DXPG

Total Pageviews

Monday, September 30, 2013

A Detained Egyptian-American Activist’s Letter to His Mother

As our colleague David Kirkpatrick reports, smuggled letters from three North Americans detained during Egypt’s security crackdown last month “offer a rare outsiders’ perspective on longstanding Egyptian prison conditions.”

One letter, written by the Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani and John Greyson, a filmmaker, was released on Saturday. Below is the complete text of a second letter, from Mohamed Soltan, an Egyptian-American activist who was shot during a raid on an Islamist sit-in in Cairo and then detained by Egypt’s military-led government.

My Dearest Mama,

I pray that this letter finds you in the best of health and the highest of spirits. Not often do we find ourselves in circumstances that prevent us from communicating with our loved ones, but unfortunately that is my current situation. As I sit in my cell, isolated from the entire world, I write this letter with the sincere hope that it finds its way to you, and conveys to you how much I love you, and long for your embrace.

Mama, I know you have many questions about what happened to me and how I ended up in this situation. Two weeks ago, the police stormed our home and arrested me and my guests who were visiting following a surgery to remove a bullet lodged in my arm from a gunshot wound I suffered in Rabaa on August 14, 2013. We were taken to a police station and tossed into a room nicknamed ‘The Fridge,” which was a room without seats, benches, windows, and lights. I was not allowed a phone call, nor any communication with a lawyer, with one guard quipping that he could get me anything I wanted, drugs, alcohol, prostitutes. Just not due process.

The next morning the officers blindfolded me and led me to a room where a man I could not see asked me a series of questions about our home, our family, and our reasons for being in the country. I was then told I would be formally charged with 6 crimes: funding a terrorist organization; membership in a terrorist organization; membership in an armed militia; disturbing the peace; falsifying and spreading rumors about the internal affairs of Egypt; and finally, the killing of protestors. I was completely shocked that such charges, none of which had any basis in reality, would be so casually brought against me, and thought of the future plans I had for my career, and family, and thought that they would all be so casually ruined by this sham I was being subjected to.

The brutality with which I have been treated has been mind boggling. During the day, soldiers and police would get in two straight lines, and we would have to run in between them as they beat us with rocks and sticks. They roused anger amongst the officers by falsely proclaiming that we had killed police officers. The officers stripped off our pants and shirts as they beat us with clubs. They put us in jail cells with what must have been 60 other inmates, and it was terribly hot and water was not made available to us. I saw an inmate suffer a heart attack right before my eyes and not receive proper medical attention. The surgical wound on my arm was open and oozing, and not one of the guards seemed to care because I was labeled a political prisoner.

I am moved frequently, precluding visits from my extended family here in Egypt, as well as the American Embassy in Cairo. The police officers routinely exhibit great amount of disdain towards us. One officer sarcastically shared with a fellow officer that he was confused as to why they hadn’t just shoot us dead and that he hoped we would attempt to escape so they could hunt us like chickens and kill us. At one of the prisons, I was handcuffed to another inmate, mandating that when I used the bathroom I had to take him in with me.

My fellow inmates aren’t members of the Muslim Brotherhood, nor am I. My fellow inmates are the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the ill, the homeless. In short, the forgotten. One fellow inmate is an 11 year old accused of theft, another a man picked up while visiting relatives in jail, and yet another a former government employee forced to take the rap for more senior officials. These men’s freedom does not threaten national security or public safety; they threaten the financial security of those that imprison them. 200 Egyptian pounds are paid to the prosecutor for every Egyptian he puts in a prison. The culture of corruption in Egypt is thriving and is more ingrained and widespread than ever.

Mama, I do not tell you these things to make you fret. You raised me as a proud American and an Egyptian. My American identity has afforded me the opportunity to taste freedom, to breathe its limitless air, and to enjoy the liberties given to me. My Egyptian identity sincerely desires those very same privileges, and to witness Egyptians be deprived of those rights motivates me to persevere and to work towards their cause. Khalil Gibran once said that birds don’t build their nests within a cage so that their offspring don’t inherit slavery. These are the principles that the American founding fathers also spoke highly of. The people of Egypt, have the natural right to freedom.

Mama, it is my hope that we will be reunited again, and I can rest my head on your lap, as the family gathers and rejoices with happiness. My heart hurts to see all your faces. Know that you, father, and my siblings are in each and every one of my prayers. I love you all.

Your loving son,

Mohamed Soltan



Iran’s Foreign Minister Calls the Holocaust ‘a Heinous Crime’ and ‘a Genocide’

Video of Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, discussing his country’s nuclear program, relations with the United States and the Holocaust with ABC News on Sunday.

Iran’s foreign minister insisted on Sunday that his country does not deny the historical reality of the Holocaust, which he called “a heinous crime,” and “a genocide,” which “must never be allowed to be repeated.”

Near the end of an interview with ABC News that was otherwise concerned with negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and the prospect of improved relations with the United States, Iran’s chief diplomat, Mohammad Javad Zarif, was challenged on his claim during a Twitter conversation about the Holocaust last month that “Iran never denied it.” He argued that a statement calling the Holocaust a “myth” still posted on the English-language Web site of Iran’s leader, Ayatllah Ali Khamenei, was poorly translated from Persian.

Mr. Zarif, who is fluent enough in both American culture and English to have included a reference to the film “Lost in Translation” in his response, skirted around the convening of a state-supported conference for Holocaust deniers in Tehran in 2006, and referred to a series of previous remarks by Iranian officials on Israel and the Holocaust that have set off disputes about the parsing Persian remarks and metaphors.

I have spoken to the leader on this issue; he rejects and condemns the killing of innocent people…. No, the Holocaust is not a myth. Nobody’s talking about a myth. If it’s said â€" I haven’t seen it â€" if it’s there it’s a bad translation, and it is translated out of context and they are using it…. He was talking about the reaction to somebody talking about a historical faâ€"incident and requiring research about that historical incident, and said, ‘What is it that people are so upset that people are simply asking that we should do some studies of that?’

But, you see, this is the problem when you translate something from Persian to English, you may lose something â€" as the film goes, ‘Lost in Translation’ â€" you may lose some of the meaning. This has been unfortunately the case several times over.

Mr. Zarif then took up an argument made by Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, last week: the claim that Israel has used the mass murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany to shield the Middle Eastern state from criticism of its treatment of the Palestinians.

The point is: we condemn the killing of innocent people, whether it happened in Nazi Germany or whether it’s happening in Palestine. One crime, however heinous â€" and Holocaust was a heinous crime, it was a genocide, it must never be allowed to be repeated â€" but that crime cannot be, and should not be, a justification to trample the rights of the Palestinian people for 60 years. We should abandon this game and start recognizing the fact that without respect for the rights of the Palestinians, we will never have peace in our region.

Asked if the translation of the leader’s remarks would be changed on his Web site, Mr. Zarif said, “I will talk to them.” One day later, the translation remains on Khamenei.ir, unchanged, along with several similar statements.



Saturday, September 28, 2013

Canadians Detained in Cairo Describe Beatings in Captivity

In a letter from a small jail cell in Cairo, two Canadian men who were swept up in the security crackdown by Egypt’s military-led government last month describe the brutal and “ridiculous conditions” in which they have been held without charge for six weeks.

