DXPG

Total Pageviews

Thursday, July 18, 2013

The Rules of In-Store Surveillance

You can tell when a powerful new technology, like tracking people as they shop, is coming of age. It starts trying to persuade people it is a force for good, and it broadens its reach and capabilities. Take the the observation and data collection techniques used by online retailers that are now moving into the physical world.

Cellphone signals, special apps and our movements tracked by software-enhanced cameras in stores are the equivalent of the tracking cookies in Internet browsers. Most people don’t seem to mind being tracked online, if the low percentage of people who disable cookies is any indication. (Studies suggest the number is below 10 percent.) Offline tracking, though, still seems to be a concern. Nordstrom discontinued using one mobile phone tracking system, produced by Euclid Analytics, after shoppers complained. That may be because the systems are new, and some people see more harm than benefit from the surveillance.

On Tuesday, several companies involved in offline tracking announced that they would be working with a Washington-based research group, the Future of Privacy Forum, to develop a series of “best practices” for privacy controls for what it called “retail location analytics,” or tracking.

Euclid was among the sponsors, along with WirelessWerx, Mexia Interactive and ShopperTrak.

The Future of Privacy Forum is primarily supported by corporations, with extensive financing from the technology sector. According to Jules Polonetsky, its director and co-chairman, the organization also has an advisory board that includes “chief privacy officers, privacy academics and privacy advocates.”

On Thursday, Euclid also announced it was producing a series of analytics tools for specialty retailers, which it said would help stores make better decisions about things like operating hours and inventory. The product, which is primarily a comparison tool, also shows how rich the data from tracking people online can be.

“We’re offering benchmarking, so we can say ‘Your customer capture rate is 8 percent, and this week the average for your sector is 10 percent,’” said Will Smith, the chief executive of Euclid. “The question is not whether something is good or bad, but what something means.”

Mr. Smith would not provide specifics, but said his company’s product was now in hundreds of malls across the United States, and had captured information on thousands of shoppers at dozens of retailers. “We can tell if someone has visited multiple outlets of a store on the same day, which indicates they couldn’t find the product they wanted at the first one,” he said. “You can assume a lot of others went to a competitor.”

Mr. Smith emphasized that the data Euclid supplied to retailers was made anonymous and delivered in aggregated forms, which he said made it unsuited to personally identifying customers. But the data gathered by the company, which Mr. Smith founded with the former head of Google Analytics, can be used to determine things like whether a Starbucks’ customer with a loyalty card stays longer at the coffee shop, or how often a store is acquiring repeat shoppers.

Over time, it is likely that at least some customers will accept tracking, particularly if offered incentives like free mall parking in exchange for visiting a specific store. “People became used to Web analytics,” Mr. Smith said, “Amazon’s customer experience is 10 times better because of the data it gathers on people. Shorter lines and good in-store service can also come from data.”



The Rules of In-Store Surveillance

You can tell when a powerful new technology, like tracking people as they shop, is coming of age. It starts trying to persuade people it is a force for good, and it broadens its reach and capabilities. Take the the observation and data collection techniques used by online retailers that are now moving into the physical world.

Cellphone signals, special apps and our movements tracked by software-enhanced cameras in stores are the equivalent of the tracking cookies in Internet browsers. Most people don’t seem to mind being tracked online, if the low percentage of people who disable cookies is any indication. (Studies suggest the number is below 10 percent.) Offline tracking, though, still seems to be a concern. Nordstrom discontinued using one mobile phone tracking system, produced by Euclid Analytics, after shoppers complained. That may be because the systems are new, and some people see more harm than benefit from the surveillance.

On Tuesday, several companies involved in offline tracking announced that they would be working with a Washington-based research group, the Future of Privacy Forum, to develop a series of “best practices” for privacy controls for what it called “retail location analytics,” or tracking.

Euclid was among the sponsors, along with WirelessWerx, Mexia Interactive and ShopperTrak.

