Depending on your viewpoint, things have changed a little or a lot. Rather than venture helplessly into.that minefield, I would like to introduce a panel of senior women who rose to the ranks of SIS in the Directorate of Operations. Their stories about what it was like then and where we are now are valuable and informative. While there is a lot of laughter in the retelling of their stories, there is also an element of righteous anger.
The sharing economy movement is taking a new stride in the Arab World, and many platforms have taken the initiative of implementing the methods of collaborative economy. We dig deep and scrutinize the factors and the potential which could see this industry grow bigger in the region at a quick rate. Here we offer some successful stories.
The sharing economy in the Arab World has been witnessing an ongoing shift in the trend that has envisaged owning rather than accessing. This shift has turned things around, where now the value of the product in the Arab World day after another has become one of usage- not in its outright ownership anymore; as was the case with mainstream consumer models. Used products are more fashionable, thanks to the popularity of online platforms for buying and selling used goods.
People are also adopting what could be called collaborative lifestyles, and depend on each other in circulating and spreading all what occupy their daily interests and concerns like we have seen in the turbulent upheavals of the Arab Spring where the power of social media and its effect on society have accelerated the rate at which relationships develop and information is shared.
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The sharing economy movement in the Arab World has seen a positive eruption in the recent few years, especially in the last one. We’re beginning to share more and more in the Arab world —; boats (fishfishme); skills (Taskty); carpooling (Kartag); swapping goods (Swaphood ) or selling used goods (krakeebegypt, dubizzle.com, Avito.ma In Morocco, a classified ads website has become the second most-visited website in the country. and Takemine the first online marketplace for peer-to-peer goods sharing in Dubai that will open (launch) soon.
I read “What Keeps Google Awake at Night.” Five good points to be sure. My view is that one big sleep disturber was either overlooked or intentionally skipped. The Information Week article identifies Google’s revenue dependence, the revenue shift riding the mobile revolution, and several other obvious issues. What was skipped? Health. The hiring of synthetic biologists, the smoke screen of Glass, and the Calico play are not trivial actions. The founders are getting older. With age come some darned exciting health issues. My research suggests that the Google founders want to patch up flawed human systems and knock down the bugs and buglets that will cause drive read errors. One popular magazine ran a headline that asked can Googlers solve death? Big issue. Definitely one of the issues about which some Googlers think. See also http://moz.com/blog/what-scares-google
No one in the ballroom came right out and shouted, “William McRaven for elected office!” but the idea hovered like a thought bubble over the OSS Society’s William J. Donovan Award Dinner Saturday night, where the commander of US Special Operations was honored—including by President Obama—and even sounded himself a bit like a candidate.
US special operations commander, Adm. William H. McRaven, greets guests at the annual OSS Society dinner, where he was honored with the William J. Donovan Award. Photograph by Carol Ross Joynt.
The annual celebration commemorating the World War II spy agency and predecessor of the CIA—for the intelligence and special operations communities, it’s the prom and the Oscars wrapped in one—is a time for reminiscing and gossiping for both the smooth-skinned, ramrod-spined young operatives and the retired spies and warriors with more medals than hair or teeth. But McRaven, the Navy admiral who oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL mission that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden and who received the Donovan award, gave this year’s gathering a political edge.
President Obama addressed the audience and the honoree via taped video, his image filling three ceiling-high screens. He called McRaven “one of the finest special operators our nation has ever produced. Few Americans will ever see what you do, but every American is safer because of your service.” Also lauding him in taped messages were two other individuals who were directly involved in the bin Laden mission, former CIA director Leon Panetta and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
A third official who was a player in that historic episode, John Brennan, now director of Central Intelligence, relived the experience in his remarks. He said the deliberations to undertake the mission were “difficult and fraught with uncertainty.” He said there was “a key moment in those deliberations when President Obama seemed to move a step closer to his final decision. It was when Adm. McRaven looked at the President and said, ‘Sir, we can get this job done.’ You could hear a pin drop. It was at that time that everyone in that room knew the decision was made and we were going forward.”
Installed on the afternoon of October 31, ReThink911’s 29-foot by 13-foot billboard will stand tall in the shadow of the New York Times Building throughout the month of November, intriguing 100,000 passersby each day and calling upon the Times to cover this vitally important issue.
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update — being read by you and 71,727 other activists. That's 1,011 more than last month!
The U.N. and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International recently released a flurry of deeply flawed reports on drone murders. According to the U.N.'s special rapporteur, whose day job is as law partner of Tony Blair's wife, and according to two major human rights groups deeply embedded in U.S. exceptionalism, murdering people with drones is sometimes legal and sometimes not legal, but almost always it's too hard to tell which is which, unless the White House rewrites the law in enough detail and makes its new legal regime public.
When I read these reports I was ignorant of the existence of a human rights organization called Alkarama, and of the fact that it had just released a report titled License to Kill: Why the American Drone War on Yemen Violates International Law. While Human Rights Watch looked at six drone murders in Yemen and found two of them illegal and four of them indeterminate, Alkarama looked in more detail and with better context at the whole campaign of drone war on Yemen, detailing 10 cases. As you may have guessed from the report's title, this group finds the entire practice of murdering people with flying robots to be illegal.
Alkarama makes this finding, not out of ignorance of the endless intricacies deployed by the likes of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Rather, Alkarama adopts the same dialect and considers the same scenarios: Is it legal if it's a war, if it's not a war? Is it discriminate, necessary, proportionate? Et cetera. But the conclusion is that the practice is illegal no matter which way you slice it.