The men, Dr. Tarek Loubani and John Greyson, were arrested during clashes in Cairo on Aug. 16, when they stopped to ask police officers for directions to their hotel after the 7 p.m. curfew. As my colleague Liam Stack reported, they were passing through Egypt on their way to the Gaza Strip, where Mr. Loubani, a professor of emergency medicine at Western University in London, Ontario, intended to provide training to Palestinian doctors as part of a humanitarian mission. Mr. Greyson, a professor at York University in Toronto and a well-known filmmaker, was documenting the trip to Gaza.

They have been detained without charges since then, but an Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman told the Toronto Star on Friday that they would soon be charged, citing what he described as evidence on a memory stick that showed they had recorded some of the crackdown.

Here is the complete text of the letter written by Dr. Loubani and Mr. Greyson from Tora Prison outside Cairo, released by relatives and friends campaigning for their release.

We are on the 12th day of our hunger strike at Tora, Cairo’s main prison, located on the banks of the Nile. We’ve been held here since Aug. 16 in ridiculous conditions: no phone calls, little to no exercise, sharing a 3m x 10m cell with 36 other political prisoners, sleeping like sardines on concrete with the cockroaches; sharing a single tap of earthy Nile water.

We never planned to stay in Egypt longer than overnight. We arrived in Cairo on the 15th with transit visas and all the necessary paperwork to proceed to our destination: Gaza. Tarek volunteers at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, and brings people with him each time. John intended to shoot a short film about Tarek’s work.

Because of the coup, the official Rafah border was opening and closing randomly, and we were stuck in Cairo for the day. We were carrying portable camera gear (one light, one microphone, John’s HD Canon, two Go-Pros) and gear for the hospital (routers for a much-needed Wifi network and two disassembled toy-sized helicopters for testing the transportation of medical samples).

Because of the protests in Ramses Square and around the country on the 16th, our car couldn’t proceed to Gaza. We decided to check out the Square, five blocks from our hotel, carrying our passports and John’s HD camera.

The protest was just starting - peaceful chanting, the faint odour of tear gas, a helicopter lazily circling overhead - when suddenly calls of “doctor.” A young man carried by others from God-knows-where, bleeding from a bullet wound. Tarek snapped into doctor mode and started to work doing emergency response, trying to save lives, while John did video documentation, shooting a record of the carnage that was unfolding. The wounded and dying never stopped coming. Between us, we saw over fifty Egyptians die: students, workers, professionals, professors, all shapes, all ages, unarmed. We later learned the body count for the day was 102.

We left in the evening when it was safe, trying to get back to our hotel on the Nile. We stopped for ice cream. We couldn’t find a way through the police cordon though, and finally asked for help at a check point.

That’s when we were: arrested, searched, caged, questioned, interrogated, videotaped with a ‘Syrian terrorist,’ slapped, beaten, ridiculed, hot-boxed, refused phone calls, stripped, shaved bald, accused of being foreign mercenaries. Was it our Canadian passports, or the footage of Tarek performing C.P.R., or our ice cream wrappers that set them off? They screamed ‘Canadian’ as they kicked and hit us. John had a precisely etched bootprint bruise on his back for a week.

We were two of 602 people arrested that night, all 602 potentially facing the same grab-bag of ludicrous charges: arson, conspiracy, terrorism, possession of weapons, firearms, explosives, attacking a police station. The arrest stories of our Egyptian cellmates are remarkably similar to ours: Egyptians who were picked up on dark streets after the protest, by thugs or cops, blocks or miles from the police station that is the alleged site of our alleged crimes.

We’ve been here in Tora prison for six weeks, and are now in a new cell (3.5m x 5.5m) that we share with ‘only’ six others. We’re still sleeping on concrete with the cockroaches, and still share a single tap of Nile water, but now we get (almost) daily exercise and showers. Still no phone calls.

The prosecutor won’t say if there’s some outstanding issue that’s holding things up. The routers, the film equipment, or the footage of Tarek treating bullet wounds through that long bloody afternoon? Indeed, we would welcome our day in a real court with the real evidence, because then this footage would provide us with our alibi and serve as a witness to the massacre.

We deserve due process, not cockroaches on concrete. We demand to be released.

Peace, John & Tarek

Mohammed Loubani, the detained doctor’s brother, explained in an email to reporters that supporters of the two men had initially withheld their letter from jail, hoping that they would eventually be released. That changed following the report that the two men might now be charged.

“If the Egyptian government wants to claim that Tarek and John are being held in accordance with a free and fair judicial process,” Mr. Loubani wrote, “they will have to address why Tarek and John were beaten by Egyptian police after being arrested â€" their bruises were documented by Canadian consular staff who urged us to keep quiet â€" and why providing medical aid to critically injured Egyptians is a grounds for their detention.”



Friday, September 27, 2013

Russian News Sites Protest Detention of Journalists With Greenpeace Activists

A Russian court on Thursday ordered that 22 members of the Greenpeace team that protested Arctic drilling by trying to scale a state-run oil rig may spend up to two months in detention in a Murmansk jail, while investigators decide whether to charge them with committing an act of piracy.

Among the activists were two journalists: Kieron Bryan, a British videographer who formerly worked for The Times of London, and Denis Sinyakov, a well-known Moscow-based freelance photographer, whom their colleagues and international organizations say have been jailed for merely doing their jobs. Mr. Sinyakov is a former Reuters photojournalist who has been granted behind-the-scenes access by protest groups including Pussy Riot and Femen.

Reporters Without Borders called on the Russian government to release both photojournalists. And more than a dozen independent Russian media sites responded to the detention of Mr. Sinyakov with a literal blackout: covering all the images on their sites with black squares on Friday as a sign of protest.

The protest included Russia’s most popular radio station, Ekho Moskvy; popular magazines, including one of the country’s top photography weeklies; an Internet television station; the independent newspaper that published Anna Politkovskaya’s writings; and several of Russia’s most popular Internet sites.

For a short time even NTV, a conservative, pro-Kremlin television station that has shown vitriolic documentaries against Russian opposition leaders, joined the protest, to the surprise of many.

Critics have contended that the Russian government overreacted to the protest last week. Many pointed at video recorded by the Russian Coast Guard that showed two of the activists dangling precariously from the oil platform as pressurized water slammed against them from above and law enforcement members tugged on them from below.

Video of the Greenpeace action released by the Russian Coast Guard.

“I’m coming down! I’m coming down!” one of the activists, Sini Saarela from Finland, could be heard yelling above the roar of the waves in the video.

Ms. Saarela was one of eight members of the 30-person crew who still has not been formally arrested by a Russian court, though she remains in police custody.

The police opened an investigation into the protest on Tuesday, and a spokesman for the powerful state Investigative Committee said that all of the participants in the protest, regardless of nationality, would be investigated for what he called an “encroachment on the sovereignty” of Russia.

Mr. Sinyakov, pictured handcuffed in a cage for criminal defendants, argued that he had not participated in the demonstration or broken the law, according to Yulia Bragina of Sky News.

A judge decided that Mr. Sinyakov posed a flight risk, as he traveled regularly and did not have a place of residence in Murmansk. Mr. Sinyakov replied that he is an internationally published photographer with a wife and a child in Moscow. He offered to travel to Murmansk for the hearings. He also pointed out that his passport and equipment had been seized.

“My weapon is a camera,” he added. “I did not poke a hole in the boats, on the contrary, Greenpeace’s boats were punctured. I cannot answer for the actions of the captain of the icebreaker.”