The Future of Privacy Forum is primarily supported by corporations, with extensive financing from the technology sector. According to Jules Polonetsky, its director and co-chairman, the organization also has an advisory board that includes “chief privacy officers, privacy academics and privacy advocates.”

On Thursday, Euclid also announced it was producing a series of analytics tools for specialty retailers, which it said would help stores make better decisions about things like operating hours and inventory. The product, which is primarily a comparison tool, also shows how rich the data from tracking people online can be.

“We’re offering benchmarking, so we can say ‘Your customer capture rate is 8 percent, and this week the average for your sector is 10 percent,’” said Will Smith, the chief executive of Euclid. “The question is not whether something is good or bad, but what something means.”

Mr. Smith would not provide specifics, but said his company’s product was now in hundreds of malls across the United States, and had captured information on thousands of shoppers at dozens of retailers. “We can tell if someone has visited multiple outlets of a store on the same day, which indicates they couldn’t find the product they wanted at the first one,” he said. “You can assume a lot of others went to a competitor.”

Mr. Smith emphasized that the data Euclid supplied to retailers was made anonymous and delivered in aggregated forms, which he said made it unsuited to personally identifying customers. But the data gathered by the company, which Mr. Smith founded with the former head of Google Analytics, can be used to determine things like whether a Starbucks’ customer with a loyalty card stays longer at the coffee shop, or how often a store is acquiring repeat shoppers.

Over time, it is likely that at least some customers will accept tracking, particularly if offered incentives like free mall parking in exchange for visiting a specific store. “People became used to Web analytics,” Mr. Smith said, “Amazon’s customer experience is 10 times better because of the data it gathers on people. Shorter lines and good in-store service can also come from data.”



Amazon Rejected as Domain Name After South American Objections

A group of Latin American countries appears to have succeeded in an effort to block Amazon, the online retailer, from using. amazon as a new suffix for Internet addresses.

A committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an international governance group for the Internet, recommended this week that. amazon not be approved for use as a so-called global top-level domain â€" the letters that follow the dot in Internet addresses.

At a meeting in Durban, South Africa, Icann reviewed applications for new domain suffixes like these in what has been billed as the biggest expansion of Internet addresses. Scores of companies, countries and organizations have applied to use their names or other terms as global top-level domains, alongside the handful of existing ones like .com and .org.

While Icann has approved several new dot-terms, including the Chinese word for game and the Russian word for network, English-language brand names derived from geographical locations have proved to be more complicated.

In the run-up to the Durban meeting, a group of Latin American countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, sent a letter to Icann, in which they argued that. amazon should be rejected because a river runs through it.

“In particular ‘. amazon’ is a geographic name that represents important territories of some of our countries, which have relevant communities, with their own culture and identity directly connected with the name,” the letter said. “Beyond the specifics, this should also be understood as a matter of principle.”

The group had also objected to another application, from the outdoor clothier Patagonia, to use its name as an address suffix. That application was withdrawn before the Durban meeting.

The decision on. amazon, by the Governmental Advisory Committee of Icann, is not necessarily final. The Icann board could overrule the committee, though in practice it rarely does so.

“We’re reviewing the G.A.C. advice and we look forward to working with Icann and other stakeholders to resolve these issues as the process moves forward,” Amazon said in a statement.

One thing that remains unclear is why the United States government, represented in the Government Advisory Committee by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an arm of the Commerce Department, went along with the decision.

The administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Before the meeting, it sent a letter to Icann in which it outlined its support for the use of names like. amazon as Internet suffixes, but added that it would stand aside if other governments objected.

“The United States affirms our support for the free flow of information and freedom of expression and does not view sovereignty as a valid basis for objecting to the use of terms, and we have concerns about the effect of such claims on the integrity of the process,” the administration said in the letter. “However, in the event the parties cannot reach agreement by the time this matter comes up for decision in the G.A.C., the United States is willing in Durban to abstain and remain neutral.”

