position:editor-in-chief

R vs Python for Data Science
GitHub - matloff
▻https://github.com/matloff/R-vs.-Python-for-Data-Science

Norm Matloff, Prof. of Computer Science, UC Davis

Hello! This Web page is aimed at shedding some light on the perennial R-vs.-Python debates in the Data Science community. As a professional computer scientist and statistician, I hope to shed some useful light on the topic. I have potential bias — I’ve written four R-related books, and currently serve as Editor-in-Chief of the R Journal — but I hope this analysis will be considered fair and helpful.

Comparaison selon plusieurs critères. Très intéressant.

US prosecutors to ’help themselves’ to Julian Assange’s possessions | Media
▻https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/19/us-prosecutors-julian-assange-wikileaks-ecuadorian-embassy

Material from WikiLeaks founder’s time in Ecuadorian embassy is said to include two manuscripts

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Julian Assange’s belongings from his time living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London will be handed over to US prosecutors on Monday, according to WikiLeaks.

Ecuadorian officials are travelling to London to allow US prosecutors to “help themselves” to items including legal papers, medical records and electronic equipment, it was claimed.

WikiLeaks said UN officials and Assange’s lawyers were being stopped from being present. Lawyers said it was an illegal seizure of property, which has been requested by the US authorities. The material is said to include two of Assange’s manuscripts.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, said: “On Monday, Ecuador will perform a puppet show at the embassy of Ecuador in London for their masters in Washington, just in time to expand their extradition case before the UK deadline on 14 June. The Trump administration is inducing its allies to behave like it’s the wild west.”

Baltasar Garzón, the international legal coordinator for the defence of Assange and WikiLeaks, said: “It is extremely worrying that Ecuador has proceeded with the search and seizure of property, documents, information and other material belonging to the defence of Julian Assange, which Ecuador arbitrarily confiscated, so that these can be handed over to the the agent of political persecution against him, the United States.

“It is an unprecedented attack on the rights of the defence, freedom of expression and access to information exposing massive human rights abuses and corruption. We call on international protection institutions to intervene to put a stop to this persecution.”

The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-urgent-quest-for-slower-better-news

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5cad4161ece1841a020ad5ac/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/luo-slownews.jpg

In 2008, the Columbia Journalism Review published an article with the headline “Overload!,” which examined news fatigue in “an age of too much information.” When “Overload!” was published, Blackberrys still dominated the smartphone market, push notifications hadn’t yet to come to the iPhone, retweets weren’t built into Twitter, and BuzzFeed News did not exist. Looking back, the idea of suffering from information overload in 2008 seems almost quaint. Now, more than a decade later, a fresh reckoning seems to be upon us. Last year, Tim Cook, the chief executive officer of Apple, unveiled a new iPhone feature, Screen Time, which allows users to track their phone activity. During an interview at a Fortune conference, Cook said that he was monitoring his own usage and had “slashed” the number of notifications he receives. “I think it has become clear to all of us that some of us are spending too much time on our devices,” Cook said.

It is worth considering how news organizations have contributed to the problems Newport and Cook describe. Media outlets have been reduced to fighting over a shrinking share of our attention online; as Facebook, Google, and other tech platforms have come to monopolize our digital lives, news organizations have had to assume a subsidiary role, relying on those sites for traffic. That dependence exerts a powerful influence on which stories that are pursued, how they’re presented, and the speed and volume at which they’re turned out. In “World Without Mind: the Existential Threat of Big Tech,” published in 2017, Franklin Foer, the former editor-in-chief of The New Republic, writes about “a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook” and “a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms.” Newspapers and magazines have long sought to command large readerships, but these efforts used to be primarily the province of circulation departments; newsrooms were insulated from these pressures, with little sense of what readers actually read. Nowadays, at both legacy news organizations and those that were born online, audience metrics are everywhere. At the Times, everyone in the newsroom has access to an internal, custom-built analytics tool that shows how many people are reading each story, where those people are coming from, what devices they are using, how the stories are being promoted, and so on. Additional, commercially built audience tools, such as Chartbeat and Google Analytics, are also widely available. As the editor of newyorker.com, I keep a browser tab open to Parse.ly, an application that shows me, in real time, various readership numbers for the stories on our Web site.

Even at news organizations committed to insuring that editorial values—and not commercial interests—determine coverage, it can be difficult for editors to decide how much attention should be paid to these metrics. In “Breaking News: the Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters,” Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, recounts the gradual introduction of metrics into his newspaper’s decision-making processes. The goal, he writes, is to have “a data-informed newsroom, not a data-led one.” But it’s hard to know when the former crosses over into being the latter.

For digital-media organizations sustained by advertising, the temptations are almost irresistible. Each time a reader comes to a news site from a social-media or search platform, the visit, no matter how brief, brings in some amount of revenue. Foer calls this phenomenon “drive-by traffic.” As Facebook and Google have grown, they have pushed down advertising prices, and revenue-per-click from drive-by traffic has shrunk; even so, it continues to provide an incentive for any number of depressing modern media trends, including clickbait headlines, the proliferation of hastily written “hot takes,” and increasingly homogeneous coverage as everyone chases the same trending news stories, so as not to miss out on the traffic they will bring. Any content that is cheap to produce and has the potential to generate clicks on Facebook or Google is now a revenue-generating “audience opportunity.”

Among Boczkowski’s areas of research is how young people interact with the news today. Most do not go online seeking the news; instead, they encounter it incidentally, on social media. They might get on their phones or computers to check for updates or messages from their friends, and, along the way, encounter a post from a news site. Few people sit down in the morning to read the print newspaper or make a point of watching the T.V. news in the evening. Instead, they are constantly “being touched, rubbed by the news,” Bockzkowski said. “It’s part of the environment.”

A central purpose of journalism is the creation of an informed citizenry. And yet––especially in an environment of free-floating, ambient news––it’s not entirely clear what it means to be informed. In his book “The Good Citizen,” from 1998, Michael Schudson, a sociologist who now teaches at Columbia’s journalism school, argues that the ideal of the “informed citizen”––a person with the time, discipline, and expertise needed to steep him- or herself in politics and become fully engaged in our civic life––has always been an unrealistic one. The founders, he writes, expected citizens to possess relatively little political knowledge; the ideal of the informed citizen didn’t take hold until more than a century later, when Progressive-era reformers sought to rein in the party machines and empower individual voters to make thoughtful decisions. (It was also during this period that the independent press began to emerge as a commercial phenomenon, and the press corps became increasingly professionalized.)