Some journalists covering the hearing were struck by the sentence, the first of 30 decisions concerning the activists that were handed down. Some had traveled on the Greenpeace boat last year, when it carried out a similar demonstration at the same oil rig.

Other photographers began holding individual pickets outside the main office of the Investigative Committee, the only form of public protests that can be held in Russia without prior sanction. Among them was Mr. Sinyakov’s wife, Alina Zhiganova.

Ilya Varlamov, a photographer who is friends with Mr. Sinyakov and has one of Russia’s most popular photoblogs, said that photographers were usually released quickly by police when they were detained at protests.

“It seems like Denis just ended up in a dangerous spot; nobody was trying to figure out who was a journalist, who wasn’t,” Mr. Varlamov said by telephone. “This is the first time I remember something like this happening in Russia. Sure, there have been detentions of journalists, but they’d always release them.”

Mr. Varlamov said that Mr. Sinyakov had taken his place aboard the Arctic Sunrise at the last minute.

“The trip that he went on, that was supposed to be me,” Mr. Varlamov said. “Denis couldn’t go, he asked me if I could go and shoot. It didn’t work out for me, so Denis went, and this is what happened. It was probably supposed to be me in his place.”

Follow Andrew Roth on Twitter @ARothNYT.



Details of Conversation With Obama Deleted From Twitter Account in Rouhani’s Name

According to Robert Windrem of NBC News, an Iranian who witnessed Friday’s historic conversation between the presidents of the United States and Iran “was giddy” describing it a short time later.

Excitement about the diplomatic breakthrough among President Hassan Rouhani’s aides â€" perhaps followed by second thoughts about diplomatic etiquette or how it might play back home â€" could also explain why a rapid-fire series of updates divulging details of the conversation were posted on the @HassanRouhani Twitter account and then deleted a short time later.

A screenshot of an update to a Twitter account maintained in the name of Iran's president that was posted and then deleted on Friday afternoon. A screenshot of an update to a Twitter account maintained in the name of Iran’s president that was posted and then deleted on Friday afternoon.

Luckily for posterity, before those updates were removed, and replaced with more sober messages, several followers retweeted them and Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed captured part of the stream in a screenshot.

Before seven updates to a Twitter account run in the name of Iran's president were deleted Friday afternoon, a Buzzfeed journalist captured them in a screenshot. Before seven updates to a Twitter account run in the name of Iran’s president were deleted Friday afternoon, a Buzzfeed journalist captured them in a screenshot.

Another of the deleted updates, captured by The Lede, described the two presidents wishing each other farewell in their own languages. Mr. Rouhani offering the American blessing, “Have a nice day!” and Mr. Obama responding with the Persian word for goodbye, “Khodahafez” â€"literally, “May God protect you.”

While the brief updates that later replaced those initial messages were generally dry, a hint of the excitement inside the Iranian delegation did seem to infuse one tweet remaining in the @HassanRouhani feed, a photograph of a beaming Mr. Rouhani on board the plane that would take him back home.

The photograph, shot by someone standing directly in front of Mr. Rouhani and quickly posted online, also seemed to confirm that the account, which the Iranian president has not directly acknowledged as his own, is at least run by someone very close to him.

That echoes what the Iranian-American writer Hooman Majd reported earlier this month, after he helped set up an NBC News interview with Mr. Rouhani in Tehran.

As my colleague Thomas Erdbrink reports from Tehran, the flurry of activity on the social network following the phone call ended with the Iranian president’s account retweeting a message from the State Department. That update from Washington hailed the presidential-level dialogue and the meeting on Thursday between Secretary of State John Kerry and Mr. Rouhani’s Twitter-fluent foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

A screenshot taken Friday evening of the @HassanRouhani Twitter account maintained in the name of Iran's president. A screenshot taken Friday evening of the @HassanRouhani Twitter account maintained in the name of Iran’s president.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Pakistan, Citing Religious and Social Values, Bans L.G.B.T. Web Site

The Queer Pakistan Web site was meant to be a virtual refuge for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in a religiously conservative country where homosexuality is illegal.

But this week the Web site, queerpk.com, said it was shut down by the Pakistani authorities, who reportedly said that the content was against Islam and the values of Pakistani society. The administrators of the Web site responded by taking measures to work around the ban, which they said drove up traffic to the site after they redirected it.

Since it was founded in July, Queer Pakistan has served as an online portal where gays, bisexuals, transgender individuals and lesbians could meet and get advice. A series of messages on the site’s online support group suggests both the risks and confusion of users reaching out for support, some of them anonymously, using only initials or apparently using pseudonyms.

“I am new to this group and I am a lost soul,” said one person who wrote in seeking advice from “professionals that can help me with my confusion.” Another person wrote asking for “treatment.” There were also questions about health issues, or whether there were lesbians in Lahore and Karachi.

The site featured an online television section of gay short films with subtitles in Urdu. But it also tracked homophobia in the media and in other public forums in Pakistan, like the remarks by a Pakistani television figure who said transgender people should be killed.

The banning of the Queer Pakistan Web site has renewed attention on Pakistan’s gay and lesbian citizens, just as its establishment in July did. Even though homosexuality is outlawed in Pakistan and is considered repugnant to the tenets of Islam, it is privately tolerated in some sections of society, and the law is rarely brought to bear against people for homosexual behavior.

In August, a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which Queer Pakistan linked to on its Facebook account, quoted Pakistani gays and lesbians describing what they must do to live in their society, including taking part in invitation-only online support groups and arranging marriages of convenience with members of the opposite gender. It quoted a researcher, Qasim Iqbal, as saying:

Gay men will make every effort to stop any investment in a same-sex relationship because they know that one day they will have to get married to a woman. After getting married they will treat their wives well but they will continue to have sex with other men.

A lesbian named Beena, in Lahore, said she and her partner were considering arranging a marriage with two gay men, and pooling their money to share a two-family house. She was quoted as saying:

Gay rights in America came after women had basic rights. You don’t see that in Pakistan. You are not allowed a difference of opinion here. My father is a gentleman but I wouldn’t put it past him to put a bullet through my head. I’m all for being ‘true to myself’ but I don’t want to die young.

While homosexuals in Pakistan already use dating Web sites and other forms of Internet communication, the Queer Pakistan site apparently distinguished itself by being a rare forum that openly addressed homosexual issues in Pakistan.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority spokesman was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying that the authorities had halted access to the site after complaints from Internet users. “We blocked the Web site under the law because its content was against Islam and norms of Pakistani society,” said the spokesman, Kamran Ali, according to the news service.

On Friday, Queer Pakistan said on its Twitter feed @queerpk that the ban had driven up interest in the redirected site.

While the site was still accessible outside Pakistan, the BBC journalist Iram Abbasi said in a report about the ban that the site displayed a message saying that because of forbidden content, access inside Pakistan had been denied.

This week the head of the BBC’s Urdu service in London, Aamer Ahmed Khan, drew attention to the ban on his Twitter account, @AakO, and to the report in Urdu by Ms. Abbasi.

Last month the site published a blog post with the headline “The Coming Out for a Pakistani” to address the difficulties.

