Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink…..
NAIROBI, 9 November 2010 (IRIN) – Fighting between two sub-clans over grazing pasture and water has left 20 dead and thousands of families displaced from several villages in central Somalia, say locals.
“In my own town of Galinsor, about 1,300 families [7,800 people] have been displaced, out of a total population of 5,500 families,” Osman Abdi, an
elder, told IRIN on 9 November. “Many of the families have fled to surrounding villages and are living in the open or sheltering under trees.”
An aid worker in the region told IRIN many of the displaced were nomads who were forced to flee their water sources. “They are now in areas where there are no water points,” he said.
Grazing airy electron opinion, the firing of Denny Blair — especially him of most High Court title — is surely a blog-seduction most likely to touch-off tremulous surface fanning and gasps, whetting unfettered gossip: All fluttering to those inmost whisperings and intimate doings in the sacred precincts of our Imperial Court.
Well what I get is all Imperial Court. I feel like I am channeling Constantinople in 1043 dealing with Irini Doukaina (Cafavy, here). Oh, you did not know how much power women marshaled in 11th and 12th century Byzantium? Perhaps you might want to consider how advanced a “medieval” civilization could be.
Yet they were dealt a bad hand. The Latin West (our ancestors!) seeded such infamous defamation of everything Byzantine that Byzantine reputation still has not recovered. Truth is that Romaioi (what Byzantines called themselves) were an amazingly compassionate and complex civilization compared to every other place on earth. They invented the hospital, social welfare, equal judicial rights for all … and the fork! And only in Constantinople could a woman be emperor. Really.
What I am trying to say is that we begin to look a lot like late modern Byzantines.
In this sense:
We are also compassionate and complex, sophisticated and advanced, and yet we are also plagued by what above all plagued Byzantines: Court politics. Vicious and divisive politics in the 11th century imperial court so undercut the ability of Constantinople to meet non-state threats that the Empire almost fell.
But we are worse than Byzantines. The politics of America's Imperial Court makes the world of Constantinople look prudent, modest, and restrained.
PCMag.com met with RockMelt's founders Eric Vishria and Tim Howes last week for an early look at the new browser software. Entering a competitor into a full field that includes Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera, not to mention an even more direct socially enhanced-browser competitor, Flock, may seem questionable, but Visheria and Howes made a fairly compelling case for it. Their point was that the current all-purpose browsers don't reflect most people's actual usage patterns.
Reinventing the Browser
“At RockMelt we are reinventing the browser for the way people use the Web today,” said Howes. “We think this has changed dramatically from the way people used it just a few short years ago. But all the browsers available today, although they've gotten a lot faster, are still just about navigating web pages. We built features into the browser to address people's three top browsing behaviors: interacting with friends, consume news and information, and searching.”
The US commander in Afghanistan, David Petraeus, has drafted a timetable for the handing over of control of its provinces to local security forces. The news emerged as officials recovered the bodies of five of 16 policemen who vanished a week ago after an apparent Taliban attack on their remote base.
General Petraeus's colour-coded map includes a small number of ”green” areas, designated for handover within six months, the London newspaper The Times reported.
The plan, which will be presented to NATO leaders at a summit in Lisbon on November 19, indicates that the western province of Herat will be handed over early, while NATO forces are expected to remain in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand for at least two more years.
KABUL—Add another group to the list of people with a message for the newly elected U.S. Congress: the Taliban.
In a rambling “open letter” to Congress, the Taliban's spokesman said he wanted to present American lawmakers with “a true picture of the ground realities” of the war in Afghanistan, which he insisted the U.S. can't win.
The spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yousaf Ahmadi, called on Congress to send a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan, apparently ignorant of the fact that representatives and senators visit Afghanistan all the time. But American lawmakers rarely leave heavily guarded U.S. facilities, moving only in armored convoys,…
Phi Beta Iota: While this initiative demonstrates the Taliban's understanding of history–Viet-Nam redux, it also shows their lack of understanding of Washington. We have absolutely no doubt that at least three lobbying firms have a team enroute to Pakistan to make contact and offer their services. They will accept bricks of #4 heroin, no extra charge for laundering currency. We are really surprised Halliburton did not think of this, Brown & Root seems to already have the smuggling channel for the drugs and money in place. Next up: a slick video and some YouTube snippets that go viral, under the broad campaign slogan of “Ground Truth from Afghanistan.”
A federal judge is set to hear arguments on Monday in a lawsuit
challenging an alleged secret Obama administration plan to use lethal
force against an American-born Islamic cleric hiding in Yemen.
In July, US authorities listed al-Awlaki as a “specially designated global terrorist.” According to press reports, he is on a US government “kill list.”
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of al-Awlaki’s father by the American Civil Liberties Union, challenges the government’s authority to carry out the
intentional killing.
SVP of Strategic Consumer Insights and Research, MTV
Posted: November 7, 2010 03:05 PM
Wit was the weapon of choice for millennials at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.
Millennials are often compared to their boomer parents in terms of their penchant for social activism and positive change. Cynically minded social commentators have also characterized the millennials' flavor of activism as “slacktivism” or, more recently, as a “diffuse, click-and-go” activism (see Malcolm Gladwell's article).
On Oct. 30, however, we saw a very different side of this generation.
Millennials gathered in the tens of thousands to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C., to speak out against fear-mongering in politics.
With an economy that's no laughing matter, one might have expected to see a generational temper tantrum, but instead we bore witness to the dynamic that we at MTV have lovingly dubbed “smart ‘n' funny as the new rock ‘n' roll.”
Read rest of this inspiring post….
Nick Shore