Schudson proposes a model for citizenship that he believes to be more true to life: the “monitorial citizen”—a person who is watchful of what’s going on in politics but isn’t always fully engaged. “The monitorial citizen engages in environmental surveillance more than information-gathering,” he writes. “Picture parents watching small children at the community pool. They are not gathering information; they are keeping an eye on the scene. They look inactive, but they are poised for action if action is required.” Schudson contends that monitorial citizens might even be “better informed than citizens of the past in that, somewhere in their heads, they have more bits of information.” When the time is right, they will deploy this information––to vote a corrupt lawmaker out of office, say, or to approve an important ballot measure.

#Journalisme #Médias #Economie_attention

Mark Zuckerberg’s Plans to Capitalize on Facebook’s Failures | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/mark-zuckerbergs-plans-to-capitalize-on-facebooks-failures

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c81545cd87bdc597819419a/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/Halpern-FB-Pivot.jpg

On Wednesday, a few hours before the C.E.O. of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, published a thirty-two-hundred-word post on his site titled “A privacy-focused vision for social networking,” a new study from the market research firm Edison Research revealed that Facebook had lost fifteen million users in the United States since 2017. “Fifteen million is a lot of people, no matter which way you cut it,” Larry Rosin, the president of Edison Research, said on American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” “This is the second straight year we’ve seen this number go down.” The trend is likely related to the public’s dawning recognition that Facebook has become both an unbridled surveillance tool and a platform for propaganda and misinformation. According to a recent Harris/Axios survey of the hundred most visible companies in the U.S., Facebook’s reputation has taken a precipitous dive in the last five years, with its most acute plunge in the past year, and it scores particularly low in the categories of citizenship, ethics, and trust.

While Zuckerberg’s blog post can be read as a response to this loss of faith, it is also a strategic move to capitalize on the social-media platform’s failures. To be clear, what Zuckerberg calls “town square” Facebook, where people post updates about new jobs, and share prom pictures and erroneous information about vaccines, will continue to exist. (On Thursday, Facebook announced that it would ban anti-vaccine advertisements on the site.) His new vision is to create a separate product that merges Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram into an encrypted and interoperable communications platform that will be more like a “living room.” According to Zuckerberg, “We’ve worked hard to build privacy into all our products, including those for public sharing. But one great property of messaging services is that, even as your contacts list grows, your individual threads and groups remain private. As your friends evolve over time, messaging services evolve gracefully and remain intimate.”

This new Facebook promises to store data securely in the cloud, and delete messages after a set amount of time to reduce “the risk of your messages resurfacing and embarrassing you later.” (Apparently, Zuckerberg already uses this feature, as Tech Crunch reported, in April, 2018.) Its interoperability means, for example, that users will be able to buy something from Facebook Marketplace and communicate with the seller via WhatsApp; Zuckerberg says this will enable the buyer to avoid sharing a phone number with a stranger. Just last week, however, a user discovered that phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication on Facebook can be used to track people across the Facebook universe. Zuckerberg does not address how the new product will handle this feature, since “town square” Facebook will continue to exist.

Once Facebook has merged all of its products, the company plans to build other products on top of it, including payment portals, banking services, and, not surprisingly, advertising. In an interview with Wired’s editor-in-chief, Nicholas Thompson, Zuckerberg explained that “What I’m trying to lay out is a privacy-focused vision for this kind of platform that starts with messaging and making that as secure as possible with end-to-end encryption, and then building all of the other kinds of private and intimate ways that you would want to interact—from calling, to groups, to stories, to payments, to different forms of commerce, to sharing location, to eventually having a more open-ended system to plug in different kinds of tools for providing the interaction with people in all the ways that you would want.”

L’innovation vient maintenant de Chine, en voici une nouvelle mention

If this sounds familiar, it is. Zuckerberg’s concept borrows liberally from WeChat, the multiverse Chinese social-networking platform, popularly known as China’s “app for everything.” WeChat’s billion monthly active users employ the app for texting, video conferencing, broadcasting, money transfers, paying fines, and making medical appointments. Privacy, however, is not one of its attributes. According to a 2015 article in Quartz, WeChat’s “heat map” feature alerts Chinese authorities to unusual crowds of people, which the government can then surveil.

“I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Zuckerberg tells us. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.” By announcing it now, and framing it in terms of privacy, he appears to be addressing the concerns of both users and regulators, while failing to acknowledge that a consolidated Facebook will provide advertisers with an even richer and more easily accessed database of users than the site currently offers. As Wired reported in January, when the merger of Facebook’s apps was floated in the press, “the move will unlock huge quantities of user information that was previously locked away in silos.”

Le chiffrage des messages est loin d’être une panacée pour la vie privée, ni pour la responsabilité sociale des individus.

Zuckerberg also acknowledged that an encrypted Facebook may pose problems for law enforcement and intelligence services, but promised that the company would work with authorities to root out bad guys who “misuse it for truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion.” It’s unclear how, with end-to-end encryption, it will be able to do this. Facebook’s private groups have already been used to incite genocide and other acts of violence, suppress voter turnout, and disseminate misinformation. Its pivot to privacy will not only give such activities more space to operate behind the relative shelter of a digital wall but will also relieve Facebook from the responsibility of policing them. Instead of more—and more exacting—content moderation, there will be less. Instead of removing bad actors from the service, the pivot to privacy will give them a safe harbor.

