The program, which provided millions in direct funding to prodemocracy groups, helped dispatch 13,000 volunteers to observe Egypt’s parliamentary elections in December. Thousands of those monitors, angered by what they said was blatant election rigging, joined the protests. Some became outspoken leaders; others used the networking and communication skills they learned to help coordinate 18 days of rallies.
“The very fact that they saw the fraud firsthand has contributed to them turning from monitors into activists,’’ said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, which has used a share of the US funds to train volunteers.
A little while ago, I decided that I wanted to be more flexible with where I was working, so I started slimming down the files I was keeping and started moving all of my data into the cloud.
This weekend I finally completed that task and all of my work files that I use are now synched up using Dropbox. I still have 2/3's of my space available - but have thrown out a TON of files that I was keeping for no good reason at all.
Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases?The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue.
Alcohol causes nearly 4 percent of deaths worldwide, more than AIDS, tuberculosis or violence, the World Health Organization warned on Friday.
Rising incomes have triggered more drinking in heavily populated countries in Africa and Asia, including India and South Africa, and binge drinking is a problem in many developed countries, the United Nations agency said.
via news.yahoo.com
Plastic bullets and tear gas were used to try and disperse large crowds in major cities and towns, with 30,000 riot police taking to the streets in Algiers alone. There were also reports of journalists being targeted by state-sponsored thugs to stop reports of the disturbances being broadcast to the outside world. But it was the government attack on the internet which was of particular significance to those calling for an end to President Abdelaziz Boutifleka's repressive regime.
Maatkit tools try to make complicated tasks simpler and more reliable. Most of these tasks involve something like gluing together difficult commands inside MySQL. Most of the tools try to do something useful by default. Some of them are only for advanced power users who really know what they’re doing. All of the tools go to great lengths to be careful and safe with your data, sometimes to the point that users think there’s a bug when they’re really seeing unexpected behavior that protects them from some obscure problem they didn’t think of.
The Egyptian military has been notably non-confrontational during the recent wave of protests, defending the right of people to protest and protecting the protesters from attacks by pro-regime forces.
One reason for the military's peaceful response: the unique role it plays in the Egyptian economy. The military owns "virtually every industry in the country," according to Robert Springborg.
via npr.org
When these parties are allowed a role in democratic government, there’s a pattern. Remember, however alarming their ideas about women and Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood and its neighbouring parties represent the people who explicitly rejected the violent option (and were shunned and sometimes attacked for this by the jihadists) because they wanted a place in a legitimate government. There’s zero chance of Egypt’s uprising turning into the 1979 Iranian revolution or the terrorist violence of Hamas; there are no parties, and no Egyptian constituency of any size, seeking a theocracy.
The president of Algeria plans to lift a state of emergency soon that has been in effect for nearly 20 years, the Algerian Press Service reported Thursday.
President Abdelaziz Bouteflika said he would lift the ban in the "very close future," the news service said.
Bouteflika's announcement comes about two weeks after government opponents marched in the North African nation to demand that the ban be lifted. The demonstrators also called for the release of detainees and the restoration of individual and collective freedoms.
LL Cool J's classic Mama said knock you out acapella over The Prodigy's-Stand up the theme music from the movie Kick Ass via soundcloud.com