For a regular Pakistani youngster the internet is the major source of all kinds of knowledge and happenings around the world. Same goes when a young gay Pakistani approaches the internet with his major life problem about being a homosexual. As the internet is dominated by content from western countries almost all the websites about being gay encourage you to ‘come out of the closet’ and tell the whole world you are gay and be yourself. This is great advice but only if you are living in a free country where laws and legislation are strict and there aren’t any religious fanatics going around running their own rule.

In Pakistan things are different. We are not going to be appreciated even by the most educated people if we be who we are in public. Moreover we also run a great risk of being harmed. It doesn’t matter if you are a boy or a girl. The risk is almost the same.

The site also linked to an article carried by SAPA, the South African press agency, and the German Press Agency, profiling the site and quoting one of its founders, who was partly identified as Fakhir Q. The agency reported:

“The main motivation is our own life stories,” said Fakhir Q, one of the people behind the pioneering Queer Pakistan website. “We have been through a lot and we know how it is growing up in a society like Pakistan with practically no support whatsoever.”

“So we want to provide a platform for people like us to show them they are not alone,” Fakhir said, giving only his first name.

He said the response to Queer Pakistan has been “remarkable,” with interest from all parts of Pakistani society.

The membership is from both the genders, with some 44 percent identifying themselves as female and 56 as males.

“It’s pretty diverse, goes from lower-middle to elite-protected class. The age group is 19-35,” Fakhir added.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has previously tried to shut down chat rooms in a move it sees as protecting moral values, according to reports in the Pakistani press this month.

Late last year it also tried to block access to YouTube to prevent people from seeing the film “Innocence of Muslims,” a low-budget film mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

Declan Walsh contributed reporting.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Thursday, September 26, 2013

What Iran’s President Said, Is Said to Have Said and Says He Said

Video of Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, discussing the Holocaust in an interview with Charlie Rose recorded on Wednesday in New York.

In an interview with Charlie Rose of CBS News broadcast on Thursday, Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, rejected accusations that he had not clearly acknowledged the historical reality of the Holocaust in remarks to CNN earlier this week.

According to the simultaneous translation of Mr. Rouhani’s remarks from Persian into English, he replied:

In principle, we and I condemn the massacre carried out by the Nazis in World War II. I’ll also add that many groups were killed by the Nazis in the course of the war, Jews in specific, but there were also Christians, there were Muslims. So in principle, I’ll tell you that my government, I condemn massacre â€" the killing of people or any group. I’ll tell you that when an innocent person is killed, we never go about asking or inquiring whether they were Jewish or Christian or Muslim. That’s not our way or our creed. We simply say that we condemn any killing, any massacre, and therefore we condemn the massacre of the Jewish people by the Nazis, as we also condemn the other massacres that took place in the course of the war.

“Why would I want to deny it?” Mr. Rouhani asked rhetorically. “Given that we live in the Middle East,” he added, “we feel the impact of what took place in World War II today in our region.”

The president argued â€" as his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had in far more inflammatory language â€" that the Palestinian people had been forced to pay for the crimes of the Nazis when the state of Israel was established as a Jewish homeland in the Middle East after the German genocide in Europe. “We think that it’s time to really separate that event from what’s happening to a group of people now in the Middle East who’ve lost their homes, who have been discriminated against, who have gone through some of the worst kinds of torture that no one â€" even the Jewish people â€" would want to see.”

While Mr. Rouhani made broadly similar remarks in his response to a question about his predecessor’s Holocaust denial from CNN’s Christiane Amanpour a day earlier, a conservative Iranian news agency â€" known for its, at times, comically staunch support of Mr. Ahmadinejad â€" injected a note of uncertainty by pointing out that the simultaneous translation in that broadcast was inexact.

Video of President Hassan Rouhani of Iran answering a question on the Holocaust during an interview with Christiane Amanpour of CNN recorded on Tuesday in New York.

The news agency, Fars, published a more literal translation of Mr. Rouhani’s response side by side with the CNN transcript and called this proof that the American network had “fabricated” the president’s acknowledgment of the Holocaust.

According to the Fars translation, which two Iranian-American journalists told The Lede is accurate, Mr. Rouhani did not actually use the word “Holocaust,” as CNN reported, but did invoke “genocide” in the following exchange with Ms. Amanpour:

Q. One of the things your predecessor used to do from this very platform was deny the Holocaust and pretend that it was a myth. I want to know you, your position on the Holocaust. Do you accept what it was? And what was it?

A. I have said before that I am not a historian and historians should specify, state and explain the aspects of historical events, but generally we fully condemn any kind of crime committed against humanity throughout the history, including the crime committed by the Nazis both against the Jews and non-Jews, the same way that if today any crime is committed against any nation or any religion or any people or any belief, we condemn that crime and genocide. Therefore, what the Nazis did is condemned, (but) the aspects that you talk about, clarification of these aspects is a duty of the historians and researchers, I am not a history scholar.

The editors at Fars, however, seemed unaware that the interpreter heard on the CNN broadcast rendering Mr. Rouhani’s Persian remarks into English on the fly, was not employed by the network but had been provided by the Iranian government.

In response to the accusation from Fars, which the Persian-speaking Ms. Amanpour dismissed as “ridiculous,” CNN posted raw footage of the entire interview online, and Mr. Rouhani’s office published a word-for-word transcript of what he said in Persian on a government Web site.

Arash Karami, a journalist who blogs about the Iranian media from Washington, reports that the transcript provided by the president’s office matches the video. He also explains that some parts of the translation released by CNN, of words Fars had claimed were never spoken, were in fact uttered just after the snippet from the interview that was initially broadcast.

Mr. Karami produced his own translation of the president’s complete answer to Ms. Amanpour’s question, which suggests that the interpreter mainly condensed rather than added to Mr. Rouhani’s remarks.

I have said before that I am not a historian and when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of historical events, historians should explain and discuss it.

But in general, I can say that any crime that is committed in history against humanity, such as the crimes committed by the Nazis, whether against Jews or non-Jews, from our viewpoint is completely condemned. Just as if today a crime is committed against any nation, religion, ethnicity or belief, we condemn that crime or genocide.

Therefore, what the Nazis did is condemnable. The dimensions of it which you say, is the responsibility of historians and researchers to make those dimensions clear. I am not a historian myself.

However, this point should be clear: If a crime took place, that crime should not be a cover for a nation or group to justify their crimes or oppression against others. Therefore, if the Nazis committed a crime, and however much it was, we condemn that, because genocide or mass murder is condemned.

From our viewpoint, it doesn’t matter if the person killed is Jewish, Christian or Muslim. From our viewpoint, [it] does not make difference. Killing an innocent human is rejected and condemned. But this cannot be a reason for 60 years to displace a people from their land and say that the Nazis committed crimes. That crime [too] is condemned; occupying the land of others is also condemned from our viewpoint.

The fallout from what Mr. Rouhani was reported to have said, however, was not limited to disputes about mistranslation. Even before the Fars report appeared, some supporters of Israel called the fact that Iran’s president had mentioned the suffering of the Palestinians in a reply about the Holocaust offensive. Abraham Foxman, a Holocaust survivor who is the director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a statement:

It is about time an Iranian leader acknowledged the Holocaust as a tragic fact of history. But in practically the same breath President Rouhani engaged in the more subtle form of Holocaust revisionism, minimizing it by accusing the Jewish survivors of taking vengeance on the Palestinians in fulfilling their 2,000-year-old dream of returning to their homeland, Israel. This was a gratuitous swipe at the survivors.