#facebook #Cryptographie #Vie_privée #Médias_sociaux #Mark_Zuckerberg

We’re losing the history of the App Store
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-03-05-were-losing-the-history-of-the-app-store

TouchArcade’s editor-in-chief on the vanishing legacy of #Mobile games, and why he’s leaving the site to save them

#Publishing

Russ Pitts steps down from Take This, on leave from Escapist
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-02-12-russ-pitts-steps-down-from-take-this-on-leave-from-escapis

Charity co-founder, site editor-in-chief takes hiatus after “diminishing” experience of Gamergate abuse survivor in Twitter fight

#Media

Exploring the Future of Smart Car Technology With Jeremy Kaplan At #ces 2019
▻https://hackernoon.com/exploring-the-future-of-smart-car-technology-with-jeremy-kaplan-at-ces-2

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(L) Attorney Andrew Rossow and (R) Digital Trends Editor-In-Chief, Jeremy KaplanDo you remember watching The Jetson’s on television growing up? I know when I first saw it, the concept of flying cars and even self-automated technology was so far-fetched and beyond the capabilities of the technology then available, that it was the futuristic animated show of its time.But, here we are today in the 21st century where we have conferences like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) where companies from all over the world fly to Las Vegas and debut their new technological innovations to the world.Over the past few years, the questions surrounding Google and Tesla’s self-driving cars have presented a number of questions to the general public. But, the most prevalent question is whether or not with (...)

#self-driving-cars #jeremy-kaplan #smart-cars #ces2019

#Jobs Roundup : Lee Skittrell joins Koei Tecmo as its new marketing manager
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-11-15-jobs-roundup-lee-skittrell-joins-koei-tecmo-as-its-new-mar

Editor-in-chief of PC Perspective joins Intel, Team Dignitas welcomes new executives

Hacker Noon Reader Survey Results
▻https://hackernoon.com/hacker-noon-reader-survey-results-1d2c60573ec4?source=rss----3a8144eabfe

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So sorry it took us this long to do it…. We have our reasons.Four months ago we started this Hacker Noon Reader Survey to improve your experience reading on Hacker Noon. We have been pouring over the results, learning how we can improve our site.It’s a long time coming, but I’m so excited to finally share the results with y’all. To find out who the winners for our 3 prizes, an interview with our editor-in-chief David Smooke, and two 0.5ETH prizes (it was a more glamorous prize when we announced the survey — oh the price of ETH) stay tuned to the end!But first, thank you to our 412 respondents who took time out of your day to answer the survey. Thanks to you, we are much better equipped to design Hacker Noon 2.0. If you’ve read the story we share on our crowdfunding page recently, you know that (...)

#hackernoon #independent-tech-media #net-promoter-score #hacker-noon-nps #hacker-noon-reader-survey

A relire

Wikileaks: Egyptian media and journalists go to Saudi for financing | MadaMasr
▻https://madamasr.com/en/2015/07/05/feature/politics/wikileaks-egyptian-media-and-journalists-go-to-saudi-for-financing

Since the Wikileaks website began posting leaked documents from the Saudi Arabian government, the issue of the Kingdom financing Egyptian media channels, journalists and researchers has garnered major attention. 

While the first group of documents released on the website on June 19 contained details regarding funding requests by pro-regime journalist Mostafa Bakry and religious preacher Amr Khalid, unpublished documents received by Mada Masr, upon an agreement with Wikileaks, has shed light on new names and details.

Requests for funding from the Saudi government varied, and in some cases was in exchange for writing articles, the fees for which were collected from the embassy.

One of the documents, titled “Bill of the representative of Dar al-Helal Institution,” is a memo raised by the head of the media affairs department at the Saudi Foreign Ministry to the deputy minister of culture and media in the Kingdom, requesting the disbursement of a check of US$68,000 to the state-owned Egyptian Dar al-Helal in February 2012 “for publishing a series of weekly articles throughout the pilgrimage season 1432 H on the achievements of Saudi Arabia in renovating and expanding the two holy mosques and other recent projects.”

During the period referred to in the cables, writer Abdel Qader Shohaieb was head of the board of Al-Helal institution, while Hamdi Rizk, a staunch supporter of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government, was editor-in-chief of Al-Mosawar, one of its publications. Al-Helal is considered one of the oldest media publishing houses in Egypt and the region.

Other publications were not as successful in collecting funds in exchange for publishing articles favoring the Kingdom, especially when the request for funding came after publishing without prior coordination.

Plus de 140 artistes (dont une vingtaine de français) de 18 pays, dont des participants à l’Eurovision signent une lettre appelant au boycott de l’Eurovision 2019 si elle a lieu en israel:

Eurovision, ne blanchissez pas l’occupation militaire et les violations des droits humains par Israël
The Guardian, le 7 septembre 2018
▻https://www.bdsfrance.org/plus-de-140-artistes-signent-une-lettre-appelant-au-boycott-de-leurovisio

Boycott Eurovision Song Contest hosted by Israel
The Guardian, le 7 septembre 2018
▻https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/sep/07/boycott-eurovision-song-contest-hosted-by-israel

