01 Poverty – Page 21 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/07/28

Marcus Aurelius: Al Qaeda is Back! and The Future of Al Qaeda — Shared Bottom Line? Everything the USG Does Enhances Al Qaeda Appeal!

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, IO Deeds of War, Lessons, Officers Call

Al Qaeda Is Back

Jailbreaks in Iraq. A surge in Syria. A growing presence in Lebanon. The terrorist group’s influence is on the rise, says Bruce Riedel.

TheDailyBeast.com, July 26, 2013

Two spectacular al Qaeda prison breaks in Iraq, freeing over 500 of its members in two separate prisons simultaneously this week, demonstrate the group is back with a vengeance. Al Qaeda’s Iraq branch is also the moving force behind the jihadist success in Syria. The resurgence of al Qaeda in Iraq has sobering implications for what is likely to follow the drawdown of NATO forces in Afghanistan for the al Qaeda mother ship in Pakistan.

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The Future of Al Qaeda

PDF (88 Pages): 2013-07-28 Future of Al Qaeda

EXTRACT:

Th e speed of change throughout the Middle East and North Africa since 2011 has demonstrated that a policy of Soviet-era containment manifested since the Cold War by support for repressive dictatorships that suppressed, rather than emancipated their populations, catalysed the appeal of Al-Qaeda. Instead, as the Arab Spring has shown, populations desire economic growth, employment and good governance in the place of the defi cient development outcomes, conflict and militancy that characterise life in so much of this region. As the recently released US National Strategy for Counterterrorism elucidates, a comprehensive approach to tackling Al-Qaeda must include “objectives such as promoting responsive governance and respect for the rights of citizens, which will reduce Al-Qaeda’s resonance and relevancy.”149

2013/07/19

SchwartzReport: Parents Struggle to Afford Food in USA

01 Poverty, 07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude

I find the food trend in the U.S. utterly shameful. It says something really sad about us as a culture. Click through to see the charts which are very helpful.

In U.S., Single-Parent Households Struggle More to Buy Food
JESSICA STUTZMAN and ELIZABETH MENDES – The Gallup Organization

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the U.S., 31% of single-parent households report times in the past 12 months when they struggled to afford food, much more than the 19% of two-parent households who say the same, according to an analysis of adults aged 18 to 50. Single-parent households also report greater difficulty affording food than do unmarried and single adults who do not have children. But, in households with two adults, the percentage who struggled at times to afford food is the same — 19% — regardless of the presence of children in the home.

2013/07/17

Neal Rauhauser: Are Syrian and Iraqi Conflicts Merging? Is Iran Gaining a Corridor to the Mediterranean?

01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Terrorism

UN envoy: Iraq and Syrian conflicts are merging

That headline appeared in my inbox earlier and I have been dreading it. The Syrian civil war has spilled over into Lebanon, it’s encroaching on Turkey’s territory, and it’s set off troubles in neighboring Iraq, which are now merging into an end to end regional threat.

Let’s take a look at how things got this way. The Ottoman empire laid claim to Syria and Iraq between 1512 and 1566.

Phi Beta Iota: A well illustrated historical overview with an itemization of current country by country one liners.

2013/06/29

SchwartzReport: Affirmative Action Needed for Poor of Every Kind

01 Poverty, 07 Other Atrocities

This is a sobering analysis of one of the principal myths we tell ourselves about America.

It's Hard to Make It in America
LANE KENWORTHY, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona – Foreign Affairs

2013/06/20

Patrick Meier: Using Big Data to Inform Poverty Reduction Strategies — Data Science for Social Good: Not Cognitive Surplus but Cognitive Mismatch

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Health, 11 Society, Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial

Using Big Data to Inform Poverty Reduction Strategies

My colleagues and I at QCRI are spearheading a new experimental Research and Development (R&D) project with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) team in Cairo, Egypt. Colleagues at Harvard University, MIT and UC Berkeley have also joined the R&D efforts as full-fledged partners. The research question: can an analysis of Twitter traffic in Egypt tell us anything about changes in unemployment and poverty levels? This question was formulated with UNDP’s Cairo-based Team during several conversations I had with them in early 2013.

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Data Science for Social Good: Not Cognitive Surplus but Cognitive Mismatch

I’ve spent the past 12 months working with top notch data scientists at QCRI et al. The following may thus be biased: I think QCRI got it right. They strive to balance their commitment to positive social change with their primary mission of becoming a world class institute for advanced computing research. The two are not mutually exclusive. What it takes is a dedicated position, like the one created for me at QCRI. It is high time that other research institutes, academic programs and international computing conferences create comparable focal points to catalyze data science for social good.

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2013/06/07

Paul Craig Roberts: Alternative Negative View of Latest Jobs Report

01 Poverty, 03 Economy

June 7, 2013. The payroll jobs report for May released today continues the fantasy.

Goods producing jobs declined, with manufacturing losing another 4,000 jobs, but the New Economy produced 179,000 service jobs.

Are these jobs the high-powered, high-wage “innovation jobs” that economists promised would be our reward from Globalism. I’m afraid not.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs created are the usual lowly paid non-exportable domestic service jobs–the jobs of a third world country.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: Alternative Negative View of Latest Jobs Report”

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