For her part, Ms. Amanpour defended CNN’s reporting and expressed astonishment at the fact that The Wall Street Journal had published an editorial based on the incorrect assumption that the network had altered Mr. Rouhani’s words. As she noted on Twitter, that broadside concluded: “points for honesty go to the journalists at Fars, who for reasons that probably range from solidarity to self-preservation aren’t disposed to whitewash their President’s ideological predilections.”



Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Today’s Scuttlebot: Reflections on Myst, and Understanding the BlackBerry Buyout Move

Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »

Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »



On YouTube, ‘Lyrics Videos’ Mark a New Genre

Maroon 5’s lyric video for their song, “Payphone,” is one of the most popular examples of a new, emerging genre on YouTube.

If you had searched for a “lyrics video” on YouTube in 2008, you might have found a touching homegrown tribute from a fan who urgently wanted to share the poetical lyricism of their favorite song with the world.

In one instance, a Guns N’ Roses fan lovingly presented the lyrics to the power ballad, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” over a montage of images of their family dogs.

Now, these handcrafted homages have evolved into more formal offerings from name-brand musicians, who see them as an additional source of views, and revenue.

Since 2011, the number of views for lyrics videos have increased seven times, according to YouTube.  The top 500 lyrics videos pulled in 624 million views this year, compared with 84 million in 2011. Also, the number of lyric videos uploaded to the site have doubled over last year.

“We’ve seen them getting more creative and sort of becoming this other art form,” said Kevin Allocca, YouTube’s head of culture and trends. “It offers artists a lot of things you can take advantage of before you have an official video.”

Lyrics videos are faster and cheaper to produce than standard music videos. They require no sets, costumes, lighting, production design or directors. And they can be made available early in a song’s release cycle to pique the interest of fans.

Lady Gaga, Vampire Weekend, One Direction and even the Rolling Stones are all pumping out official lyrics videos to pair with (or preview) a song’s release.

When Cee Lo Green’s popular song, the sometimes politely titled “Forget You,” was first released as a lyrics video in October 2010, it was an early, bold entrant in the genre. Sharp fluorescent backgrounds and moving block type emphasized the song’s frank dismissal of a former loved one and helped catapult the song on YouTube.

Since then, official lyrics videos have grown as creative exercises in using animated text effects and clever conceits to share a song’s meaning with its fans.

Katy Perry has been a leader in inventively toying with lyrics videos, Mr. Allocca said. When she released the lyrics video for her new summer single, “Roar,” the screen displayed a scroll of animated text-messages matching both words and text-messaging icons to her verses.

The video received 45 million views since it was uploaded, many before her “official” video for the same song was made available. That presented the singer leaping through a faux Technicolor jungle in Tarzanesque drapery, with no lyrics to be seen.

Searches for lyrics videos have also peaked in the last few months, spiking higher along with major song releases, according to YouTube.

Even smaller bands, like the Sydney-based group, “For All Eternity,” are putting out lyrics videos. Some of them have outperformed the band’s traditional music videos, said the band’s lead vocalist, Shane Carroll.

Part of this may be because the band’s songs carry Christian themes that are nearly impossible to decipher over their music, which Mr. Carroll describes as, “a hybrid between post-hardcore and melodic metal-core.” But also, lyrics videos simply make it easier for fans to connect with the music, he said.

“CD sales have declined dramatically,” Mr. Carroll said. “Kids can’t open a physical booklet and read the lyrics anymore.”

“It’s a lot easier to share our music with people that may not listen to our style of music,” he said, “if we can link them up to something like a lyric video.”



Daily Report: Alibaba Is Said to Shift I.P.O. Focus to U.S.

The Chinese Internet company Alibaba has ended talks with the Hong Kong stock exchange over an initial public offering and is now moving forward with plans to list in New York, a person close to Alibaba said on Wednesday.

In its discussions over a potential listing â€" which, at as much as $15 billion, would be a huge victory for any stock exchange â€" Alibaba had proposed to officials in Hong Kong that the company’s 28-member partner committee be allowed to continue to nominate a majority of its board of directors, Neil Gough reports.

Hong Kong discourages companies from organizing in a way that favors dual-class shareholding over individual shareholdings, or gives one shareholder a disproportionate say over how a company is run.

The company has yet to appoint underwriters for an I.P.O. or submit filings to sell shares in any market. Alibaba has, however, hired an American law firm to work on its offering and it plans to “be hiring banks soon,” the person said, declining to be named because the information was not public.

Analysts and investors expect Alibaba’s listing â€" if, when and where it happens â€" to be one of the biggest and most highly anticipated since Facebook raised $16 billion in May 2012.

Alibaba was founded in 1999. Its partner committee was set up in 2010 and includes Jack Ma, the executive chairman. The partners own about 10 percent of the company, and the committee does not include SoftBank, the Japanese telecommunications company that owns 36.7 percent of Alibaba, or Yahoo, which has a 24 percent stake.

Alibaba’s online businesses include Alibaba.com, which links overseas buyers with Chinese exporters; Tmall.com, which lets retailers connect with online shoppers; and the consumer-to-consumer retail Web site Taobao Marketplace.

The company’s profit more than tripled in the first quarter of the year, rising to $668.7 million from $220.5 million in the period a year earlier, according to Yahoo’s stock exchange filings. Quarterly revenue increased 72 percent, to $1.38 billion.



Daily Report: Automating the Search for a Last-Minute Reservation

It can require stamina to land a table at New York’s great restaurants, but what few diners realize is that procrastinators often have access to the best seats.

Cancellations and V.I.P. tables are often released into the reservation system at the last minute, for those prepared to call or search online. A handful of new services are finding ways to eliminate that step altogether, automating the process so that people don’t even need to search for open seats. Instead, diners are alerted to those openings â€" in some cases, in real time, Tejal Rao reports.

In July, Jason Davis, a New York entrepreneur and software engineer, started Last Minute Eatin’, an automated Twitter account that alerts diners to available reservations on OpenTable. The idea sprang from his own reluctance to plan ahead.

“I love New York City restaurants and I hate keeping a schedule,” he said. Every few minutes, the program runs through the 1,000 listings with the greatest number of user reviews (regardless of whether they are positive or negative), along with listings for new restaurants that he picks. It then sends alerts on a few good finds (like a 7:30 p.m. table for two at the Dutch in SoHo) every 20 minutes, along with a link to book the table.

Mr. Davis is not the only entrepreneur who sees potential hidden in OpenTable’s vast trove of data. Reed Kavner, a product manager at the crowdfunding Web site Piggybackr in San Francisco, began Rezhound in January after several unsuccessful attempts to eat at Nopa. The free service allows users to choose specific restaurants and dates of interest across the country, then alerts them by text or e-mail the moment a table opens up. (In Chicago, Mr. Kavner said, requests for Stephanie Izard’s restaurant Girl & the Goat account for almost all use.)



Amazon Updates Kindle Fire Line

In the dark of night, very late on Tuesday, Amazon.com announced a refresh of its Kindle Fire tablet line: lighter, faster, cheaper. The Fires were introduced two years ago, and this is their second update in a tablet environment that is brutally competitive.

Microsoft, for instance, announced the new generation of its struggling Surface tablets earlier this week. And the devices are getting more proprietary. Tesco, a supermarket chain in the United Kingdom, introduced a tablet this week for its customers.