L-FRESH The LION, musician, Eurovision 2018 national judge (Australia)
Helen Razer, broadcaster, writer (Australia)
Candy Bowers, actor, writer, theatre director (Australia)
Blak Douglas, artist (Australia)
Nick Seymour, musician, producer (Australia)
DAAN, musician, songwriter (Belgium)
Daan Hugaert, actor (Belgium)
Alain Platel, choreographer, theatre director (Belgium)
Marijke Pinoy, actor (Belgium)
Code Rouge, band (Belgium)
DJ Murdock, DJ (Belgium)
Helmut Lotti, singer (Belgium)
Raymond Van het Groenewoud, musician (Belgium)
Stef Kamil Carlens, musician, composer (Belgium)
Charles Ducal, poet, writer (Belgium)
Fikry El Azzouzi, novelist, playwright (Belgium)
Erik Vlaminck, novelist, playwright (Belgium)
Rachida Lamrabet, writer (Belgium)
Slongs Dievanongs, musician (Belgium)
Chokri Ben Chikha, actor, theatre director (Belgium)
Yann Martel, novelist (Canada)
Karina Willumsen, musician, composer (Denmark)
Kirsten Thorup, novelist, poet (Denmark)
Arne Würgler, musician (Denmark)
Jesper Christensen, actor (Denmark)
Tove Bornhoeft, actor, theatre director (Denmark)
Anne Marie Helger, actor (Denmark)
Tina Enghoff, visual artist (Denmark)
Nassim Al Dogom, musician (Denmark)
Patchanka, band (Denmark)
Raske Penge, songwriter, singer (Denmark)
Oktoberkoret, choir (Denmark)
Nils Vest, film director (Denmark)
Britta Lillesoe, actor (Denmark)
Kaija Kärkinen, singer, Eurovision 1991 finalist (Finland)
Kyösti Laihi, musician, Eurovision 1988 finalist (Finland)
Kimmo Pohjonen, musician (Finland)
Paleface, musician (Finland)
Manuela Bosco, actor, novelist, artist (Finland)
Noora Dadu, actor (Finland)
Pirjo Honkasalo, film-maker (Finland)
Ria Kataja, actor (Finland)
Tommi Korpela, actor (Finland)
Krista Kosonen, actor (Finland)
Elsa Saisio, actor (Finland)
Martti Suosalo, actor, singer (Finland)
Virpi Suutari, film director (Finland)
Aki Kaurismäki, film director, screenwriter (Finland)
Pekka Strang, actor, artistic director (Finland)
HK, singer (France)
Dominique Grange, singer (France)
Imhotep, DJ, producer (France)
Francesca Solleville, singer (France)
Elli Medeiros, singer, actor (France)
Mouss & Hakim, band (France)
Alain Guiraudie, film director, screenwriter (France)
Tardi, comics artist (France)
Gérard Mordillat, novelist, filmmaker (France)
Eyal Sivan, film-maker (France)
Rémo Gary, singer (France)
Dominique Delahaye, novelist, musician (France)
Philippe Delaigue, author, theatre director (France)
Michel Kemper, online newspaper editor-in-chief (France)
Michèle Bernard, singer-songwriter (France)
Gérard Morel, theatre actor, director, singer (France)
Daði Freyr, musician, Eurovision 2017 national selection finalist (Iceland)
Hildur Kristín Stefánsdóttir, musician, Eurovision 2017 national selection finalist (Iceland)
Mike Murphy, broadcaster, eight-time Eurovision commentator (Ireland)
Mary Black, singer (Ireland)
Christy Moore, singer, musician (Ireland)
Charlie McGettigan, musician, songwriter, Eurovision 1994 winner (Ireland)
Mary Coughlan, singer (Ireland)
Luka Bloom, singer (Ireland)
Robert Ballagh, artist, Riverdance set designer (Ireland)
Aviad Albert, musician (Israel)
Michal Sapir, musician, writer (Israel)
Ohal Grietzer, musician (Israel)
Yonatan Shapira, musician (Israel)
Danielle Ravitzki, musician, visual artist (Israel)
David Opp, artist (Israel)
Assalti Frontali, band (Italy)
Radiodervish, band (Italy)
Moni Ovadia, actor, singer, playwright (Italy)
Vauro, journalist, cartoonist (Italy)
Pinko Tomažič Partisan Choir, choir (Italy)
Jorit, street artist (Italy)
Marthe Valle, singer (Norway)
Mari Boine, musician, composer (Norway)
Aslak Heika Hætta Bjørn, singer (Norway)
Nils Petter Molvær, musician, composer (Norway)
Moddi, singer (Norway)
Jørn Simen Øverli, singer (Norway)
Nosizwe, musician, actor (Norway)
Bugge Wesseltoft, musician, composer (Norway)
Lars Klevstrand, musician, composer, actor (Norway)
Trond Ingebretsen, musician (Norway)
José Mário Branco, musician, composer (Portugal)
Francisco Fanhais, singer (Portugal)
Tiago Rodrigues, artistic director, Portuguese national theatre (Portugal)
Patrícia Portela, playwright, author (Portugal)
Chullage, musician (Portugal)
António Pedro Vasconcelos, film director (Portugal)
José Luis Peixoto, novelist (Portugal)
N’toko, musician (Slovenia)
ŽPZ Kombinat, choir (Slovenia)
Lluís Llach, composer, singer-songwriter (Spanish state)
Marinah, singer (Spanish state)
Riot Propaganda, band (Spanish state)
Fermin Muguruza, musician (Spanish state)
Kase.O, musician (Spanish state)
Soweto, band (Spanish state)
Itaca Band, band (Spanish state)
Tremenda Jauría, band (Spanish state)
Teresa Aranguren, journalist (Spanish state)
Julio Perez del Campo, film director (Spanish state)
Nicky Triphook, singer (Spanish state)
Pau Alabajos, singer-songwriter (Spanish state)
Mafalda, band (Spanish state)
Zoo, band (Spanish state)
Smoking Souls, band (Spanish state)
Olof Dreijer, DJ, producer (Sweden)
Karin Dreijer, singer, producer (Sweden)
Dror Feiler, musician, composer (Sweden)
Michel Bühler, singer, playwright, novelist (Switzerland)
Wolf Alice, band (UK)
Carmen Callil, publisher, writer (UK)
Julie Christie, actor (UK)
Caryl Churchill, playwright (UK)
Brian Eno, composer, producer (UK)
AL Kennedy, writer (UK)
Peter Kosminsky, writer, film director (UK)
Paul Laverty, scriptwriter (UK)
Mike Leigh, writer, film and theatre director (UK)
Ken Loach, film director (UK)
Alexei Sayle, writer, comedian (UK)
Roger Waters, musician (UK)
Penny Woolcock, film-maker, opera director (UK)
Leon Rosselson, songwriter (UK)
Sabrina Mahfouz, writer, poet (UK)
Eve Ensler, playwright (US)
Alia Shawkat, actor (US)

#Palestine #BDS #Boycott_culturel #Eurovision

Left-wing peace activist Uri Avnery hospitalized in critical condition Haaretz.com - Aug 09, 2018 10:37 AM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/left-wing-peace-activist-uri-avnery-in-critical-condition-in-hospital-1.636

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6362680.1533798508!/image/2769817577.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/2769817577.jpg

Left-wing peace activist Uri Avnery has been hospitalized in very serious condition after suffering a stroke on Saturday and is said to be unconscious.

Avnery, 94, has written opinion pieces on a regular basis for Haaretz. He is a former Knesset member and a founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement who worked as editor-in-chief of the Haolam Hazeh weekly. He has been an advocate for the past 70 years for the creation of a Palestinian state.

