noth­ing be­cause they didn’t have a bud­get. The Na­tional Se­cu­rity Coun­cil obliged them to send a re­port ev­ery week, but we have no idea what re­port was given or what work was done. The agency tried to dis­cuss the fund­ing is­sue in a govern­ment meet­ing, but was post­poned. By then, the bud­get dis­cus­sion had al­ready been con­ducted, hence, no so­lu­tion. Ba­si­cally, they took this is­sue very idly.

    Govern­ment Memo No. 54 was passed. In there, they as­signed six agen­cies to take care of the ex­e­cu­tion and fund­ing of this is­sue, three for each. While the Mon­go­lian script en­cod­ing im­prove­ment is­sue was bounced be­tween state or­ga­ni­za­tions like a ten­nis ball, it was time for the sched­uled meet­ing.

    T.Jamiyansuren: Ap­prox­i­mately 20 days be­fore we left, an­other work­ing group was es­tab­lished by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, Cul­ture and Sci­ence, and they held a meet­ing. Dur­ing that meet­ing, there was some kind of talk, “What do we do . Ei­ther we give S.Badral and T.Jamiyansuren a state as­sign­ment, or no­tify them that they do not rep­re­sent the state”. A let­ter was sent to the Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion stat­ing, “These two men do not have the right to rep­re­sent the state,” and that a per­son named Enkhdalai will be com­ing. Those two men have just re­turned from par­tic­i­pat­ing in that meet­ing. But po­lit­i­cal sug­ges­tions and con­clu­sions do not af­fect the Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion meet­ing. They sent a per­son called Enkhdalai with a po­si­tion of con­sul­tant at CITA. We were in­tro­duced at the meet­ing.

    Did the Mon­go­lian rep­re­sen­ta­tives first met each other once they were at the meet­ing?

    S.Badral: Yes. We had ar­rived two days be­fore, met our trans­la­tor, and care­fully pre­pared the is­sues of con­cern and presentations. Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion chose Gan­ba­yar Gan­sukh (G.Gan­ba­yar), a man who lives in Ok­la­homa, as our trans­la­tor. On our end, it was un­clear who was go­ing to voice the state po­si­tion even a week be­fore the meet­ing.

    T.Jamiyansuren: Uni­code Consortium be­lieved that CITA is of im­por­tance and had them at­tend as a li­ai­son mem­ber. The re­spon­si­bil­i­ties should be even higher in re­gard to this.

    Did you in­tro­duce a Mon­go­lian pho­netic model that you de­vel­oped your­selves, dur­ing the meet­ing?

    S.Badral: How could we have the Mon­go­lian script en­coded graphet­i­cally, like that of Chi­nese char­ac­ters on our watch? So, I and T.Jamiyansuren dis­cussed and co­op­er­ated with Mon­go­lian script ex­pert Lkhag­va­suren, and pre­pared a pre­sen­ta­tion on ways to im­prove the pho­netic model. We dis­cussed the dis­ad­van­tages of the ex­ist­ing model and ways to fix it, and proved it with a re­al­is­tic ex­am­ple. Af­ter three days of the meet­ing, the Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion had a pos­i­tive at­ti­tude and said, “If we re­ally fix it like this, the model will be eas­ier and bet­ter”. That’s be­cause the graphetic model con­tains only char­ac­ters and not let­ters, which makes it com­pli­cated to sort, cat­e­go­rize, and de­velop etc. There would be many prob­lems such as iden­ti­fy­ing the text and spellcheck­ing it. The pro­posed graphetic model was not even for the clear Mon­go­lian script drawn, so it was hard for the user to write with the word in mind or even the root of the word . For in­stance, the “a” and “e” at the be­gin­ning, mid­dle, and end of a word, and “n”, were to be writ­ten by press­ing one “teeth” or aleph, and the “crown”, “tooth”, and “tail” (el­e­ments of Mon­go­lian script writ­ing) were to be au­to­mat­i­cally man­aged. This might break the Mon­go­lian think­ing and one but­ton will eas­ily break from too much pres­sure. I think the Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion peo­ple started to un­der­stand it. The In­ner Mon­go­lians on the other hand, sug­gested to de­velop both the graphetic and pho­netic mod­els, maybe be­cause they were in a rush to de­cide on some so­lu­tion to pre­vent fur­ther drag out, or they lost faith in the pho­netic model.