Amazon said the Kindle Fire HDX, at 8.9 inches, would be 34 percent lighter than the previous version. It would have a faster memory and a faster processor, and 11 hours of battery time for mixed use. If you did nothing but read, it would be 17 hours.

In its announcement, Amazon trumpeted the Fire’s new “Mayday” button, which it will be touting in television commercials. Tap the button and you will be connected to an Amazon expert “24/7, 265 days a year.”

Which brings up the question: Why is this feature needed? Were the previous Fires so complicated they were beset by confused customers?

Alas, the Amazon public relations team is not as voluble as the Mayday squad, and no answer was forthcoming Tuesday night.

The cheapest Fire will sell for $139, a substantial discount from the previous version. But it is hard to tell how the Fire is doing because Amazon does not release sales figures. This is clear: It is very far behind the iPad. Apple sold about $33 billion worth of iPads in the last year. Amazon’s total revenue in 2012 was less than twice that, and Amazon sells many, many other things besides Kindles.

“The challenge for Amazon is expanding its appeal beyond Amazon’s super fans,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forester analyst. “They’re not the market leader, or anywhere near it. The risk is they fall by the wayside like Barnes & Noble â€" max out their base and then have nowhere to go.”

Next up, according to the rumors: Kindle TV, a set-top device that will feed Amazon’s burgeoning selection of video content directly into living rooms. Stay tuned.



Amazon Updates Kindle Fire Line

In the dark of night, very late on Tuesday, Amazon.com announced a refresh of its Kindle Fire tablet line: lighter, faster, cheaper. The Fires were introduced two years ago, and this is their second update in a tablet environment that is brutally competitive.

Microsoft, for instance, announced the new generation of its struggling Surface tablets earlier this week. And the devices are getting more proprietary. Tesco, a supermarket chain in the United Kingdom, introduced a tablet this week for its customers.

Amazon said the Kindle Fire HDX, at 8.9 inches, would be 34 percent lighter than the previous version. It would have a faster memory and a faster processor, and 11 hours of battery time for mixed use. If you did nothing but read, it would be 17 hours.

In its announcement, Amazon trumpeted the Fire’s new “Mayday” button, which it will be touting in television commercials. Tap the button and you will be connected to an Amazon expert “24/7, 265 days a year.”

Which brings up the question: Why is this feature needed? Were the previous Fires so complicated they were beset by confused customers?

Alas, the Amazon public relations team is not as voluble as the Mayday squad, and no answer was forthcoming Tuesday night.

The cheapest Fire will sell for $139, a substantial discount from the previous version. But it is hard to tell how the Fire is doing because Amazon does not release sales figures. This is clear: It is very far behind the iPad. Apple sold about $33 billion worth of iPads in the last year. Amazon’s total revenue in 2012 was less than twice that, and Amazon sells many, many other things besides Kindles.

“The challenge for Amazon is expanding its appeal beyond Amazon’s super fans,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forester analyst. “They’re not the market leader, or anywhere near it. The risk is they fall by the wayside like Barnes & Noble â€" max out their base and then have nowhere to go.”

Next up, according to the rumors: Kindle TV, a set-top device that will feed Amazon’s burgeoning selection of video content directly into living rooms. Stay tuned.



Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Internet Pioneer RealNetworks Seeks Revival

SEATTLE â€" When a ground-breaking product called RealPlayer was released in its earliest form in 1995, Steven P. Jobs had yet to return to Apple, Google’s future founders had only just met and Mark Zuckerberg was 10 years old.

Almost two decades later, RealPlayer, which practically invented the category of streaming audio and video over the Internet, is not gone, but it is largely forgotten. The same might be said for the pioneering company that created the software, RealNetworks, which helped midwife the Internet into its heady commercial phase.

Now RealNetworks says it has reinvented its venerable software as a cloud service that will make it easier to privately share personal videos among mobile devices, television sets and computers. The change is a test of whether RealNetworks can avoid the tar pits by returning to a product that put it on the map in the first place.

“If we’re successful in this, we’ll make a successful company that could be even more successful than Real has been in the past,” Rob Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, said in a recent interview.

The Internet is not generous to companies seeking rebirth. There are precious few examples of early online businesses losing their way and then finding it again â€" eBay and Priceline.com are two of them. Many more dot-coms vanished (Webvan, Kozmo, Excite@Home) or were absorbed into bigger companies before gradually fading away (Netscape).

RealNetworks was nearly wiped out after the dot-com bubble burst, when many of the companies that were buying its software to stream radio, sports matches and other events disappeared. It managed to hang on, winning a hefty antitrust settlement from Microsoft that padded its bank account. It got into a smorgasbord of new businesses, including subscription music, casual games and ringtones for mobile phones.

But those businesses fizzled, too, as RealNetworks failed to keep up with changing technology and tastes, including the growth of smartphones and a preference for free games that support themselves with the sales of virtual goods. Mr. Glaser, who stepped down as chief executive of RealNetworks in 2009, returned to lead the company in July of last year.

“When the board asked me to step in, we had multiple challenges to get on the right side of history,” Mr. Glaser said.

When he got back to the company, RealPlayer was being milked as a cash cow, supported by advertising and fees from companies like Google that paid to have their software bundled with it, Mr. Glaser said. But the company had invested little in it, not bothering to make a version for Apple’s iOS devices, for example.

RealPlayer has largely been overshadowed by other software for managing music and video collections on computers, as well as services like Spotify and Netflix that eliminate the need to store media locally. But the software still has 25 million active users a month, about two-thirds of them outside North America, according to the company.

With its new service, RealPlayer Cloud, the company is seeking to eliminate the hassles that can make sharing personal videos a challenge. Incompatible video formats on different devices can be a problem when sharing movies shot on smartphones. Stingy limits on the size of clips that can be sent via e-mail or text message are another.

Uploading clips to YouTube is a possible solution, though people need to figure out how to create a private channel for family and friends if they don’t want everyone to see their videos.

The RealNetworks offering lets people upload videos they shoot on their tablets, smartphones and GoPro cameras to an online service and then share them privately with others. The company is making apps available for the service so that it works on Android devices, iOS devices, computers and Roku set-top boxes, with a version under development for Google’s Chromecast media player.

It’s borrowing from the playbook of Dropbox and others by giving people two gigabytes of free storage for their movies and charging them if they want more space, with plans from $4.99 a month for 25 gigabytes to $30 a month for 300 gigabytes.

Mr. Glaser is technically the interim chief executive of RealNetworks, but he said he intends to stay at the company until his plan for reviving it begins to bear fruit. He said there is no active search by the board for a replacement for him as far as he knows.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Mr. Glaser said. “Right now we’re in the middle of a turnaround.”



Internet Pioneer RealNetworks Seeks Revival

SEATTLE â€" When a ground-breaking product called RealPlayer was released in its earliest form in 1995, Steven P. Jobs had yet to return to Apple, Google’s future founders had only just met and Mark Zuckerberg was 10 years old.

Almost two decades later, RealPlayer, which practically invented the category of streaming audio and video over the Internet, is not gone, but it is largely forgotten. The same might be said for the pioneering company that created the software, RealNetworks, which helped midwife the Internet into its heady commercial phase.

Now RealNetworks says it has reinvented its venerable software as a cloud service that will make it easier to privately share personal videos among mobile devices, television sets and computers. The change is a test of whether RealNetworks can avoid the tar pits by returning to a product that put it on the map in the first place.

