position:ceo

  • Toyota invests $500 million in Uber
    https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/27/technology/toyota-uber/index.html

    Eine halbe Milliarde Spielgeld steckt Toyota in vermeintliche Innovation. Kein Wunder, denn nur autonome Fahrzeuge versprechen auf längere Zeit den Markt für PKW am Leben zu erhalten. Das ist konsequent aus der Perspekzive eines der prößten Problemproduzenten der Welt . Toyota setzt darauf, dass Probleme, die durch die massenhafte Verbreitung von Karaftfahrzeugen entstehen sollen durch bessere Kraftfahrzeige gelöst werden können. Jede realistische Problemlösung würde die Abschaffung der Kfz-Produzenten bedeuten. Dagegen wird Spielgeld in die Kriegskasse des Gesellschaftszerstörers Uber gepumpt. Lösungen für menschenfreundliche Umwelt und Gesellschaftsformen werden so nicht befördert. Lemminge allesamt.

    Toyota just placed a big bet on autonomous vehicles.
    The automaker announced on Monday that it is investing $500 million in Uber and working more closely with the company to accelerate the development and deployment of self-driving vehicles. Uber plans to retrofit Toyota Sienna minivans with its autonomous technology and begin real-world testing in 2021.

    The deal gives Toyota a key partner in a field that is growing rapidly, and comes on the same day that four of the automaker’s suppliers announced a partnership to develop some of the software underpinning autonomous vehicles.

    “This agreement and investment marks an important milestone in our transformation to a mobility company,” Shigeki Tomoyama, the president of Toyota Connected Company, said in a statement.

    Automakers and tech companies continue scrambling to position themselves for a future in which car ownership gives way to mobility as a service. That’s led to a growing number of partnerships as companies like Toyota realize they don’t know much about ridesharing and companies like Uber discover that building cars is hard.

    Other tech and auto companies have forged similar arrangements. Waymo, for example, buys vehicles from Chrysler and Jaguar Land Rover.

    “We’re seeing marriages of companies of complementary abilities,” said Brian Collie of Boston Consulting Group. “Partnerships are quite necessary and create value toward bringing mobility as a service to the market faster.”

    Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, shakes hands with Shigeki Tomoyama, president of Toyota Connected Company.
    Uber leads the world in ridesharing, which gives it an edge in finding an audience for autonomous vehicles. Uber could create a ready market for Toyota self-driving cars through its app, which is used by millions of people.

    Monday’s announcement builds on an existing partnership. During the International Consumer Electronics Show in January, the two companies announced e-Palette, an autonomous vehicle concept that could be used for everything from pizza delivery to ridesharing.

    Toyota’s latest infusion of cash provides Uber with an unreserved endorsement of a self-driving car program rocked by a lawsuit from Google and the death of a pedestrian in Arizona in March. Uber shuttered its research and development efforts in Arizona in May, and only recently returned to the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It still has not started testing its cars again in autonomous mode.

    Related: How free self-driving car rides could change everything

    This isn’t Toyota’s first move into the space. In 2015, it said it would invest $1 billion in the Toyota Research Institute artificial intelligence lab. Institute CEO Gill Pratt said in a statement Monday that the Uber partnership would accelerate efforts to deliver autonomous technology.

    Toyota’s financial investment will also prove useful given the high costs of running a self-driving car program. Engineers who specialize in the technology are rare and command salaries of several hundred thousand dollars a year. Maintaining a large fleet of test vehicles brings additional costs.

    In May, SoftBank invested $2.25 billion in Cruise, the self-driving startup of General Motors. That just goes to show that even the biggest companies need partners.

    #Uber #Wirtschaft

  • i24NEWS - Israel drone firm faces charge in said bombing of Armenian forces for Azerbaijan
    https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy-defense/182956-180829-israel-drone-firm-faces-charge-in-said-bombing-of-armenian-for

    The State Attorney of Israel announced Wednesday that it has summoned an Israeli dronemaker to a pre-indictment hearing for its role in an alleged bombing of Armenian forces while conducting a demonstration of one of its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on behalf of Azerbaijan in fall of 2017.