One analyst said that while the specific reasons the United States government went along with the rejection were unclear, its position on Internet governance issues had been weakened by the recent leaks of information about a vast digital surveillance program by the National Security Agency. Several countries in South America â€" though not those in the Amazon basin or the Patagonian region â€" have offered the leaker, Edward J. Snowden, asylum.

“It is clear that the leaks of sensitive national security information have severely weakened the U.S. government’s ability to fight for our economic interests and have left the U.S. isolated in the G.A.C.,” said Nao Matsukata, chief executive of FairWinds Partners, a Washington-based consulting firm that specializes in domain name strategy.

Milton Mueller, a professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, said there might have been an element of horse-trading. By yielding to a broader consensus on the advisory committee, Washington could have been seeking to shore up broader support for Icann, whose control over the Internet address system has long irked the governments of countries like Russia and China.

“My hypothesis is that the U.S. government has been scared to death for some time that if G.A.C. doesn’t get enough of what it wants, governments will give up on the whole Icann regime,” Mr. Mueller said.



Chants of ‘Russia Without Putin’ Ring Out as an Activist Blogger Goes Down Tweeting

Video of protesters in Moscow on Thursday, blocked by riot police officers from the square where they had planned to rally.

Chants of “Russia Without Putin!” could be heard in video streamed live from the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg on Thursday, where supporters of the jailed opposition activist Aleksei Navalny, hemmed in by riot police officers, gathered after the anti-corruption blogger was sentenced to five years in prison.

Video of protesters on Malaya Sadovaya Street in St. Petersburg on Thursday.

Mr. Navalny, who was still posting evidence of official corruption on his popular blog on the eve of the verdict, told my colleague Ellen Barry in April that he fully expected to be convicted on charges of corruption filed against him by state prosecutors last year, after he emerged as a leader of street protests against President Vladimir Putin. He also expressed confidence, however, that the opposition movement would eventually succeed.

Although he has warned that “romantic ideas” about the power of the Internet to affect change are often “exaggerated,” Mr. Navalny has used the Web to chip away at the positive image of Mr. Putin disseminated on state-controlled television. Even as his sentence was read out on Thursday in the city of Kirov, Mr. Navalny continued to send a stream of wry commentary, self-portraits and calls for fresh anti-Putin protests to hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Instagram followers from his phone.

As Glenn Kates explained in a post for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Mr. Navalny even found time to follow the discussion of his case on Twitter. He responded to another blogger who had captioned a frame-grab of Mr. Navalny tweeting from court, “To put hipsters on trial is only to ruin the trial,” by writing simply, “АХАХАХА,” which is Russian for “AHAHAHA.”

After he snapped an Instagram photograph of the judge in his case, Sergei Blinov, reading the verdict out, Mr. Navalny noted with approval that someone then Photoshopped the image to make it look like the official was taking part in a satanic ritual.

At the end of the trial, Mr. Navalny signed off: “Okay. Don’t miss me. And most importantly â€" do not be lazy.” Referring to the Russian government, he added, “The toad will not remove itself from the oil pipeline.”

Video of the complete court session posted online by a state news agency showed Mr. Navalny typing on his phone for a final time less than three minutes before he was handcuffed and led away.

Video of Aleksei Navalny’s trial on Thursday in the Russian city of Kirov.

As The Lede reported earlier this week, Mr. Navalny spent much of his time in the run-up to the verdict launching a campaign to get himself elected mayor of Moscow. A YouTube clip of the activist and his supporters marching to an election office to make his candidacy official last week offers a sense of the infectious optimism and enthusiasm that might have unsettled his enemies in the Kremlin.

Video of Aleksei Navalny and his supporters marching to an election office in Moscow last week.

Journalists in the Russian capital on Thursday, including Ilya Mouzykantskii, a contributor to The Lede, uploaded images of a tense standoff there between protesters and the police on Tverskaya Street, where the crowds were eventually pushed back onto sidewalks.

As the Russian blogger Ilya Varlamov reported on Twitter and his live blog, protesters remained on the street late Thursday.