Anat Saragusti, a journalist and human rights activist, who is close to the 94-year-old Avnery, posed a wry comment on Facebook late Wednesday in which she wrote of in part: “It can be assumed that he won’t write his weekly column this week He once told me half-kiddingly and half-seriously: ’If you don’t receive my column on Friday, you should know that I died.’ So he hasn’t died, but he’s not conscious. In exactly another month, on September 10, he’ll be celebrating his 95 birthday, and an event is already being prepared in his honor at the Tzavta [Theater in Tel Aviv]. I was there today, hoping for the best, fingers crossed.”

Avnery was the first Israeli to meet with PLO leader Yasser Arafat, in Lebanon in 1982.

In the last article that Avnery wrote for Haaretz, which appeared in Hebrew on Tuesday, he was highly critical of the controversial nation-state law that the Knesset passed last month, and argued that the Israeli nation and not the Jewish nation has its home in Israel. He also mentioned that he had once been among the petitioners in an unsuccessful effort before the High Court of Justice to change the nationality notation in his identity card from “Jewish” to “Israeli.”

Je crois qu’il se passe quelque chose d’important par ici :
▻https://twitter.com/jack/status/1026984242893357056
Pas seulement parce que le patron de twitter explique pourquoi #twitter ne va pas clôturer le compte de #Alex_Jones ni de #Infowars, contrairement à la plupart des autres réseaux sociaux, mais parce qu’il réaffirme le besoin de confronter les opinions et surtout de contrer les fausses informations de manière visible, chose que peut se permettre un twitter où les commentaires sont beaucoup plus lus qu’ailleurs...

If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.
Accounts like Jones’ can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it’s critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. This is what serves the public conversation best.

Je suis tombée là dessus grâce à un tweet de #Olivier_Tesquet qui fait un article super complet pour telerama sur la descente aux enfers des #GAFAM de Alex Jones :

La “Big Tech” à l’épreuve du roi des conspirationnistes

En privant Alex Jones, conspirationniste en chef de l’extrême-droite américaine, de ses comptes Facebook, Spotify ou Youtube, les géants de l’Internet prennent le risque d’ouvrir un débat sur la privatisation de la liberté d’expression.

▻https://www.telerama.fr/medias/la-big-tech-a-lepreuve-du-roi-des-conspirationnistes,n5756062.php

#liberte_d_expression #conspirationnisme #complotisme #extreme_droite ...

Hacker Noon Reader Survey
▻https://hackernoon.com/hacker-noon-reader-survey-14060d66027b?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/854/1*jvC2fNrGzyGIx_70c0IYdg.png

Heyo, awesome Hacker Noon readers. We would like to improve your experience reading on Hacker Noon by having you answer a few simple questions about yourself and your reading preferences. It takes less than two minutes and three lucky winners of this survey will be chosen for prizes, including one interview with Hacker Noon’s editor-in-chief David Smooke to be featured atop Hacker Noon homepage (for most interesting/thoughtful feedback), and two 0.5ETH prizes (randomly selected). Happy surveying!▻https://medium.com/media/b0122d13ee4177fae866c2aa97c4113d/hrefHacker Noon Reader Survey was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this (...)

#read-hacker-noon #hacker-noon-reader #hacker-noon-survey #reader-survey #hackernoon

Turkish court bans 9 books on terror charges

A Turkish government has banned the sale and distribution of nine books, printed by pro-Kurdish Avesta Publications, media reported Sunday.

The ban was imposed after the copies of the nine books were found at a place where two people were earlier detained as part of an investigation into the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Sirnak’s Idil district.

“The said books are the ones which were published as doctoral dissertations at the world’s leading universities between 2003 and 2015. …Among the banned books are the the ones about Yazidis’ holy writings and Battle of Chaldiran. How on earth they are affiliated with terrorism? The other banned book is on the genocide in Iraq. This book consists of official reports of Human Rights Watch… and it is accredited with parliaments of several countries,” publisher’s editor-in-chief Abdullah Keskin told Duvar news portal.

The original names of the banned books are as follows: “ Kan, İnançlar ve Oy Pusulaları; Cesur Adamların Ülkesine Yolculuk; Tasavvur Mu Gerçek Mi? Mahabad Kürt Cumhuriyeti Büyük Güçlerin Politikasında Kürtler 1941-1947; Mağdur Diasporadan Sınır-Ötesi Vatandaşlığa Mı?; Ülkemde Bir Yabancı; Çaldıran Savaşı’nda Osmanlılar Safeviler ve Kürtler; Tanrı ve Şeyh Adi Kusursuzdur: Yezidi Tarihinden Kutsal Şiirler ve Dinsel Anlatılar; Kürdistan Bayrağının Altında; Irak’ta Soykırım.”

http://turkeypurge.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/dsdsdd-1024x675.jpg

The creeping spectre of “white genocide”. The conspiracy theory that was once contained to South Africa is spreading worldwide.

Founded in 2016, and with more than 186,000 members, #Afriforum focuses on the preservation of #Afrikaner rights. Two of its leaders are currently on tour in the U.S. — first stop Texas — campaigning to raise awareness about what they describe as “racist theft” (otherwise known as land expropriation), and farm murders. Pieter Du Toit, the editor-in-chief for HuffPost South Africa, noted earlier this month that while the group has not made public the list of people or media outlets they are meeting with, the issues they are raising have recently been taken up by #Ann_Coulter and #Alex_Jones.

▻https://theoutline.com/post/4486/the-creeping-spectre-of-white-genocide?zd=5&zi=vj6thlgm
#Afrique_du_sud #génocide_des_blancs #racisme #xénophobie

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

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/05/02035620/Warscapes-Cover.jpg

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.