    “The letter of suspicion attributes to the company’s senior managers and suspected employees offenses of receiving fraudulently under aggravated circumstances and violates the Defense Export Control Law,” a statement from the State Attorney’s office said.

    “The Defense Export Control Law was enacted about a decade ago, and its purpose is to protect Israel’s political and security ties from dangers of unauthorized exports of defense know-how and equipment,” it added.

    CEO Amos Matan, deputy CEO Meir Rizmovitch, development director Haim Hivashar, and marketing director David Goldin are among the representatives of Aeronautics Defense Systems Ltd summoned to appear before the State Attorney’s Office’s Economics Division.

    “We are convinced that after we first present our position at the hearing, the State Prosecutor’s Office will reach an informed decision that there is no reason to put the company or any of its officers in court and will order the case closed,” Aeronautics said in a statement responding to the hearing summonses.

    Last year, a criminal investigation was opened into the defense systems firm for “a deal with a key client” that allegedly involved an attempted bombing of the Armenian military on behalf of Azerbaijan during a live demonstration of a kamikaze UAV, but a gag order was placed on many of the details.

  • Shocked, burnt and bruised: the plight of workers at Tesla’s plants Peoples Dispatch - 10 Juillet 2018
    https://peoplesdispatch.org/2018/07/10/shocked-burnt-and-bruised-the-plight-of-workers-at-teslas-plants

    A third investigation has been opened last week into carmaker Tesla by California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA), which received a complaint from a worker at the company’s automobile assembly plant in Fremont. The details of the complaint will be disclosed by the body only after the completion of the investigation.

    The investigation has been launched only days after the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, announced that he would be launching a new production line at the Fremont plant.

    Over the past years, Tesla’s Fremont plant, which employs over 10,000 workers, has proven to be an extremely dangerous workplace, where employes have been “sliced by machinery, crushed by forklifts, burned in electrical explosions and sprayed with molten metal.”


    In 2014, the rate of work-related recordable injuries – i.e injuries that require medical treatment beyond first aid – was 15% higher than the average rate in the automobile industry. The following year, when the industry average of such injuries came down from 7.3 per 100 workers to 6.7, at the Fremont plant, the rate of injuries increased from 8.4 per 100 workers to 8.8, which was 31% higher than the industry average.

    The figures on the rate of serious injuries – i.e those that require days off from work or restricted duty or transfer to a different task – paint a much darker picture of how dangerous working in Tesla is for its employees. As with recordable injuries, the rate of serious injuries also came down industry-wide in 2015. In the case of Tesla’s plant, however, the rate of serious injuries soared and was 103% higher than the industry average, according to a report by Work Safe, a non-profit organization that specializes in workplace health and safety issues.

    The 2018 annual report of The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, which identified Tesla as one of the 12 most dangerous workplaces in the US that puts its employees at risk of physical injuries, pointed out that the rate of recordable injuries was 31% higher than the industry average in 2016, while the rate of serious injuries was 83% higher. Last year, another 722 instances of work-related injuries were reported at the Fremont plant, of which 600 were serious injuries.

    While the industry-average for last year is not yet available, Tesla’s Vice President of Environment, Health and Safety claimed on its website, under an article titled “Becoming the Safest Car Factory in the World”, that the recordable injuries last year had declined by 25% compared to the year before.

    “Relying on 2017 injury data to reach any conclusions about safety trends at the plant is premature and could have misleading results,” said Workspace’s report, which pointed to many irregularities in the way in which the injury logs were maintained by the company.

    “I hear coworkers quietly say that they are hurting but they are too afraid to report it for fear of being labeled as a complainer or bad worker.”

    . . . . . . .

    #tesla#voiture #mobilité #robotisation #innovation #batteries #électricité #accidents_du_travail #pénibilité #danger #elon_musk

    • Une troisième enquête a été ouverte début juillet contre le constructeur automobile Tesla par la Division de la sécurité et de la santé au travail de Californie (OSHA dans son acronyme anglais), à la suite de la plainte d’un ouvrier de l’usine d’assemblage automobile de l’entreprise de Fremont. Les détails de la plainte ne seront divulgués par le service qu’après la fin de l’enquête.