“If we’re successful in this, we’ll make a successful company that could be even more successful than Real has been in the past,” Rob Glaser, the founder of RealNetworks, said in a recent interview.

The Internet is not generous to companies seeking rebirth. There are precious few examples of early online businesses losing their way and then finding it again â€" eBay and Priceline.com are two of them. Many more dot-coms vanished (Webvan, Kozmo, Excite@Home) or were absorbed into bigger companies before gradually fading away (Netscape).

RealNetworks was nearly wiped out after the dot-com bubble burst, when many of the companies that were buying its software to stream radio, sports matches and other events disappeared. It managed to hang on, winning a hefty antitrust settlement from Microsoft that padded its bank account. It got into a smorgasbord of new businesses, including subscription music, casual games and ringtones for mobile phones.

But those businesses fizzled, too, as RealNetworks failed to keep up with changing technology and tastes, including the growth of smartphones and a preference for free games that support themselves with the sales of virtual goods. Mr. Glaser, who stepped down as chief executive of RealNetworks in 2009, returned to lead the company in July of last year.

“When the board asked me to step in, we had multiple challenges to get on the right side of history,” Mr. Glaser said.

When he got back to the company, RealPlayer was being milked as a cash cow, supported by advertising and fees from companies like Google that paid to have their software bundled with it, Mr. Glaser said. But the company had invested little in it, not bothering to make a version for Apple’s iOS devices, for example.

RealPlayer has largely been overshadowed by other software for managing music and video collections on computers, as well as services like Spotify and Netflix that eliminate the need to store media locally. But the software still has 25 million active users a month, about two-thirds of them outside North America, according to the company.

With its new service, RealPlayer Cloud, the company is seeking to eliminate the hassles that can make sharing personal videos a challenge. Incompatible video formats on different devices can be a problem when sharing movies shot on smartphones. Stingy limits on the size of clips that can be sent via e-mail or text message are another.

Uploading clips to YouTube is a possible solution, though people need to figure out how to create a private channel for family and friends if they don’t want everyone to see their videos.

The RealNetworks offering lets people upload videos they shoot on their tablets, smartphones and GoPro cameras to an online service and then share them privately with others. The company is making apps available for the service so that it works on Android devices, iOS devices, computers and Roku set-top boxes, with a version under development for Google’s Chromecast media player.

It’s borrowing from the playbook of Dropbox and others by giving people two gigabytes of free storage for their movies and charging them if they want more space, with plans from $4.99 a month for 25 gigabytes to $30 a month for 300 gigabytes.

Mr. Glaser is technically the interim chief executive of RealNetworks, but he said he intends to stay at the company until his plan for reviving it begins to bear fruit. He said there is no active search by the board for a replacement for him as far as he knows.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Mr. Glaser said. “Right now we’re in the middle of a turnaround.”



Today’s Scuttlebot: Zuckerberg in a Suit, and Claims of an iPhone Fingerprint Scanner Hack

Log in to manage your products and services from The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Don't have an account yet?
Create an account »

Subscribed through iTunes and need an NYTimes.com account?
Learn more »



Remote Controls, Without the AAA Batteries

Smartphones, tablets and other portable devices that need electricity rely on batteries that use a chemical reaction. But Maxwell Technologies, a company in San Diego, announced Tuesday that it was providing devices for television remote controls that store electricity without chemicals.

The devices, called ultracapacitors, are a little smaller than the two AAA batteries they will replace. They can recharge within minutes and have a life span that will probably outlast the remote control, said Michael W. Sund, a spokesman for the company.

Maxwell said it was approached by Celadon, a company that makes remote controls for set-top boxes, with a request for a power system that could work with a remote control.

Ultracapacitors are used in many devices, particularly in manufacturing, but they have only pushed out bursts of energy, and basic storage has remained in the chemical battery. The ultracapacitors store energy by putting an electric charge â€" positive or negative, on plates that are separated by an insulator.

Engineers have experimented with the use of capacitors in hybrid and electric cars, where they could provide energy for quick acceleration and recapture the energy generated when a car slows down. Maxwell already sells giant capacitors for use in hybrid transit buses that need to capture energy when they come to a stop. The capacitors in the buses also deliver energy to help get the wheels moving.

But using capacitors to provide a steady flow of energy is something new. Still, like other capacitors, the new ones can be recharged quickly. The remote control can recharge in five minutes and run for many hours, maybe even days, depending on how often it is used to change channels, Mr. Sund said. And unlike the lithium-ion batteries used in phones, laptops and, now cars, capacitors do not lose storage space with age.

“The speed of charge is an advantage,” Mr. Sund said. “If you forget to plug it in, it’s just a few minutes.”

The Energy Department’s Advanced Research Project Administration - Energy, an energy version of the better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is enthusiastic about capacitors, and is financing several projects that use it.

Comparing a capacitors’ energy storage characteristics to those of a chemical battery is a bit like comparing the water storage capability of a pitcher with that of a roll of paper towels. A paper towel, like a chemical battery, takes a little time to soak up the water and never quite gives it all back â€" and over time, its ability to store water breaks down. The pitcher can be repeatedly filled quickly and emptied quickly or slowly.

So far, no one can build a capacitor that meets the requirements of a smartphone, Mr. Sund said. But his company is working on one that would be an adjunct to a smartphone battery, providing energy for the camera flash, a weak spot in current smartphones.

And more capable capacitors are on the way. Maxwell uses a layer of carbon on an aluminum substrate, where the charged particles can be stored. But researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, are working on a model that uses a single layer of carbon atoms.



The Science Author Clive Thompson Does Not Think Tech Is Ruining Your Mind

Count Clive Thompson as someone who does not believe Google is dulling our ability to memorize things.

Mr. Thompson is a science and technology writer who wrote the new book, “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.” He is also an occasional contributor to The New York Times.

With science as its backbone, Mr. Thompson’s book argues that the current transformation of society into the digital age is making us more intelligent, not the other way around. The following is an edited interview:

Q. Do you really think technology is making us smarter?
A. Yes, I do. I think basically we’re able to think more socially. There is something about the ability to externalize our thoughts and compare them with other people in a public way that is really transformative for the average person.

Q. You talk a lot about memory in your book. Are we augmenting our memories with computers, or are we replacing them?
A. I would say we are augmenting them. When I started the book I was genuinely worried that I was losing my memory to Google, but the more I studied the way that everyday memory works, the more I realized how much we already rely on other outside sources â€" books, Post-it notes, etc. â€" but also other people to remember things. We are social thinkers, and we are also social rememberers, we use our co-workers, our partners and our friends to help us retrieve the details about things that they they are better at remembering than we are. And they’ve used us in the same way. Memory has always been social. Now we’re using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.

Q. You’ve write a lot about “ambient awareness.” What does that actually mean?
Ambient awareness is the experience of knowing what’s going on in the lives of other people â€" what they’re thinking about, what they’re doing, what they’re looking at â€" by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting online. We’re now able to stitch together these fantastic details and mental maps of what is going on in other people’s lives.

Q. But critics say all of these details are just noise. Aren’t they?
A. It’s often really misunderstood because social critics are often pointing at an insignificant tweet and saying look at how trivial and silly this is, but ambient awareness happens in aggregate while you follow someone for a year or two, and that’s when these insignificant tweets add up to give us meaning. We use these tools over a long period of time and we develop a deep ESP-like sense of the intellectual and emotional lives of the people we care about.