    Any­how, main­tain­ing the pho­netic model which was to be aban­doned, fix­ing its bugs, and hav­ing a de­ci­sion made for it to be de­vel­oped with pref­er­ence is a big achieve­ment.

    So the rep­re­sen­ta­tives lis­tened to you and ac­knowl­edged your pre­sen­ta­tion. Isn’t the mes­sage “They don’t rep­re­sent the state” a way of sav­ing their skin in case some­thing went wrong?

    S.Badral: It just looks like that. Since last Septem­ber, that’s the stance our govern­ment held. In the first work­ing group meet­ing of the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, Cul­ture and Sci­ence, CITA rep­re­sen­ta­tives kept say­ing, “It’s not suit­able for pri­vate com­pany rep­re­sen­ta­tives be in­cluded in a state work­ing group, that’s pri­vate party in­ter­est,” so I even re­moved my­self from the work­ing group (laughs).

    T.Jamiyansuren: Be­cause the is­sue couldn’t have been qui­eted down, they had to send some­body as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive, which hap­pened to be Enkhdalai, as a con­sul­tant at CITA. I had the im­pres­sion that that per­son read and re­searched quite a lot too. But it’s not ef­fec­tive to have some­one who’s in­ter­ested in the Uni­code stan­dard of Mon­go­lian script read ready pre­pared ma­te­ri­als and retell them. You have to be metic­u­lous with your words, and be able to prove your point. His few un­sure words dur­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion had Chi­nese ex­perts stand up and say, “This is ex­actly why there should be a graphetic model”. Of course, it was not easy to give this much work in tight sched­ule to a per­son who lacked ex­pe­ri­ence.

    Peo­ple are say­ing that the Mon­go­lian govern­ment will pay at­ten­tion to our na­tional script be­fore the next Au­gust meet­ing to pre­vent the graphetic model from be­ing en­coded. Is there re­ally such dan­ger, or is ev­ery­thing be­hind us now?

    S.Badral: If we hadn’t given a pre­sen­ta­tion at this last meet­ing and changed the com­mis­sion’s un­der­stand­ing, our Mon­go­lian script re­ally would have been en­coded graphet­i­cally. But now, the Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion has de­cided to de­velop both mod­els to ra­tio­nally solve the is­sue. That means we have to fix and im­prove our pho­netic model and in­tro­duce it to use. Even a sin­gle sym­bol can­not be changed once it’s reg­is­tered in the Uni­code stan­dard. There­fore, there’s a strict rule that we have to fix with­out chang­ing the pre­vi­ous one. In the meet­ing, we in­tro­duced a pos­si­ble so­lu­tion that we can im­prove it like that. So our govern­ment has to take care of this is­sue for this to con­tinue on a big­ger scale. We wouldn’t beg them if it was only tech­ni­cal work, but it’s re­lated to so­ci­ety, cul­ture, and pol­i­tics.

    T.Jamiyansuren: Some who un­der­stands the sig­nif­i­cance of this meet­ing are right when they say, “This was like the mod­ern Khi­agt agree­ment”. This is a mat­ter of whether Mon­go­lian script will ex­ist for the next five years, 500, or 5,000. When the rep­re­sen­ta­tives were asked for their opin­ion on the lo­ca­tion and time of the next meet­ing, In­ner Mon­go­lians sug­gested to ur­gently hold it in Ho­hhot, af­ter two months. But the Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion head said, “The next meet­ing will be held at least six months later. There’s a sug­ges­tion to or­ga­nize it in Ulaan­baatar,” while our state rep­re­sen­ta­tive stayed quiet. We couldn’t, so we voiced our opin­ion. In other words, there will be a Uni­code meet­ing re­gard­ing this is­sue in Ulaan­baatar, at the end of Septem­ber. If it’s or­ga­nized well, it’s not ours but Mon­go­lia’s name that will bear the good name.