      L’enquête a été entamée quelques jours seulement après l’annonce, par le PDG de l’entreprise Elon Musk, qu’il lancerait une nouvelle ligne de production dans l’usine de Fremont.

      Ces dernières années, l’usine Tesla de Fremont, qui emploie plus de 10 000 ouvriers, s’est avérée être un lieu de travail extrêmement dangereux, où les employés ont été « taillés en pièces par des machines, écrasés par des chariots élévateurs, brûlés dans des explosions électriques et aspergés de métal en fusion ».

      En 2014, le taux de blessures liées au travail rapportées – c’est-à-dire des blessures exigeant un traitement médical au-delà des premiers soins – était de 15% plus élevé que le taux moyen dans l’industrie automobile. L’année suivante, lorsque le taux moyen de ces blessures dans l’industrie est passé de 7.3 à 6.7 pour 100 ouvriers, il a augmenté de 8.4% à 8.8% dans l’usine de Fremont, ce qui était plus élevé de 31% que la moyenne de l’industrie.

      Les chiffres du taux de blessures graves – c’est-à-dire celles qui nécessitent des jours d’arrêt de travail ou un horaire de travail limité ou encore le transfert à un autre poste – brossent un tableau beaucoup plus sombre de la dangerosité du travail chez Tesla pour ses employés. Comme pour les blessures signalées, le taux de blessures graves a aussi diminué dans toute l’industrie en 2015. Dans le cas de l’usine de Tesla, ce taux de blessures graves a explosé pour se situer à 103% de la moyenne de l’industrie, selon un rapport de Work Safe, une organisation à but non lucratif spécialisée dans les questions de santé et de sécurité au travail.

      Le rapport annuel 2018 du Conseil national pour la sécurité et la santé au travail, qui a identifié Tesla comme l’un des 12 lieux de travail les plus dangereux aux États-Unis, qui exposent leurs employés au risque de blessures physiques, a souligné que le taux de blessures signalées était plus élevé de 31% que la moyenne dans l’industrie en 2016, tandis que le taux de blessures graves était plus élevé de 83%. L’an dernier, 722 cas de blessures liées au travail ont été rapportées dans l’usine de Fremont, dont 600 étaient graves.
      . . . . .

  • Israel is using an online blacklist against pro-Palestinian activists. But nobody knows who compiled it

    Israeli border officials are using a shadowy online dossier as an intelligence source on thousands of students and academics

    The Forward and Josh Nathan-Kazis Aug 07, 2018

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/the-blacklist-used-by-israel-against-pro-palestinian-activists-1.6359001

    Last December, Andrew Kadi flew to Israel to visit his mother. As he walked through Ben Gurion International Airport, officials pulled him aside and said that the security services wanted to speak with him.
    Kadi is among the leaders of a major pro-Palestinian advocacy group, and border authorities always question him when he travels to Israel to see his family. This time, however, something was different.

    During his second of what ended up being three interrogations, spanning more than eight hours, Kadi realized that much of what the interrogator knew about him had come from Canary Mission, an anonymously-run online blacklist that tries to frighten pro-Palestinian students and activists into silence by posting dossiers on their politics and personal lives.

    Kadi’s interrogator asked question after question about organizations listed on his Canary Mission profile. A pro-Palestinian organization that Kadi had been involved with but that wasn’t listed on his Canary Mission profile went unmentioned. Hours later, a third interrogator confirmed what Kadi had suspected: They were looking at his Canary Mission profile.

