Key Players – Page 277 – Public Intelligence Blog

NEWSWIRE: United Nations (New York). The Secretary General of the United Nations today called for the death of all pets, but especially dogs and cats. He also called for a 20% reduction in all livestock grown for consumption for each year until all humans adopted a vegetarian diet, citing Francis Lappe Moore's book Diet for a Small Planet as the single most authoritative reference in any language written in all time.

Below is the principal scientific finding, every bit as robust and indisputable as the science of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Secretary General is reported to have said “Now that ClimateGate is old news, it is time for PetGate.”

Full Story Online

Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man's best friend

PARIS (AFP) – Man's best friend could be one of the environment's worst enemies, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.

But the revelation in the book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living by New Zealanders Robert and Brenda Vale has angered pet owners who feel they are being singled out as troublemakers.

The Vales, specialists in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington, analysed popular brands of pet food and calculated that a medium-sized dog eats around 164 kilos (360 pounds) of meat and 95 kilos of cereal a year.

Combine the land required to generate its food and a “medium” sized dog has an annual footprint of 0.84 hectares (2.07 acres) — around twice the 0.41 hectares required by a 4×4 driving 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) a year, including energy to build the car.

. . . . . .

And pets' environmental impact is not limited to their carbon footprint, as cats and dogs devastate wildlife, spread disease and pollute waterways, the Vales say.

With a total 7.7 million cats in Britain, more than 188 million wild animals are hunted, killed and eaten by feline predators per year, or an average 25 birds, mammals and frogs per cat, according to figures in the New Scientist.

Likewise, dogs decrease biodiversity in areas they are walked, while their faeces cause high bacterial levels in rivers and streams, making the water unsafe to drink, starving waterways of oxygen and killing aquatic life.

And cat poo can be even more toxic than doggy doo — owners who flush their litter down the toilet ultimately infect sea otters and other animals with toxoplasma gondii, which causes a killer brain disease.

Continue reading “Journal: United Nations–Death to Pets, Cows & Sheep”

2009/12/222009/12/22

Journal: USAID in Afghanistan

08 Wild Cards, Gift Intelligence, Government, Peace Intelligence

Home > Asia > Afghanistan An Afghan construction worker places mud on a wall for a new building in a school in Taloqan, east of Kundus, April 23, 2009. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters)

USAID: Understaffed and overwhelmed in Afghanistan

Obama's troop surge fails to address how to improve delivery of aid.

A dramatic shortage of program officers as well as auditors and investigators and poor security conditions on the ground have all conspired, the 128-page report concludes, to “significantly impair” the objectives of USAID’s mission, which is to provide economic development and humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan and around the world.

The failure of USAID to effectively monitor the development projects threatens to undermine the U.S. military’s new counterinsurgency strategy and troop surge, which is built upon the effective delivery of aid in the struggle against the Taliban for hearts and minds.

2009/12/222009/12/22

Journal: MILNET Headlines (Selected)

05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, Military

We always do the right thing---we just try everything else first....

AA: Playboy undercover with Dennis Montgomery, who ‘fooled CIA over Al-Jazeera codes'

AA: Our Flip-Flopping Wars

AF: Afghanistan For The Short Term

AF: Allegation: Some Contractors In Afghanistan Paying Protection Money To Taliban

AF: First New U.S. L-3 Spy Plane Due In Afghanistan By Christmas

AF: The Familiar Road To Failure In Afghanistan

IQ: ‘It’s A Whole New Mission’–Iraq: Stryker troops doing detective work

IR: Top US Officer: Force Must Be Option For Iran

2009/12/222010/09/02

Journal: Resources on Terrorism and Jihad

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Analysis, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence

A 9/11 in Indonesia: JI's planned aviation attack: info Noordin Top's laptop

Countering terrorist ideology: the ideological response unit (Singapore)

Global (Terrorism) Pathfinder (Singapore)

The ICPVTR Terrorism Database – Global Pathfinder – is a one-stop repository for information on the current and emerging terrorist threat. The database focuses on terrorism and political violence in the Asia-Pacific region – comprising of Southeast Asia, North Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and Oceania.

In addition to providing the latest information on terrorist attacks and pronouncements, Global Pathfinder also includes over a hundred terrorist training manuals, counter terrorism legislations and conventions, analytical papers on terrorist ideologies, commentaries on terrorist trends and patterns, transcripts of landmark cases, interviews with terrorists as well as photographs from different conflict zones across the world. Further, Global Pathfinder also has a huge collection of jihadi websites, the contents of which are routinely translated and analysed by our analysts.