India makes U-turn after proposing to punish ’fake news’ publishers - CNN
▻https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/03/asia/india-fake-news-intl/index.html

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180403210755-01-narendra-modi-super-tease.jpg

(CNN)The Indian government is shelving a rule to punish journalists for publishing “fake news” just 48 hours after its introduction.
The proposed order would have given the government the authority to strip individuals and media organizations of their accreditation — which is needed to go to government functions and makes access to government offices easier — if they received a complaint of reporting so-called fake news, a term that was not specifically defined.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government said the measure was meant to help stop the spread of misinformation throughout the country, but critics swiftly condemned it as an attack on free speech in the world’s most populous democracy.
“Make no mistake: (T)his is a breathtaking assault on mainstream media,” Shekhar Gupta, one of India’s most prominent journalists, tweeted to his nearly 2 million followers. He is the editor-in-chief of ThePrint, an Indian website focusing on politics and policy.

The measure’s introduction was troubling to some who saw it as the latest effort among powerful leaders of Asian democracies to target the free press under the guise of combating so-called fake news, a term popularized by President Donald Trump in his effort to fight negative press coverage.
Malaysia’s Upper House passed a bill criminalizing the spread of fake news this week, the first step in it becoming law. Singapore is also planning legislation to tackle online misinformation. Journalists in Myanmar and Cambodia — two countries the West has invested heavily in to ensure successful transitions to democracy — have been arrested in recent months.
And Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has railed against the media by employing the term on a regular basis. His government has come under fire for reportedly targeting the online news site Rappler over its negative coverage of the Duterte administration’s bloody war on drugs. A presidential spokesman denied the allegations.
India appears to be following a similar path, said Prem Panicker, a prominent journalist who used to be Yahoo India’s managing editor
“There is a worldwide leaning toward hard-right governing style and hard-right leaders, and the corollary to that is that there’s increasing stresses on the press,” Panicker told CNN.
“The single biggest problem is that this is when you want a very free, very vibrant press.”
Despite the fierce criticism of New Delhi’s proposed rule, some of its opponents do believe there’s a need for either more regulation or greater responsibility on the part of publishers.
India has one of the world’s most saturated and fastest-growing media markets, boasting thousands of options in print, television and online journalism.
With that freedom and booming market has come a thriving tabloid culture, which has frustrated mainstream journalists who get lumped in with those peddling misinformation and flouting common standards.

#Fake_news #Asie #Censure

J’essaie de réunir ici quelques liens déjà sur seenthis sur la #persécution de citoyens de #Turquie à l’#étranger, suite à la #purge après le #coup :
▻http://seen.li/d36u
#Allemagne

▻http://seen.li/e8dx
#Belgique #Suisse

Turquie : Erdoğan traque les collaborateurs de Gülen dans tous les Balkans
▻https://www.courrierdesbalkans.fr/Turquie-Erdogan-traque-les-collaborateurs-de-Gulen-dans-tous-les-
#Balkans #Albanie #Bosnie-Herzégovine #purge

cc @isskein

Egyptian pro-government media downplay January revolution
BY BBC MONITORING

Egyptian pro-government traditional media are observed to have downplayed the seventh anniversary of the 25 January 2011 revolution that forced long-standing President Hosni Mubarak to step down.

State-owned Nile News and Channel 1 TV stations focused on the Police Day, which coincides with that of the January revolution, dedicating considerable airtime to this occasion.

Both channels carried a logo for the 66th Police Day anniversary at the upper left-hand corner of the screen and aired parts of President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s speech for this occasion a day earlier.

Privately-owned, pro-government TV channels, such as Al-Asimah (the capital) TV, also dedicated its main evening talk show “Al-Asimah” to criticising key youth activists who played a prominent role in the January revolution, accusing them of “collaborating” with foreign powers to the detriment of the Egyptian state.

On the other hand, Istanbul-based pro-Muslim Brotherhood Mekameleen TV marked the seventh anniversary of the January revolution, dedicating its evening chat show “Egypt Today” to discussing the revolution and the media role.

The channel made special coverage under the title “the revolution continues”, airing footage of the revolution demonstrations, the use of force by the police against protesters and the “martyrs” of the revolution.

Revolution vs Police Day

The state-owned newspapers are also observed to have downplayed the event, focusing on the Police Day instead. The main headlines reflect parts of Sisi’s speech.

Editor-in-Chief of state-owned Al-Gomhouria daily wrote a full-page article under a big headline reading: “25 January an anniversary for whom? For those who made sacrifices and defended the nation or those who sabotaged, destroyed, burned and threatened the existence of the homeland?” Two pictures for Sisi during the Police Day celebration appeared with the article.

State-owned flagship Al-Ahram daily also published a report saying that 25 January revolution “was abducted by the Muslim Brotherhood in collaboration with foreign elements”. The paper added that the “30 June revolution”, in reference to the mass protests that preceded the removal from office of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi by the military in 2013, “restored Egypt”.

Some pro-Sisi editors in privately-owned newspapers also criticised the January revolution.

Managing Editor of privately-owned Al-Youm al-Sabi newspaper, Dandrawy al-Hawary, criticised the January revolution, saying: “How to celebrate two occasions on one day?”

“The 25 January is the Police Day only. If you want, under the pressure of fear, to mark it a day for the January revolution, let it be on 28 January at least to make people remember the size of damage and destruction as well as the state of panic that filled the hearts of the Egyptians and the killings and systematic looting of public and private property,” al-Hawary said.

SOURCE: BBC MONITORING IN ARABIC 1100 GMT 25 JAN 18

Scientists Are Linking Extreme Weather to Man-Made Warming - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-13/scientists-are-linking-this-extreme-weather-to-man-made-warming

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/ihxfIgLQWWvw/v1/1200x800.jpg

Some of last year’s crazy weather — including extreme heat around the world to unusually warm waters in the Bering Sea — can be blamed on man-made climate change, according to a report from a group of weather researchers.

Scientists are a careful lot, and while there’s been plenty of others who’ve blamed the changing climate for weather events, this is the first time the American Meteorological Society has definitively linked the two phenomena. The report was published Wednesday as a special supplement to the group’s annual bulletin, and included contributions from researchers at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Climate change, driven by carbon emissions from human activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution, affected, among other things, the severity of El Nino, coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef and the warmth of the North Pacific Ocean. The report “marks a fundamental change,” said Jeff Rosenfeld, editor-in-chief of the bulletin. “We’re experiencing new weather, because we’ve made a new climate.”

In a separate study Wednesday, scientists from World Weather Attribution found that human-caused climate change made the record rainfall that fell over Houston during Hurricane Harvey in August 15 percent more intense.