    Canary Mission has said since it went live in 2015 that it seeks to keep pro-Palestinian student activists from getting work after college. Yet in recent months, the threat it poses to college students and other activists has grown far more severe.
    The site, which is applauded by some pro-Israel advocates for harassing hardcore activists, is now being used as an intelligence source on thousands of students and academics by Israeli officials with immense power over people’s lives, the Forward has learned.
    Rumors of the border control officers’ use of the dossiers is keeping both Jewish and Palestinian activists from visiting relatives in Israel and the West Bank, and pro-Palestinian students say they are hesitant to express their views for fear of being unable to travel to see family.
    >> Twitter account of Canary Mission, group blacklisting pro-Palestinian activists, deactivated
    Meanwhile, back on campus, pro-Israel students are facing suspicion of colluding with Canary Mission. The students, and not the operatives and donors who run it from behind a veil of anonymity, are taking the blame for the site’s work.

    The dossiers
    Canary Mission’s profiles, of which there are now more than 2,000, can run for thousands of words. They consist of information about the activist, including photographs and screenshots, cobbled together from the internet and social media, along with descriptions of the groups with which they are affiliated.
    The phrase, “if you’re a racist, the world should know,” appears on the top of each page on the site.
    In addition to the thousands of profiles of pro-Palestinian students and professors, Canary Mission has also added a smattering of profiles of prominent white supremacists, including 13 members of Identity Evropa and a handful of others.
    The site’s profiles appear to be based entirely on open source intelligence that could be gathered by anyone with a computer. But the researchers are thorough, and some of what they post is exceptionally personal. Canary Mission’s profile of Esther Tszayg, a junior at Stanford University whose profile went online in May, includes two photographs of her as a young child and one taken for a campus fashion magazine.
    “It feels pretty awful and I really wish I wasn’t on that website,” said Tszayg, the president of Stanford’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian group.
    Canary Mission’s profile of Rose Asaf, a leader of the local chapter of JVP at New York University, includes nearly 60 photographs of her and screenshots of her social media activities. It went online in November of 2017, when she was a college junior.
    Liz Jackson, a staff attorney at the legal advocacy group Palestine Legal, said that she was aware of one case in which Canary Mission posted old photographs a student had deleted a year before. The student believes that Canary Mission had been tracking her for over a year before they posted her profile.
    Some of what Canary Mission captures is genuinely troubling, including anti-Semitic social media posts by college students. But often, the eye-catching charges they make against their subjects don’t quite add up. A profile of an NYU freshman named Ari Kaplan charges him with “demonizing Israel at a Jewish event.” In fact, he had stood up at a Hillel dinner to make an announcement that was critical of President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
    “It’s really weird when they’re trying to have someone who looks like me [as] the face of anti-Semitism,” said Kaplan, joking that he looks stereotypically Jewish.
    The border
    It’s these profiles that Israeli border control officers were looking at when they interrogated Kadi, who is in his 30s, and is a member of the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Kadi is a U.S. citizen, but his mother and her family are Palestinian citizens of Israel.
    Kadi’s case is not unique. In April, before deporting Columbia University Law School professor Katherine Franke and telling her she will be permanently banned from the country, an Israeli border control officer showed her something on his phone that she says she is “80% sure” was her Canary Mission profile.
    The officer, Franke said, had accused her of traveling to Israel to “promote BDS.” When she said that wasn’t true, the officer accused her of lying, saying she was a “leader” of JVP. He held up the screen of his phone, which appeared to show her Canary Mission profile, and told her: “See, I know you’re lying.”
    Franke, who had previously sat on JVP’s academic advisory council steering committee but at that time had no formal role with the group, told the officer she was not on JVP’s staff. The officer deported her anyhow.
    “Canary Mission information is often neither reliable, nor complete, nor up to date,” said Israeli human rights attorney Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, who represents activists and human rights advocates denied entry to Israel. Schaeffer Omer-Man says that the site, as such, shouldn’t legally qualify to be used as the basis for a deportation decision by border control officers, as it doesn’t meet reliability standards set by Israeli administrative law.
    Yet incidents like those experienced by Franke and Kadi are on the rise. Schaeffer Omer-Man said that clients for years have said that they suspected that their interrogators had seen their Canary Mission profiles, based on the questions they asked. More recently, she said, clients have told her that border control mentioned Canary Mission by name.
    Rumors of these incidents are spreading fear among campus activists.
    “I have family in Israel, and I don’t expect I will be let in again,” said Tszayg, the Stanford student.
    Palestine Legal’s Liz Jackson said that a large majority of people who get in touch with her organization about their Canary Mission profile are mostly worried about traveling across Israeli borders. “That really puts the muzzle on what people can say in the public sphere about Palestine,” Jackson said.
    Israel’s Ministry of the Interior, which oversees the country’s border control agency, did not respond to a question about whether it is ministry policy for its interrogators to use Canary Mission as a source of information on travelers. It’s possible that the officers are finding the Canary Mission dossiers on their own, by searching for travelers’ names on Google.
    But absent a denial from the interior ministry, it’s also possible that the dossiers are being distributed systematically. When Schaeffer Omer-Man reviews her clients’ interrogation files, as attorneys have the right to do under Israeli law, she has never seen a mention of Canary Mission. What she has seen, however, in summaries of the interrogations, are references to material provided by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the arm of the Israeli government tasked with opposing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement worldwide, largely through a secret network of non-governmental organizations that help it defend Israel abroad.