The Global Jihad Network: Why and How al–Qaeda UsesComputer Technology to Wage Jihad

One of the main architects of the new al-Qaeda is a man named Abu Musab al-Suri. He put down his vision for the future of jihad in a book entitled Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistance, a one-thousand six-hundred page manifesto published on the Internet in 2004.

…he sought “…to transfer the training to each house of each district in the village of every Muslim….making appropriate training materials available to more than a billion Muslims….

Systems Approach To Terrorism: Countering The Terrorist Training Subsystem

Celebi's thesis focuses on the use of the Internet both in general and in the case of the Kurdish group PKK. The work is strongest in its discussion of what the author calls the training subsystem, and in his explication of that system as involving more than tradecraft and being increasingly based online. This training subsystem is seen as having four core functions:

1. The training subsystem creates, intensifies and sustains the competence, commitment and the skills that the terrorists will apply to reach their goals.

2. The training subsystem not only teaches the ways and means, but also justifies them by means of intensive indoctrination.

3. The training subsystem establishes ties to the group and creates a sense of belonging.

4. The training subsystem enables knowledge to be stored inside the boundaries of the system, and facilitates its passing through generations.

2009/12/212009/12/21

Worth a Look: Deep Web Multilingual Federated Search

Analysis, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Technologies, Threats

Deep Web Implements the Multilingual Search that Google Imagines

Donald A. DePalma 17 December 2009
Filed under (Translation & Localization, Translation Technologies)

In an interview with the U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph, Google vice president for search products Marissa Mayer challenged the readership to “Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites.” We spoke with Abe Lederman, CEO of Deep Web Technologies, a technology supplier that already offers this multilingual search.

. . . . . . .

The bottom line: Multilingual search is not just a figment of Google’s imagination. It’s already here — you just have to dig a bit deeper to find it.

Deep Web Press Release

SANTA FE, N.M., Sept. 3, 2009 — Deep Web Technologies is proud to announce development of a prototype of a multilingual translation capability for clients using its federated search applications. An early prototype of multilingual searching was demonstrated to the members of the WorldWideScience Alliance in June of 2009. This new feature, when fully developed and implemented, will translate a user’s search query into the native language of the collections being searched, will translate result titles and snippets back to the user’s original language and aggregate and rank these results according to relevance. The translation process will be seamless, making it simple to search collections in multiple languages from a single search box in the native language of the user.

. . . . . .

Deep Web Technologies (http://www.deepwebtech.com) creates custom, sophisticated federated search solutions for clients who demand precise, accurate results. The tool of choice when needing to access the deep web, federated search performs real-time, parallel searches of multiple information sources, merging the results into one page. Serving Fortune 500 companies, the Science.gov Alliance (http://www.science.gov), the U.S. Dept. of Energy, the Dept. of Defense, Scitopia.org (http://www.scitopia.org), Nutrition.gov, WorldWideScience Alliance (http://www.worldwidescience.org) and a variety of other customers and partners, Deep Web Technologies has built a reputation as the “researcher’s choice” for its advanced, agile information discovery tools

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Deep Web Multilingual Federated Search”

2009/12/202009/12/20

Reference: PK Officer View on AF

08 Wild Cards, Articles & Chapters, DoD

This article is one of two cited by a top US flag officer speaking to COINSOC in Iraq. The other one is Reference: One Tribe at a Time by Maj Jim Gant.

2009/12/192010/09/02

Journal: Pakistani Perspectives

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Taliban Insurgency in Pakistan: A Counterinsurgency Perspective

How counterinsurgents manipulate insurgents’ disadvantage in their own favor would ultimately prove crucial. The task requires vision, will and capacity, but so far the state seems to lack effective strategy on this tactical front. The Taliban insurgency in the tribal areas has regional dimensions as well, with regional and global actors trying to secure their own interests in the area. But ignoring Pakistan’s concerns and regional interests would frustrate the counterinsurgency effort. Pakistan cannot snuff out the insurgency alone.

Exploring the Mindset of the British-Pakistani Community: The Socio-cultural and Religious Context

The study finds that British-Pakistanis are almost all Muslims and have a mainly rural background. Their first generation in Britain was very conservative and did not let the next generation assimilate and become part of British society. There is lack of political, social and economic awareness among British-Pakistanis, many of whom are still confused and divided, not only physically but mentally as well, between their adopted and native countries. Moreover, there are some radical elements amongst this population also. The socio-cultural and religious identities of the British-Pakistani community may become more crucial in their potential to evolve parallel closed societies within the mainstream host society if not brought into the mainstream immediately

Pakistan Jihad: The Making of Religious Terrorism
Dr Eamon Murphy & Dr Ahmad Rashid Malik

Central Asia: Islamists in Prison

Anne Speckhard on delegitimizng terrorism

Impact of War in SWAT Valley on Farming Sector