After Steve Bannon’s dismissal, pro-Israel hardliners lose an ally in the White House - U.S. News - Haaretz.com
▻http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.807776

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.807777.1503113953!/image/3230503709.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/3230503709.jpg

"ZOA’s own experience and analysis of Breitbart articles confirms Mr. Bannon’s and Breitbart’s friendship and fair-mindedness towards Israel and the Jewish people,” the organization said in a statement. "To accuse Mr. Bannon and Breitbart of anti-Semitism is Orwellian. In fact, Breitbart bravely fights against anti-Semitism.” The organization added that it “welcomes” Bannon’s appointment and wishes him success.

Bannon also received strong backing from Caroline Glick, a Jerusalem Post columnist whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to persuade to join the Likud’s list for the Knesset in Israel’s 2015 election. Glick wrote on her Facebook account that “Steve Bannon is not anti-Semitic. Period. He is anti-leftist.” She added that “despite the ravings of the ADL, which is now a leftist outfit staffed by Jews rather than a Jewish organization staffed by leftists, ’Jewish’ and ’leftist’ are not synonymous.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition also released a statement, attributed to board member Bernie Marcus, offering support for Bannon. “I have known Bannon for many years,” Marcus wrote. “The person that is being demonized in the media is not the person I know. He is a passionate Zionist and supporter of Israel.” Marcus mentioned that during his tenure as the editor-in-chief of Breitbart, Bannon opened an office for the website in Jerusalem, because “he felt so strongly about this and wanted to ensure that the true pro-Israel story would get out.”

#sionistes #sionisme #Israel #Israël #antisémitisme

EU copyright reform is coming. Is your startup ready?
▻https://medium.com/silicon-allee/eu-copyright-reform-is-coming-is-your-startup-ready-4be81a5fabf7?source=user

Last Friday, members of Berlin’s startup community gathered at Silicon Allee for a copyright policy roundtable discussion hosted by Allied for Startups. The event sparked debate and elicited feedback surrounding the European Commission’s complex drafted legislation that would have significant impact on startups in the EU. Our Editor-in-Chief, Julia Neuman, gives you the rundown here — along with all the details you should know about the proposed reform.

‘Disruption’ in the startup world isn’t always a good thing — especially when it involves challenging legislation. Over the past five years, as big data and user-generated content began to play an increasing role in our society, startups have worked tirelessly to navigate laws regarding privacy and security in order to go about business as usual. Now, they may soon be adding copyright concerns to their list of potential roadblocks.

The forthcoming copyright reform proposed by the European Commission severely threatens the success and momentum that startups have gained in the EU, and it’s being introduced under the guise of “a more modern, more European copyright framework.”

On September 14, 2016, the European Commission tabled its Proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (commonly referred to as the “Copyright Directive”) — a piece of draft legislation that would have significant impact on a wide variety of modern copyrighted content. Consequently, it poses a direct threat to startups.

Members of the startup community are now coming together, unwilling to accept these measures without a fight. On Friday, members of Allied for Startups and Silicon Allee — alongside copyright experts and Berlin-based entrepreneurs and investors — met at Silicon Allee’s new campus in Mitte for a policy roundtable discussion. Additional workshop discussions are taking place this week in Warsaw, Madrid and Paris. The ultimate goal? To get startups’ voices heard in front of policymakers and counter this legislation.
Sparking conversation at Silicon Allee

Bird & Bird Copyright Lawyer and IP Professor Martin Senftleben led the roundtable discussions in Berlin, outlining key clauses and offering clarifying commentary. He then invited conversation from guests — which included representatives from content-rich startups such as Fanmiles, Videopath, and Ubermetrics. The result was a well-balanced input of perspectives and testimonials that sparked an increased desire to fight back. The roundtable covered the three main areas affected by the proposed reforms: user-generated content, text and data mining, and the neighboring right for press publishers.
User-generated content

The internet has allowed us all to become content creators with an equal opportunity to make our voices heard around the world. With this transition comes evolving personal responsibilities. Whereas in the past, copyright law only concerned a small percentage of society — today it concerns anyone posting to social media, uploading unique content, or founding a company that relies on user-generated content as part of its business model.

The proposed EU copyright reform shifts copyright burden to content providers, making them liable for user content and forcing them to apply content filtering technology to their platforms. As it stands now, management of copyright infringement is a passive process. Companies are not required to monitor or police user-generated content, instead waiting for infringement notices to initiate relevant takedowns.

New laws imply that companies would have to constantly police their platforms. As you can imagine, this would quickly rack up operating costs — not to mention deter investors from committing if there’s such a inherently persistent and high legal risk for copyright infringement. Furthermore, filtering technology would not exactly promote public interest or media plurality, as an efficiency-based filtering system would be more likely to result in overblocking and censoring (even if unintentional). This result is counter to the expressed aims of the reform.

“Having this necessity to add filtering technology from the start would kill any innovation for new startups, which is the reason why we’re all here and this economy is booming and creating jobs,” said Fabian Schmidt, Founder of Fanmiles. “The small companies suddenly cannot innovate and compete anymore.”

Text and data mining

The proposed reform also blocks startups from using text and data mining technology, consequently preventing the rich kind of data analysis that has added value and yielded deeper insights for growing startups. Copyright law today accounts for lawful access and consultation, however not for the automated process of reading and drawing conclusions. The scraping and mining of freely available texts could give rise to complex, costly legal problems from the get-go — problems that not even the most prudent founder teams could navigate (unless they work to the benefit of research institutions, which are exempt from the measure).

What kind of message does this send out to new startups? As with laws dealing with user-generated content, these measures don’t entice entrepreneurs to turn their seeds of ideas into profitable companies. Nor do they get VCs jumping to invest. Data input from mining and scraping suddenly gives rise to a huge legal issue that certainly does not benefit the public interest.

Senftleben reminded the group in Berlin that these types of legislation normally take several years to implement, and that the proposed policy could have amplified effects down the road as the role of data mining increases. “If this legislation is already limiting now, who knows what kind of text and data mining will be used in ten years and how it will play in,” he said.
Neighboring right for press publishers

The third and final point discussed at the roundtable has gathered the most media attention thus far. It’s the “elephant in the room,” unjustly pitting established publishers against startups. Proposed legislation creates an exclusive right for publishers that protects their content for digital use in order to “to ensure quality journalism and citizens’ access to information.”