    It seems like we are greedy, hear­ing that the Chi­nese have de­vel­oped the graphetic model and en­code the Mon­go­lian script, when we don’t even use the Mon­go­lian script our­selves. There are some who say to stop co­op­er­a­tion with the Chi­nese and de­velop the script alone. What do you say about this?

    S.Badral: Lan­guages ex­ist through the use of its script. In the mod­ern times, peo­ple’s writ­ing has trans­ferred from hand­writ­ten notes to typ­ing on a com­puter or a phone. As for Mon­go­lian writ­ing, it has slipped into the list of en­dan­gered lan­guages be­cause there is no dig­i­tal us­age and no op­por­tu­nity to cre­ate con­tent. How can dig­i­tal con­tent be cre­ated when the Uni­code stan­dard of 18 years has a big prob­lem. There­fore, this is­sue will be im­me­di­ately fixed and in­tro­duced into use like Cyril­lic and Latin al­pha­bets. In terms of pos­ses­sion, it shall be­long to those who use it. In other words, Mon­go­lian script is not the prop­erty of Outer or In­ner Mon­go­lians. There could be Amer­i­cans, Ger­mans, British, Bel­gians, Ira­ni­ans, or peo­ple of any other coun­try who have stud­ied and uses Mon­go­lian script. They have the right to learn and use what­ever lan­guage and script they please. It’s im­por­tant we pro­vide that op­por­tu­nity. That’s why these in­ter­na­tional rep­re­sen­ta­tives are putting this much ef­fort into in­tro­duc­ing the Mon­go­lian script in dig­i­tal use. This script is a very im­por­tant world cul­tural her­itage.

    Why are you putting this much ef­fort and heart for the Mon­go­lian script?

    S.Badral: As for me, I’m a mem­ber of the Uni­code tech­ni­cal com­mis­sion Work­ing Group (WG)-2 and vol­un­teer of the WG3. I re­ceive in­for­ma­tion about this be­fore oth­ers. I’ve seen this as my civic du­ties and re­ported it to the state and govern­ment. Sec­ondly, Bolor­soft is a dig­i­tal lin­guis­tics com­pany. Mon­go­lians know that we have re­leased many prod­ucts re­lated to Mon­go­lian lan­guage and script. Al­though Cyril­lic writ­ing pro­grams are in the mar­ket, most users don’t know that it is based on Mon­go­lian script. That’s why we can’t aban­don it.

    Bolor­soft Co. is con­sid­ered a ma­jor provider in the de­vel­op­ment of Mon­go­lian script at Uni­code Consortium. That’s be­cause we were the first to cre­ate the Uni­code font for Mon­go­lian script and have it li­censed. This field was stag­nant since 2013, un­til we solved the Uni­code stan­dard for Mon­go­lian script is­sue. But those fonts be­came the be­gin­ning of big cor­po­ra­tions such as Google and Mi­crosoft. So, Uni­code Consortium al­ways invites us to their in­ter­na­tional meet­ings. We try to at­tend these meet­ings con­stantly to voice the in­ter­ests of Mon­go­lia, but we can’t al­ways due to the ex­pen­di­ture. But I see that there are peo­ple who are jeal­ous and spread ru­mors that we are try­ing to make money us­ing Mon­go­lian script. That’s the only thing they talked about in the last six months, politi­ciz­ing it. On the other hand, we are work­ing for Mon­go­lia’s in­ter­ests.

    If we were seek­ing profit from this, we wouldn’t be us­ing ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence to de­velop Mon­go­lian lan­guage and writ­ing, but fi­nan­cial de­vel­op­ment. We are one of the first Mon­go­lian com­pa­nies de­vel­op­ing and us­ing ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. In this last meet­ing, we have achieved our ob­jec­tive for the past few years and de­fended our her­itage.

    • Débats et choix « techniques » (!) sur l’adaptation de l’écriture mongole ancienne en Unicode. Qui, de fait, ne fonctionne pas du tout.