Hours later, as the protests continued, a new update appeared on Mr. Navalny’s Twitter feed, reading: “Thanks to all! It is a crazy feeling when you understand that you don’t stand alone!”



Today’s Scuttlebot: Dark Side of a Taxi App, and Language Cats

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. Tuesday's selections include a woman's bad experience with a Lyft driver, and an app that tries to teach foreign language with cat photos.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Dark Side of a Taxi App, and Language Cats

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. Tuesday's selections include a woman's bad experience with a Lyft driver, and an app that tries to teach foreign language with cat photos.

Test Run: BookVibe Picks Up the Buzz on Books

A persistent problem faced by users of social networks like Facebook and Twitter is the flood of information they create. If you are connected to more than a handful of people on one of those platforms, you will be deluged with far more status updates, photos, likes, advertisements and videos than any human being could ever digest.

That provides an opening for tools, like BookVibe, that scan your feeds to pull out specific, useful information.

BookVibe, created by a tiny start-up called Parakweet, basically analyzes the tweets of accounts that you follow on Twitter and compiles a list of book recommendations based on which titles those people are talking about.

The company uses artificial intelligence techniques to try to distinguish between someone expressing true affection for a book as opposed to merely mentioning it. When you pull up the recommendation, the service gives you the full tweets so that you can see the book reference in its original context. And on Wednesday, Parakweet unveiled a new feature that lets you look at the Twitter discussion surrounding half a million specific titles.

I currently follow 245 accounts on Twitter, many of them smart people in technology and journalism. Although I am a voracious consumer of news and magazines, I don’t have time to read a whole lot of books, so I am always looking to make smart choices about the ones I do pick up.

So I checked BookVibe, which is free, to see what it recommended for me. It pulled up an eclectic list, from the 1972 children’s classic “Watership Down” by Richard Adams (which my colleague Diego Sorbara called “a wonderful book”) to the 2012 novel “Forgotten Country” by Catherine Chung (which the author and food blogger Cheryl Tan said was “a beautiful debut novel”).

Intrigued by “Watership Down,” which I never read as a kid because it was about rabbits, I clicked through to learn more. I got a basic description of the book plus data that indicated it was being mentioned about 20 times a month on Twitter. There were many tweets from fans, including the Chadron State College professor Elisabeth Ellington, who proclaimed it “My #1 Top crying book?” A British Twitter user named John painted a more mixed picture: “I was obsessed with Watership Down as a child (even wrote fanfic) but it has more blood & death than most horror films.” And a student named Camille was clearly distressed at being forced to read it for school: “That book looks like it is NOT the business.”

Hmmm, perhaps I made the right decision back in junior high.

Would “Forgotten Country” be more promising? Although its BookVibe page said it was only getting a few mentions a month on Twitter, they were overwhelmingly positive. The Syracuse University student Kyra Nay wrote, “Beautifully clear prose. Complex meditation on family, sisterhood, immigrating & secrets.” And the book blogger Jaime Boler not only liked it but pointed out it was now available in paperback.

Much more my type of book. Since BookVibe provides easy links to Amazon.com to buy books, I added it to my list of saved items for my next order.

The service is still in beta, and it shows signs of being a work in progress. Extracting real meaning from the shorthand found in 140-word tweets can be a challenge for humans, let alone computers. Some books popped up on the recommended list because their author had mentioned them. Some reviews were missed because the Twitter user offered a link to an external review without summarizing it in the tweet.

But over all, I found BookVibe to a valuable single-purpose tool and an indication of what’s possible as social media search technology becomes more sophisticated.

One of BookVibe’s most intriguing features is what I call voyeur mode. Because most Twitter posts are public, BookVibe lets you see the books recommended for any Twitter user, offering a window into their possible tastes through the people they have decided to follow on Twitter.

So you can, for example, peek at the recommendations for the television book-club hostess Oprah Winfrey (“Gone Girl” is on the list, as is “The Kite Runner”), or for the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (“Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything” popped up, as did “The Autobiography of Malcom X”).