Sure, this reasoning sounds like a positive contribution to a free and democratic society. But closer examination reveals that these publishers’ outdated and financially unviable business models are being grandfathered in for protection at the expense of more innovative content models.

It’s not hard to see why this is happening. Publishers have lobbying power, and they are bleeding money in today’s digital climate. “I work a lot with publishers. Their position here in Europe is a little more old school,” said one of the founders present at the discussion. “Their business model and revenues are going down, so they’re going to fight hard.”

Axel Springer, for example, is lobbying for greater protection; they want a piece of Google’s success. But the most interesting aspect of this measure is that it’s unclear how much value it would add for publishers, who already have rights to digital reproduction from the individual content creators employed under contract with their firms. A freelance journalist contributing to Die Zeit, for example, is already transferring digital reproduction rights to the newspaper just by agreeing to publish.

The drafted legislation makes it pretty clear that content aggregating search engines would take a big hit when they would inevitably have to pay content reproduction fees to publishers. But the interdependent relationship between publishers and online search aggregation services makes this legislation unlikely to generate a meaningful revenue stream for publishers anyway: Publishers want compensation for snippets of articles that show up on search engines, and search engines want compensation for bringing attention to them in the first place. In the end, content aggregators would likely just stop their use of content fragments instead of resorting to pay license fees to publishers.

It’s unclear how the proposed legislation could promote media plurality and freedom; instead, it seems to promote market concentration and monopolization of content publishing, potentially stifling free and open access to information.

“I know two small aggregators here in Germany that have given up because of this,” said Tobias Schwarz, Coworking Manager at Sankt Oberholz in Berlin.

What comes next? Turning discussion into action

What is clear now is that copyright law has potential to affect anyone. Startups in Europe, especially, are at risk with these new reforms. As players in the European economy, they have not been present in the policy debate so far. Allied for Startups and Silicon Allee are inviting founders, entrepreneurs, and interested members in the tech community to come forward and make their voices heard. They invite contributions to an open letter to the European Parliament which dives into this topic in more detail, explaining how toxic the Copyright Directive is for companies who are trying to stay alive without incurring €60 million in development costs.

“A lot of startup leaders have their heads down working on their next feature, without realizing policymakers are also creating something that can instantly kill it,” said Silicon Allee co-founder Travis Todd. “But if more startups come to the table and tell others what they learned, they will become more aware of these potential roadblocks and ultimately help change them.”

To find out more information, participate at the next discussion, or share your ideas and testimonials on this policy discussion, please get in touch! Drop a line to hello@alliedforstartups.org, tweet to @allied4startups, or join the online conversation using #copyright4startups.

The news website that’s keeping press freedom alive in Egypt | Leslie T Chang | News | The Guardian
@madamasr

A relire alors que les autorités égyptiennes ont bloqué l’accès au site hier (en même temps qu’à une vingtaine d’autres sites)

▻https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jan/27/-sp-online-newspaper-keeping-press-freedom-alive-egypt

Last modified on Thursday 11 May 2017 12.31 BST

On the afternoon of 17 June 2013, a group of friends gathered in a fourth-floor apartment in downtown Cairo. They sat on the floor because there were no chairs; there were also no desks, no shelves, and no ashtrays. A sign on the door, written in black marker, read “Office of the Artists Formerly Known as Egypt Independent”. What they had was a name – Mada, which means “span” or “range” in Arabic, had been chosen after much debate and many emails between 24 people – and a plan to set up an independent news outlet. Most of them had not seen each other since their former employer, a newspaper called Egypt Independent, closed two months before.

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Lina Attalah, the venture’s founder and editor-in-chief, called the meeting to order. Designers were rushing to finish the website; a team was drafting a business plan; half a dozen grant applications were pending. “The update is: there’s no money,” she said, to laughter, “but we have a lot of promises. I’m working on the faith that the money will be there.” She signed off on 17 articles to be delivered over the next week. Lina is dark-eyed and fine-boned, with long black hair; she speaks in lengthy and well-wrought sentences that suggest a professor teaching a graduate seminar. Nothing in her demeanour betrayed the pressures she felt. The company had no cash to pay its writers. She was covering the rent and furnishing the office out of her own pocket. This would be, by her count, her seventh news venture; many of the previous ones had folded owing to the hostility of successive governments towards independent-minded journalists (“I have a history of setting up places that close”). Although she was only 30 and didn’t have a husband or children, Lina was accustomed to taking care of other people.

This moving photo essay flips the script on race expectations

In a feature titled “Let’s Talk About Race” for O, the Oprah Magazine’s May 2017 issue on race, photographer #Chris_Buck published a photo essay reversing the roles of women of color and white women. Buck, who is white, was commissioned by the editor-in-chief at O, Lucy Kaylin, who curated the feature to encourage more open conversation about race. Kaylin told Mic News that the concept came out of a meeting with Oprah Winfrey herself.

http://api.ning.com/files/9RA3xKfvsue6u-R5kAHLnpEDO1NwbHk-ms61uZzi0QZ4sSGEQOM6V10AOBWMdI-T1BzHdErXkYg-IGqPn2H0O1wMrqIrqSdc/spa.jpg?width=550#.jpg http://api.ning.com/files/9RA3xKfvsucW2ajmzSz1trEdNYrdnqqlQJY5VYgWD7PYHe5w6vIJgca6ZCnX2k6978RCa-cuOpmVZl8rDxIufjurU7AJeaDC/dolls.jpg?width=550#.jpg http://api.ning.com/files/9RA3xKfvsudEOmyGCLGq7WPQOFtDRcJ8BUu9HPe-FJ1ivujsjMi3V74JHoxr1-fKQvdes-surPV6lwfD5Rx0eKBzh5LUoZFL/latina.jpg?width=550#.jpg

#photographie #clichés #racisme #xénophobie #rôles_inversés
cc @albertocampiphoto @philippe_de_jonckheere @reka