    The Israeli connection
    When Gilad Erdan, the strategic affairs minister, took over his agency in 2015, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, as it is officially known in English, had a tiny staff and a small budget. In just a few years, he has turned it into a major operation with a budget of over $100 million over two years, according to reporting by the Israeli investigative magazine the Seventh Eye.
    At the core of the MSA’s operation is a network of more than a hundred non-governmental organizations with which it shares information and resources. “A key part of the strategy is the belief that messaging by ‘real people’ is much more effective than plain old hasbara [propaganda] by official spokespersons,” said Itamar Benzaquen, an investigative journalist at the Seventh Eye, who has done extensive reporting on the MSA.
    The Forward has learned that the people who run Canary Mission are in direct contact with the leadership of Act.il, a pro-Israel propaganda app that is a part of the network, and has benefited from a publicity campaign funded by the MSA, according to Benzaquen’s reporting.
    The founder and CEO of Act.il, Yarden Ben Yosef, told the Forward last fall that he had been in touch with the people who run Canary Mission, and that they had visited his office in Israel.
    Neither Canary Mission nor the MSA responded to queries about their relationship to each other.
    The operators
    Canary Mission has jealously guarded the anonymity of its operators, funders, and administrators, and its cloak of secrecy has held up against the efforts of journalists and pro-Palestine activists alike.
    Two people, granted anonymity to speak about private conversations, have separately told the Forward that a British-born Jerusalem resident named Jonathan Bash identified himself to them as being in charge of Canary Mission.
    The Forward reported in 2015 that Bash was the CEO of a pro-Israel advocacy training organization, Video Activism, that appeared to have numerous ties to Canary Mission. At the time, Bash denied there was any relationship between the organizations.
    Neither Canary Mission nor Bash responded to requests for comment.
    The response
    As Canary Mission has become an increasingly prominent feature of the campus landscape, students have adapted to its threat. Increasingly, student governments vote on divestment resolutions by secret ballot, partly in an attempt to keep Canary Mission from profiling student representatives who vote in favor.
    Student activist groups, meanwhile, strategically mask the identities of vulnerable members. Abby Brook, who has been a leader in both the Students for Justice in Palestine and JVP groups at George Washington University, said that her fellow activists had strategized about who would be a public-facing leader of the group, and shoulder the risk of appearing on Canary Mission. When her profile went up last year, she was ready.
    “We made strategic decisions within our organization about who would be out-facing members and who would be in-facing members, knowing that Canary Missionwould have different consequences for different people,” Brook said. She said that the names of members of her chapter of SJP who are Palestinian are not listed publicly, and that those individuals have stayed off of Canary Mission.
    “We deliberately keep those people private,” Brook said. “I’m not Palestinian; I won’t be prohibited from being able to go home if I’m listed on Canary Mission. It has a lot less consequences for me as a white person.”
    While Brook’s Palestinian colleagues have been able to hide their identities while being active on the issue, others have chosen not to take the risk. Palestine Legal’s Jackson said that she has fielded questions from students who want to take political action in support of Palestinian rights, but have been afraid to do so because of what being listed on Canary Mission could mean for their families. One student activist told Jackson she wanted to be a leader in SJP, but asked Jackson if getting a Canary Mission profile could damage her family’s naturalization application.
    “I said I don’t know, honestly,” Jackson said.
    Another student told Jackson that she had wanted to write an op-ed about the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, a controversial piece of federal legislation that critics say could limit free speech, but that she was afraid to be published because she wanted to be able to go visit her grandparents in the West Bank, and couldn’t risk being profiled on Canary Mission.
    For students who do find themselves on Canary Mission, there is little recourse. Canary Mission has posted a handful of essays by “ex-canaries,” people who have written effusive apologies in return for being removed from the site. Jackson said that some profiles have been temporarily removed after the subjects filed copyright complaints, but that they were reposted later with the offending images removed.
    There do not appear to have been any defamation suits filed against Canary Mission. The authors of the profiles are careful about what they write, and pursuing a lawsuit would place a heavy burden on the plaintiff. “Students who are naturally concerned about the reputational damage of being smeared as a terrorist usually don’t want to go through a public trial, because that only makes it worse,” Jackson wrote in an email. “It’s tough to take on a bully, especially in court. But litigation is not off the table.”
    Campus spies
    In the meantime, Canary Mission’s utter secrecy has created an atmosphere of suspicion on campuses. While the operatives behind Canary Mission hide behind their well-protected anonymity, pro-Israel students take the blame for its activities, whether or not they were involved.
    A number of students listed on the site who spoke with the Forward named specific pro-Israel students on their campuses who they suspected of having informed on them to Canary Mission.
    Tilly Shames, who runs the local Hillel at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, said that Canary Mission has led to suspicion of pro-Israel students on her campus. “It has created greater mistrust and exclusion of pro-Israel students, who are assumed to be involved in Canary Mission, or sharing information with Canary Mission, when they are not,” Shames said.
    Kaplan, the NYU sophomore, said that he’s now wary talking to people who he knows are involved in pro-Israel activism on campus.
    “I’ll want to be open and warm with them, but it will be, how do I know this guy isn’t reporting to Canary Mission?” Kaplan said. He said he didn’t intend to let the suspicions fomented by Canary Mission keep him from spending time with other Jewish students.
    “I’m not going to live in fear; I love Jews,” he said. “I’m not going to not talk to Jewish students out of fear of being on Canary [Mission], but it would be better to have some solidarity from the Jewish community of NYU.”
    For more stories, go to www.forward.com. Sign up for the Forward’s daily newsletter at http://forward.com/newsletter/signup

  • Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal
    https://theintercept.com/2018/08/01/google-china-search-engine-censorship

    Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, The Intercept can reveal. The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans. (...)

    #Google #GoogleSearch #algorithme #Dragonfly #censure #web #surveillance

  • Saudi Arabia Planned to Invade Qatar Last Summer. Rex Tillerson’s Efforts to Stop It May Have Cost Him His Job.
    https://theintercept.com/2018/08/01/rex-tillerson-qatar-saudi-uae

    THIRTEEN HOURS BEFORE Secretary of State Rex Tillerson learned from the presidential Twitter feed that he was being fired, he did something that President Donald Trump had been unwilling to do. Following a phone call with his British counterpart, Tillerson condemned a deadly nerve agent attack in the U.K., saying that he had “full confidence in the U.K.’s investigation and its assessment that Russia was likely responsible.

    White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders had called the attack “reckless, indiscriminate, and irresponsible,” but stopped short of blaming Russia, leading numerous media outlets to speculate that Tillerson was fired for criticizing Russia.

    But in the months that followed his departure, press reports strongly suggested that the countries lobbying hardest for Tillerson’s removal were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which were frustrated by Tillerson’s attempts to mediate and end their blockade of Qatar. One report in the New York Times even suggested that the UAE ambassador to Washington knew that Tillerson would be forced out three months before he was fired in March.