Ramesh Haridas, the co-founder and chief executive of Paraktweet, said in an interview that his team set out three years ago to figure out what kind of posts in the social stream had staying power and would be worth cataloging in some way.

“We decided that the most useful ones were updates about activities,” he said. “The quality of these updates was very, very good, especially movies and books.”

In addition to the free consumer-oriented BookVibe, which will soon come out in a Facebook version, the company sells a more in-depth set of tools to book publishers, authors and retailers to help them understand how books are selling and where and what people are saying about them.

Parakweet is also developing a similar recommendation service for movies, which it calls TrendFinder. (There is already an early version.)

The technology is promising enough that Parakweet was recently able to raise $2 million from angel investors, and Mr. Haridas said that several global media companies and retailers, which he declined to name, were testing the company’s services.

By focusing on just a few topics, he said, Parakweet is able to offer more sophisticated results than those provided by the general-purpose search tools available on Twitter and Facebook. “It’s very hard to be an all-purpose social media tool and provide actionable analytics,” he said.



Online Reaction Is Swift as Texas Abortion Bill Is Signed

Advocates on both sides of the abortion debate took to Twitter on Thursday after Gov. Rick Perry of Texas signed the legislation, House Bill 2, which imposes sweeping new abortion restrictions that prompted weeks of protests online and in the state capital.

A small group of protesters holding a sign that read “Shame” gathered in the State Capitol building in Austin to protest as more than 100 Republican lawmakers joined Governor Perry at Thursday’s bill-signing ceremony.

State Senator Wendy Davis, a Democrat from Fort Worth whose filibuster of the legislation helped block initial passage of the bill in late June, has used the debate as an opportunity to energize Democrats across the state. On Twitter, Ms. Davis posted:

Under the new law, Texas would become the 12th state to ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy. The new law would also restricts abortion to surgical centers and requires doctors at abortion clinics to have hospital admitting privileges. Abortion rights campaigners say the new requirements would force the closing of all but a handful of the state’s 42 abortion clinics.

Cecile Richards, the daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, has been president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America since 2006. On Twitter, she said that effort were under way to block the law from taking effect.

On the other side of the debate, the Republican-controlled Texas House Caucus posted.



Updates on Snowden\'s Meeting With Rights Groups in Moscow

Last Updated, Saturday, 1:08 p.m. As my colleague Ellen Barry reports on Twitter from Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, Human Rights Watch released the first image of Edward Snowden in Russia, taken at a meeting with rights groups on Friday.

The image was sent to reporters by Tanya Lokshina, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Russia who was invited to the meeting. The woman seated to Mr. Snowden's right was Sarah Harrison, a British WikiLeaks activist; at his left was a translator. After the meeting ended, WikiLeaks released a full transcript of Mr. Snowden's statement to the group and a brief video clip of the meeting was published on a Russian news site.

In the video, obtained by Life News, Mr. Snowden read the beginning of his statement, saying: “A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Anyone's communications at any time. That is the power to change people's fates. It is also a serious violation of the law. The 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution of my country, Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous statutes and treaties forbid such systems of massive, pervasive surveillance.”

After a pause for translation, he continued, “While the U.S. Constitution marks these programs as illegal, my government argues that secret court rulings -” at which point he was interrupted by an airport announcement, provoking laughter from the room. He commented wryly, “I've heard that many times in the last couple of weeks.”

More video of his statement, apparently shot from the same angle, was broadcast on Russian television later.

Video of Edward Snowden reading a statement to rights advocates at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport on Friday.

Ms. Lokshina also revealed that Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said that he has decided to apply for political asylum in Russia. When asked about Mr. Snowden earlier this month, President Vladimir V. Putin told reporters, “If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: He must cease his work aimed at inflicting damage to our American partners, as strange as it may sound from my lips.” (More information on the meeting, which was still in progress when this post was first published, will be added in updates below as it reaches us via @EllenBarryNYT and other reporters.)