      Une partie du problème vient du fait que l’écriture ancienne transcrit un état… ancien (voire très ancien) de la langue un peu comme ce qu’est le français médiéval au français moderne.

      La transcription en cyrillique, seule forme officielle de 1941 à 1990 a pratiquement éradiqué l’écriture traditionnelle qui n’était plus connue que de quelques érudits. Du moins, en Mongolie, car de son côté la Chine a conservé l’écriture ancienne pour la Mongolie Intérieure. Pendant la période « soviétique », les seuls documents en écriture ancienne provenaient donc de Hohhot (parfois Hu Hu Hot, à la mongole-chinoise, Khukh Khot, à la mongole).

      #mongol_bitchik

      https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_bitchig

  • Give The Customer What They Want and Stop Worrying About Illegal Downloads
    https://hackernoon.com/give-the-customer-what-they-want-and-stop-worrying-about-illegal-downloa

    Got into an interesting debate about my last post: How I Doubled My Revenue By Breaking Up With Amazon.This author seemed appalled at the notion that I would offer my customers the option to buy a PDF version of one of my books.Even though the data told me it would reach more people, he simply didn’t get it.He writes:“OK, I’m mystified. Why would anyone in their right mind want a PDF version of an #ebook? …It’s terrible for e-reading unless you have a large screen, high resolution tablet. It’s the format commonly used on pirate book websites because it’s easy to scan a printed book and easy to conceal malware in it.”Now, there are some interesting assumptions going on here.First of all, asking “why would anyone in their right mind want a PDF version” is a bit judgmental.It seems obvious that he (...)

    #publishing #entrepreneurship #creativity #piracy

  • Next.js Website Boilerplate
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    #cms #api #web-development #javascript #reactjs

  • Des demandeurs d’asile soudanais torturés dans leur pays après avoir été expulsés par la #France

    Une enquête du New York Times a révélé dimanche soir que plusieurs demandeurs d’asile soudanais renvoyés par la France, l’#Italie et la #Belgique, avaient été torturés à leur retour dans leur pays d’origine.

    https://www.lejdd.fr/international/des-demandeurs-dasile-soudanais-tortures-dans-leur-pays-apres-avoir-ete-expuls
    #torture #asile #migrations #réfugiés #renvois #expulsions #réfugiés_soudanais #Soudan

    via @isskein sur FB

    • Et ici l’article du New York Times, repris par Lejdd :

      By Stifling Migration, Sudan’s Feared Secret Police Aid Europe

      At Sudan’s eastern border, Lt. Samih Omar led two patrol cars slowly over the rutted desert, past a cow’s carcass, before halting on the unmarked 2,000-mile route that thousands of East Africans follow each year in trying to reach the Mediterranean, and then onward to Europe.

      His patrols along this border with Eritrea are helping Sudan crack down on one of the busiest passages on the European migration trail. Yet Lieutenant Omar is no simple border agent. He works for Sudan’s feared secret police, whose leaders are accused of war crimes — and, more recently, whose officers have been accused of torturing migrants.

      Indirectly, he is also working for the interests of the European Union.

      “Sometimes,” Lieutenant Omar said, “I feel this is Europe’s southern border.”

      Three years ago, when a historic tide of migrants poured into Europe, many leaders there reacted with open arms and high-minded idealism. But with the migration crisis having fueled angry populism and political upheaval across the Continent, the European Union is quietly getting its hands dirty, stanching the human flow, in part, by outsourcing border management to countries with dubious human rights records.

      In practical terms, the approach is working: The number of migrants arriving in Europe has more than halved since 2016. But many migration advocates say the moral cost is high.
      To shut off the sea route to Greece, the European Union is paying billions of euros to a Turkish government that is dismantling its democracy. In Libya, Italy is accused of bribing some of the same militiamen who have long profited from the European smuggling trade — many of whom are also accused of war crimes.