    The Intercept has learned of a previously unreported episode that stoked the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s anger at Tillerson and that may have played a key role in his removal. In the summer of 2017, several months before the Gulf allies started pushing for his ouster, Tillerson intervened to stop a secret Saudi-led, UAE-backed plan to invade and essentially conquer Qatar, according to one current member of the U.S. intelligence community and two former State Department officials, all of whom declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.

    In the days and weeks after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and closed down their land, sea, and air borders with the country, Tillerson made a series of phone calls urging Saudi officials not to take military action against the country. The flurry of calls in June 2017 has been reported, but State Department and press accounts at the time described them as part of a broad-strokes effort to resolve tensions in the Gulf, not as an attempt by Tillerson to avert a Saudi-led military operation.

    In the calls, Tillerson, who dealt extensively with the Qatari government as the CEO of Exxon Mobil, urged Saudi King Salman, then-Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir not to attack Qatar or otherwise escalate hostilities, the sources told The Intercept. Tillerson also encouraged Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to call his counterparts in Saudi Arabia to explain the dangers of such an invasion. Al Udeid Air Base near Doha, Qatar’s capital city, is the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command and home to some 10,000 American troops.

    Pressure from Tillerson caused Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country, to back down, concerned that the invasion would damage Saudi Arabia’s long-term relationship with the U.S. But Tillerson’s intervention enraged Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and effective ruler of that country, according to the U.S. intelligence official and a source close to the Emirati royal family, who declined to be identified, citing concerns about his safety.

    Later that June, Mohammed bin Salman would be named crown prince, leapfrogging over his cousin to become next in line for the throne after his elderly father. His ascension signaled his growing influence over the kingdom’s affairs.

    Qatari intelligence agents working inside Saudi Arabia discovered the plan in the early summer of 2017, according to the U.S. intelligence official. Tillerson acted after the Qatari government notified him and the U.S. embassy in Doha. Several months later, intelligence reporting by the U.S. and U.K. confirmed the existence of the plan.

    The plan, which was largely devised by the Saudi and UAE crown princes and was likely some weeks away from being implemented, involved Saudi ground troops crossing the land border into Qatar, and, with military support from the UAE, advancing roughly 70 miles toward Doha. Circumventing the U.S. air base, Saudi forces would then seize the capital.

  • Evolution of the Content Management System and the CMS API
    https://hackernoon.com/evolution-of-the-content-management-system-and-the-cms-api-bfdfff86fc5b?

    Founder InterviewTony Spiro, speaking at a local ReactJS Dallas Meetup.Please welcome Cosmic JS to Hacker Noon! Cosmic JS is an API-first content management platform that helps teams of developers and content managers build apps faster together. I personally like their product, and without it, StoryLicensing.com would not be possible. Cosmic provides a web dashboard to manage content and powerful APIs for developers to deliver content to any new or existing application built in any programming language.Today we’re going to catch up with Cosmic JS CEO Tony Spiro to discuss trends in content management, his career path from the agency world to starting his own tech company, and the balancing act of startup life.David: Hey Tony! Could you share some numbers about the traction of Cosmic (...)

    #cms-evolution #cms-api #content-management-api #content-manage-system-api #content-management-system

  • crFRST.io — Crypto trading platform
    https://hackernoon.com/frst-io-crypto-trading-platform-55189a2417ab?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3-

    FRST.io visualizationI got the chance to interview Karl Muth, CEO of FRST.io. They make enterprise grade, trading-desk-ready crypto software. Using their software, a trader can track large and subtle movements of crypto into various wallets and exchanges to get insight into which way the markets are moving. You can also tune your algorithms with their expansive data sets, which include annotated information back to block 1.Karl holds J.D. and M.B.A. degrees, the latter with a concentration in economics from the University of Chicago, as well an M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from the London School of Economics. The founders of FRST brought him in as CEO earlier this year; prior to this, he was CEO of Chicago-based search engine startup Haystack, whose technology helps users find content on (...)

    #bitcoin #crypto-trading #crypto-trading-startup #crypto-trading-platform #cryptocurrency