Earlier on Friday, Ms. Lokshina had posted the complete text of the mysterious invitation she received to the meeting at the airport on her Facebook page.

As the meeting started, her colleague Hugh Williamson pointed to a Human Rights Watch statement calling for his request for asylum to be evaluated fairly.

According to the Russian news agency Interfax, Mr. Putin's press secretary, Dmitri S. Peskov, stressed that the conditions outlined by the president still apply.

After the meeting ended, participants were besieged by a large number of journalists at the airport, the journalist Olaf Koens reported on Twitter.

Shaun Walker, the Moscow correspondent for London's Independent, noted that Vyacheslav Nikonov, a member of the Russian Parliament, was among those invited to meet Mr. Snowden.



Malala Yousafzai, Girl Shot by Taliban, Makes Appeal at U.N.

Last Updated, Saturday, 11:19 p.m. In a speech at the United Nations on her 16th birthday, Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban for promoting education for girls in Pakistan, called on world leaders to provide “free, compulsory education” for every child.

“Let us pick up our books and our pens,” Ms. Yousafzai told young leaders from 100 countries at the United Nations Youth Assembly in New York. “They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution.”

Ms. Yousafzai, noting that she was proud to be wearing a shawl that had once belonged to Benazir Bhutto, spoke in a calm, self-assured voice as she delivered her first major speech since she was shot on the left side of her head Oct. 9 on her way home from school in Pakistan's Swat Valley.

In her speech, she recalled how the attackers had also shot her friends. “They thought that the bullets would silence us,” she said, “but they failed.”

And then, out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born. I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. My dreams are the same

As my colleagues, Taha Siddiqui and Declan Walsh report, Taliban militants have pressed their violent campaign against girls' education in northwestern Pakistan, attacking more than 800 schools in the region since 2009.

From that time, Ms. Yousafzai was a outspoken critic of the Taliban campaign. Her efforts were included in a 2009 video report by my colleague, Adam Ellick.

She was greeted by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of South Korea. He introduced her to the youth assembly. “By targeting Malala, extremists showed what they feared the most: a girl with a book,” Mr. Ki-moon said. “Malala is calling on us to keep our promises - invest in young people and put education first.”

Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister and now United Nations special envoy for global education, also introduced Ms. Yousafzai and helped organize what was being called the Malala Day event at the U.N. On Twitter, thousands of people shared updates about the speech with the hashtag #malaladay.

But Ms. Yousafzai stressed in her speech that it was “not my day” but “the day of every woman, every boy and girl who have raised their voices for their rights.”

“Thousands of people have been killed by the terrorists and millions have been injured,” she said. “I am just one of them. So here I stand, one girl among many. I speak not for myself but for those without voice.”

She also emphasized that she had no desire for revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group. She included the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Gandhi and Mother Teresa as among the leaders who have inspired her.

She said she wanted education for every child, including the “sons and daughters of the Taliban” and terrorists.

“I do not even hate the Talib who shot me,” Ms. Yousafzai said. “Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was in front of me, I would not shoot him.”

She attributed her nonviolence philosophy and ability to forgive from lessons “learned from my father and my mother.”

It was her father, according to Mashable, who joined efforts with a Grammy Award-winning producer to produce a YouTube video with three young, undiscovered artists and more than 30 choir singers from around the world, to help promote a foundation to promote education for girls that was formally launched on Friday.

A version of this article appeared in print on 07/13/2013, on page A4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Girl Shot by Taliban Makes Appeal at U.N..

Muslims From Yangon Share Stories of Discrimination

Myanmar's Muslim minority has faced a series of deadly attacks over the past year that have tarnished the country's image even as it is trying to transform itself into a stable, peaceful democracy after decades of military rule. As my colleague Thomas Fuller has reported, sectarian clashes in the western state of Rakhine in 2012 left at least 167 dead and forced 100,000 people, most of them Muslims, to flee their homes. Buddhist mobs went on a rampage in Meiktila in central Myanmar in March, killing dozens. And critics say a radical Buddhis t movement has fanned the flames of discrimination, discouraging Buddhists from doing business with Muslims or intermarrying.