      In Sudan, crossed by migrants trying to reach Libya, the relationship is more opaque but rooted in mutual need: The Europeans want closed borders and the Sudanese want to end years of isolation from the West. Europe continues to enforce an arms embargo against Sudan, and many Sudanese leaders are international pariahs, accused of committing war crimes during a civil war in Darfur, a region in western Sudan

      But the relationship is unmistakably deepening. A recent dialogue, named the Khartoum Process (in honor of Sudan’s capital) has become a platform for at least 20 international migration conferences between European Union officials and their counterparts from several African countries, including Sudan. The European Union has also agreed that Khartoum will act as a nerve center for countersmuggling collaboration.

      While no European money has been given directly to any Sudanese government body, the bloc has funneled 106 million euros — or about $131 million — into the country through independent charities and aid agencies, mainly for food, health and sanitation programs for migrants, and for training programs for local officials.

      “While we engage on some areas for the sake of the Sudanese people, we still have a sanction regime in place,” said Catherine Ray, a spokeswoman for the European Union, referring to an embargo on arms and related material.

      “We are not encouraging Sudan to curb migration, but to manage migration in a safe and dignified way,” Ms. Ray added.

      Ahmed Salim, the director of one of the nongovernmental groups that receives European funding, said the bloc was motivated by both self-interest and a desire to improve the situation in Sudan.

      “They don’t want migrants to cross the Mediterranean to Europe,” said Mr. Salim, who heads the European and African Center for Research, Training and Development.

      But, he said, the money his organization receives means better services for asylum seekers in Sudan. “You have to admit that the European countries want to do something to protect migrants here,” he said.

      Critics argue the evolving relationship means that European leaders are implicitly reliant on — and complicit in the reputational rehabilitation of — a Sudanese security apparatus whose leaders have been accused by the United Nations of committing war crimes in Darfur.

      “There is no direct money exchanging hands,” said Suliman Baldo, the author of a research paper about Europe’s migration partnership with Sudan. “But the E.U. basically legitimizes an abusive force.”

      On the border near Abu Jamal, Lieutenant Omar and several members of his patrol are from the wing of the Sudanese security forces headed by Salah Abdallah Gosh, one of several Sudanese officials accused of orchestrating attacks on civilians in Darfur.

      Elsewhere, the border is protected by the Rapid Support Forces, a division of the Sudanese military that was formed from the janjaweed militias who led attacks on civilians in the Darfur conflict. The focus of the group, known as R.S.F., is not counter-smuggling — but roughly a quarter of the people-smugglers caught in January and February this year on the Eritrean border were apprehended by the R.S.F., Lieutenant Omar said.

      European officials have direct contact only with the Sudanese immigration police, and not with the R.S.F., or the security forces that Lieutenant Omar works for, known as N.I.S.S. But their operations are not that far removed.

      The planned countertrafficking coordination center in Khartoum — staffed jointly by police officers from Sudan and several European countries, including Britain, France and Italy — will partly rely on information sourced by N.I.S.S., according to the head of the immigration police department, Gen. Awad Elneil Dhia. The regular police also get occasional support from the R.S.F. on countertrafficking operations in border areas, General Dhia said.

      “They have their presence there and they can help,” General Dhia said. “The police is not everywhere, and we cannot cover everywhere.”

      Yet the Sudanese police are operating in one unexpected place: Europe.

      In a bid to deter future migrants, at least three European countries — Belgium, France and Italy — have allowed in Sudanese police officers to hasten the deportation of Sudanese asylum seekers, General Dhia said.

      Nominally, their official role is simply to identify their citizens. But the officers have been allowed to interrogate some deportation candidates without being monitored by European officials with the language skills to understand what was being said.

      More than 50 Sudanese seeking asylum in Europe have been deported in the past 18 months from Belgium, France and Italy; The New York Times interviewed seven of them on a recent visit to Sudan.

      Four said they had been tortured on their return to Sudan — allegations denied by General Dhia. One man was a Darfuri political dissident deported in late 2017 from France to Khartoum, where he said he was detained on arrival by N.I.S.S. agents.