Q. You’re married to Emily Nussbaum, the television critic for The New Yorker. Is your house just a series of blaring screens, iPads and smartphones?
A. Probably no more than any other families, no. The one thing that might be a little different is that Emily and I are really avid communicators via text messaging and instant messenger. So there are times I might be working upstairs and she’s downstairs and I’ll strike up an instant messenger conversation with her (because she’s watching TV), and we’ll just carry on that conversation on for a couple of hours.

Q. How do you control the amount of time your children get to use screens in the house?
A. I usually say everything in moderation. This advice hasn’t changed since the ancient Greeks. The things kids can do on screens can be really delightful â€" if they are age appropriate. But no, they shouldn’t spend all their time on a screen, they should split up their time doing multiple, different things. It’s not good for adults either to spend all their days on screens. I talk about cognitive diversity in the book, if you grant that argument that these new technologies help us think in new ways, then the old ways are still useful also, like going for a walk, or writing with a pencil.

Q. You talk about “tip-of-the-tongue syndrome” in your book. What is that, and how is it affected by technology?
A. Tip-of-the-tongue syndrome is when people almost remember something but need a computer, or someone else, to help them find it. The problem is, our brains have always been terrible at remembering details. They were like that way before the Internet came along. We’re very good at remember meaning, but we constantly mess up the details. One of the ways we’ve always resolved tip-of-the-tongue was by using other people. Now we have machines that help us resolve tip-of-the-tongue.

Q. You’re very bullish on technology, so if you could only take one piece of technology with you on a deserted island, what would it be?
A. I would probably take an e-reader loaded down with a gazillion books. (Making the assumption it has a solar ray so I can power that e-reader.) I am frankly really excited that modern technology allows us to read so many books in the way it does now. That was the dream of H. G. Wells and other science fiction writers, that all of knowledge could exist on a single device â€" which it does now. But, if I couldn’t bring electronics with me to my deserted island, I’d probably bring penicillin.



Israeli Diplomats Mock Iran’s President Online

On a day when President Obama told delegates at the United Nations that he welcomed the opportunity posed by diplomatic overtures from Iran’s new president, Israeli diplomats in Washington sounded a very different note online, mocking the moderate cleric as scarcely different from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A message posted on the official Twitter page of the Israeli Embassy on Tuesday morning drew attention to a parody LinkedIn account for President Hassan Rouhani. The mock résumé of Mr. Rouhani’s career, filled with sarcastic asides, described him as “President of Iran, Expert Salesman, PR Professional, Nuclear Proliferation Advocate.”

Under the heading, Skills and Experience, the fake LinkedIn page posted on the embassy’s Web site included “International Sales,” “Deceptive Trade Practices,” “Nuclear Weapons,” “Twitter,” “Public Relations” and “Illusion” in a long list.

A summary of the fake Mr. Rouhani’s experience, written in the straw man’s name, boasted: “Since my election as president of Iran in 2013, I have developed and executed an unprecedented PR campaign for the government of Iran. Through a series of statements, tweets, op-eds and smiles I have re-branded the human-rights-suppressing, Ayatollah-led regime as moderate and a source of hope among the international community.”

The satirical pitch concluded, “If you’re looking for a persuasive communications expert and master salesman capable of making almost anything believable, I’m your man.”

The embassy’s attempt to take some of the shine off the new administration’s image came as Mr. Rouhani’s Twitter-savvy foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, suggested on the social network that his talks this week with foreign ministers of nations concerned about Iran’s nuclear program could produce a breakthrough.

Some hours later, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israeli diplomats in New York would not be present to listen to the new Iranian president’s address, scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.



Some of the Victims of the Attack in Kenya

Ross Langdon giving a speech during a TED conference.

As our colleagues in Kenya reported, the government has said 67 people were killed in the attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi and the standoff that followed, and 175 have been injured. But the Kenyan Red Cross has said a further 51 people were listed as missing, so the death toll could be higher. It also said there were four unidentified bodies in the mortuary.

Names of the victims have been trickling out in the past few days. One of them was Ross Langdon, an Australian architect who spoke at a recent TED conference, describing his life as a child growing up in Tasmania in a tent “in a lush valley by a river” and the inspiration it had on his work as an architect in Africa.

“I thought it might be better to be like a chameleon - able to adapt and change and blend with our environment rather than conquer it,” he said.
The architectural firm where he worked, Regional Associates, said:

We are deeply saddened by the tragic loss our friend and colleague Ross Langdon and his partner Elif Yavuz.
Profoundly talented and full of life, Ross enriched the lives of all those around him. Ross’s leadership on projects throughout East-Africa was inspirational, and he will be will be very, very sorely missed by us all. Our deepest condolences and thoughts are with Ross and Elif’s families at this very difficult time.

On Saturday, the day that the attack started, Mr. Langdon was at the mall with Ms. Yavuz, who was expecting their first child. Ms. Yavuz worked with the Clinton Foundation, which posted a statement by former President Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea.

We were shocked and terribly saddened to learn of the death of Elif Yavuz in the senseless attacks in Nairobi. Elif devoted her life to helping others, particularly people in developing countries suffering from malaria and HIV/AIDS. She had originally worked with our Health Access Initiative during her doctoral studies, and we were so pleased that she had recently rejoined us as a senior vaccines researcher based in Tanzania. Elif was brilliant, dedicated, and deeply admired by her colleagues, who will miss her terribly. On behalf of the entire Clinton Foundation, we send our heartfelt condolences and prayers to Elif’s family and her many friends throughout the world.

In a statement, the United States Agency for International Development said Ruhila Adatia-Sood, the wife of Ketan Sood, a Foreign Service national at the agency’s mission in Nairobi, had been  killed in the attack. Ms. Adatia-Sood was several months pregnant. “Ruhila was a popular radio and TV personality, who was known throughout Kenya for her passion, vibrancy, and gift for making people smile,” the statement said.

On Ms. Adatia-Sood’s Twitter account, she posted Instagram photographs of herself apparently posing with friends and fans. On East FM’s Kiss TV, a recent video shows her presenting programs on chefs.

Ruhila Adatia-Sood presents an East FM program posted 2 months ago.

As my colleague Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura reports from London, the militants specifically targeted non-Muslims, and at least 18 foreigners were among the dead, including six Britons, according to the British Foreign Office. Citizens from France, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Peru, India, Ghana, South Africa, and China, were also killed, according to The Associated Press, which reported the names and profiles of some of the other victims.

The Daily Telegraph quoted a British businessman, Louis Bawa, who confirmed the deaths of his daughter Jenah, 8, and his wife Zahira, as saying his “heart just stopped” when he was asked to identify them from photographs of victims taken at the mall. “The people who did this, they are vigilantes, they are animals,” he told the newspaper. “They are using religion as an excuse to kill people. Zahira and Jenah were Muslims, but these animals just shot them the same as all of the others.”

He said he had spoken to his daughter last week and promised “to buy her any present in the world” if she did well on her exams. She told him to “start saving up” because she wanted him to buy her a pony and said “she was going to work very hard.” Jenah’s 12-year-old cousin, Ajay Bawa, said, “I don’t understand how people can kill 8- and 9-year-olds.”

The Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor was also killed in the attack as my colleague Adam Nossiter reported on Monday.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)