      Over the next 10 days, he said he was given electric shocks, punched and beaten with metal pipes. At one point the dissident, who asked that his name be withheld for his safety, lost consciousness and had to be taken to the hospital. He was later released on a form of parole.
      The dissident said that, before his deportation from France, Sudanese police officers had threatened him as French officers stood nearby. “I said to the French police: ‘They are going to kill us,’” he said. “But they didn’t understand.”

      European officials argue that establishing Khartoum as a base for collaboration on fighting human smuggling can only improve the Sudanese security forces. The Regional Operational Center in Khartoum, set to open this year, will enable delegates from several European and African countries to share intelligence and coordinate operations against smugglers across North Africa.

      But potential pitfalls are evident from past collaborations. In 2016, the British and Italian police, crediting a joint operation with their Sudanese counterparts, announced the arrest of “one of the world’s most wanted people smugglers.” They said he was an Eritrean called Medhanie Yehdego Mered, who had been captured in Sudan and extradited to Italy.

      The case is now privately acknowledged by Western diplomats to have been one of mistaken identity. The prisoner turned out to be Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, an Eritrean refugee with the same first name as the actual smuggler. Mr. Mered remains at large.

      Even General Dhia now admits that Sudan extradited the wrong man — albeit one who, he says, admitted while in Sudanese custody to involvement in smuggling.

      “There were two people, actually — two people with the same name,” General Dhia said.

      Mr. Berhe nevertheless remains on trial in Italy, accused of being Mr. Mered — and of being a smuggler.

      Beyond that, the Sudanese security services have long been accused of profiting from the smuggling trade. Following European pressure, the Sudanese Parliament adopted a raft of anti-smuggling legislation in 2014, and the rules have since led to the prosecution of some officials over alleged involvement in the smuggling business.

      But according to four smugglers whom I interviewed clandestinely during my trip to Sudan, the security services remain closely involved in the trade, with both N.I.S.S and R.S.F. officials receiving part of the smuggling profits on most trips to southern Libya.

      The head of the R.S.F., Brig. Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, has claimed in the past that his forces play a major role in impeding the route to Libya. But each smuggler — interviewed separately — said that the R.S.F. was often the main organizer of the trips, often supplying camouflaged vehicles to ferry migrants through the desert.

      After being handed over to Libyan militias in Kufra and Sabha, in southern Libya, many migrants are then systematically tortured and held for ransom — money that is later shared with the R.S.F., each smuggler said.

      Rights activists have previously accused Sudanese officials of complicity in trafficking. In a 2014 report, Human Rights Watch said that senior Sudanese police officials had colluded in the smuggling of Eritreans.

      A British journalist captured by the R.S.F. in Darfur in 2016 said that he had been told by his captors that they were involved in smuggling people to Libya. “I asked specifically about how it works,” said the journalist, Phil Cox, a freelance filmmaker for Channel 4. “And they said we make sure the routes are open, and we talk with whoever’s commanding the next area.”

      General Dhia said that the problem did not extend beyond a few bad apples. Sudan, he said, remains an effective partner for Europe in the battle against irregular migration.

      “We are not,” he said, “very far from your standards.”

      https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/world/africa/migration-european-union-sudan.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSo
      #externalisation

    • Soudan : des demandeurs d’asile torturés après avoir été expulsés par la France

      Un dissident politique du #Darfour, expulsé par la France fin 2017, affirme notamment avoir été électrocuté, battu et frappé avec des tuyaux en métal pendant dix jours.
      En Belgique, c’est un scandale. En France, le silence est... assourdissant. Dans une grande enquête, publiée dimanche 22 avril, le « New York Times » révèle que des demandeurs d’asile soudanais renvoyés par la France, l’Italie et la Belgique, ont été torturés à leur retour dans leur pays.

      Une enquête de Streetpress, publiée en octobre dernier, révélait déjà que la police française collaborait étroitement, et depuis 2014, avec la dictature soudanaise, et favorisait « le renvoi à Khartoum d’opposants politiques réfugiés en France ». Le titre de Streetpress parlait de lui-même : « Comment la France a livré des opposants politiques à la dictature soudanaise ».
      Le quotidien américain a de son côté retrouvé des demandeurs d’asile et a publié les témoignages de quatre d’entre eux. Ils ont été arrêtés dès leur retour puis torturés par le régime soudanais. Un dissident politique du Darfour expulsé par la France fin 2017, affirme ainsi avoir été électrocuté, battu et frappé avec des tuyaux en métal pendant dix jours. Il affirme qu’avant son expulsion, des officiers de police soudanais l’ont menacé en présence d’officiers français :
      ""Je leur ai dit : ’Ils vont nous tuer’, mais ils n’ont pas compris.""
      Des policiers soudanais dans des centres de rétention

      Interrogé par le « New York Times », le régime du général Omar el-Béchir dément. Le dictateur, qui dirige depuis 28 ans le Soudan, est visé par un mandat d’arrêt en 2008 de la Cour pénale internationale pour génocide, crimes contre l’humanité et crimes de guerre, comme le rappelle « le Journal du dimanche ».

      Comme l’écrit le quotidien américain, la Belgique, la France et l’Italie ont autorisé des « officiels soudanais » à pénétrer dans leurs centres de rétention et à interroger des demandeurs d’asile soudanais. Ces « officiels » étaient en réalité des policiers soudanais. Selon le « New York Times », les entretiens dans les centres de rétention entre les « officiels » soudanais et les demandeurs d’asile se seraient faits « en l’absence de fonctionnaire capable de traduire les propos échangés ».

      En Belgique, les révélations sur les expulsions de demandeurs d’asile soudanais ont provoqué de vives tensions. En septembre dernier, le Premier ministre belge Charles Michel a reconnu devant une commission d’enquête de son Parlement que les polices de plusieurs pays européens collaboraient étroitement avec la dictature soudanaise d’Omar el-Béchir.

      https://www.nouvelobs.com/monde/20180424.OBS5650/soudan-des-demandeurs-d-asile-tortures-apres-avoir-ete-expulses-par-la-fr

    • Et, signalé par @isskein sur FB, un communiqué de Migreurop qui date d’il y a une année. Rappel :

      L’Europe collabore avec un dictateur pour mieux expulser vers le Soudan

      Migreurop demande l’arrêt immédiat de toutes les collaborations initiées par l’Union européenne et ses Etats membres avec la dictature d’Omar El-Béchir et avec tout Etat qui bafoue les droits fondamentaux.

      http://www.migreurop.org/article2837.html

  • How Zionist terrorism determined Palestine’s fate (mars 2017)
    https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-zionist-terrorism-determined-palestines-fate/19871

    But how did terrorism originate in Palestine and what was its outcome, both historically and today?

    Thomas Suárez sheds much new light on those questions in State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel. He does this largely by mining previously neglected declassified documents from the British National Archives, covering the period of the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948).

    Suárez’s principal thesis is that Zionist terrorism “ultimately dictated the course of events during the Mandate, and it is Israeli state terrorism that continues to dictate events today.”

    The author cautions that while he unequivocally condemns Palestinian terrorism against civilians, he recognizes that some were driven to extreme measures due to an asymmetry in power and in reaction to attempts to subjugate the Palestinian people and expropriate their resources, land and labor.

    Zionist terrorism aimed to prevent Palestinian Arabs from exercising their right to self-determination, Suárez argues, and when an aggressor encounters resistance, it can hardly use self-defense as a justification for its own acts of violence. “Otherwise,” Suárez writes, “all aggression would self-justify.”

  • In Historic Move, Harvard Teaching and Research Assistants Vote to ...
    https://diasp.eu/p/7050664

    In Historic Move, Harvard Teaching and Research Assistants Vote to Unionize

    HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16888332 Posted by Mononokay (karma: 1507) Post stats: Points: 92 - Comments: 30 - 2018-04-20T20:48:23Z

    #HackerNews #and #assistants #harvard #historic #move #research #teaching #unionize #vote HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 71 - Loop: 184 - Rank min: 60 - Author rank: 49