The violence has raised fears among Muslims in Yangon and elsewhere that they, too, could come under attack.

Asked on Facebook to share with The Times their personal experiences with religious discrimination, a handful of Burmese Muslims wrote to us about the prejudice they have felt from colleagues, fellow students and even teachers. One woman said several members of her extended family, including one who was pregnant, were killed 10 years ago in an attack by Buddhists. The responses reflected a sense that while there has been an increase in attacks since Myanmar, also known as Burma, began opening up, the sectarian divisions within society have deep roots.

Below are four such responses, which were submitted in English.

Moe, 34, grew up in Yangon and was one of the few Muslim students in a school with mostly Buddhists. Classmates and some teachers, he wrote in an e-mail, harassed him for being Muslim and called him “kalar,” a pejorative word used to describe people from South Asia or people of Indian ancestry.

“When you dig out the history, today violence towards Muslims are not new. We have grown up with fears,” wrote Moe, who asked to be referred to by his middle name.

When Moe was 18, he applied for a national registration card with his friend, who was Buddhist. The cards are used to prove citizenship, according to the State Department. While the friend received his card two weeks later, Moe said his never came. After a few months, Moe asked the immigration officer about the delay. According to Moe, the officer told him that he had been directed not to give such cards to Muslims.

“He took out my application form and threw it on the floor. I collected it from the floor with tears in my eyes,” Moe wrote. “Some Buddhist applicants were laughing at me.”

Moe applied again years later. After a lengthy process, which he said included the paying of multiple bribes and being forced to incorrectly identify his race as Bengali, he received the card.

“That day was happiest day for me. But my mother owed debt for me,” he wrote.

Ten years ago, one reader wrote, Buddhist activists attacked the home of a cousins' family in Kyaukse, a town in central Myanmar about 70 miles from Meiktila. She said the activists blocked the entrance to the home as they set it on fire, causing five of the relatives, including two children and a pregnant woman, to burn to death.

The reader has since moved abroad, but did not want to be identified as she returns to the country for visits. She now worries for the safety of her family in Yangon.

“After some recent events, I am still worried for my family in Myanmar, especially for my old mother, so I try to call them and check now and then to make sure they are all right,” she wrote. “I really hope some peaceful days will be ahead for my fellow Muslims living in Myanmar.”

One woman who identified herself as a teacher at a public high school in Yangon said that in May she was forced by the head of her school to quit her job and transfer her class to a different teacher. After pressing for a reason, the teacher, who asked that her name not be used, was told it was because she was a Muslim. Local officials, she said, told the school that there could be no Muslim teachers in the area this year.

“As soon as I heard that, tears flowed down n I couldn't stand up straight,” she wrote. “Then I transferred my class. I feel regret: being a teacher in Myanmar, studying hard for 6 years to get M.Ed. degree, molding the students as good citizens, trying my best during 10 years experience as a senior teacher & having hobby of teaching. How cruel discrimination it is!”

Wayne, 22, grew up in Yangon and said that he faced discrimination in school from the age of 5 because he is Muslim.

“Almost everyday in school, people made fun of me and my other friends of minority religions such as Islam and Christianity,” said Wayne, who has since moved abroad.

Some teachers in his schools also made derogatory comments against non-Buddhists during class.

“They sometimes mentioned unnecessary things during history classes such as how Muslims (especially Indians) made good slaves in the past and the class would break into a mocking laughter,” wrote Wayne, who asked to be identified by his middle name.

“Another teacher (ironically my best English grammar teacher) mentioned openly” that he hated Muslims, he wrote.

Wayne said that when he was in his final year of high school, he received a merit-based scholarship to attend an education program abroad. However, he said, the teacher announced to the class that the scholarship had been revoked because of his religion.

“She spilled her words with such a cold and cruel tone as if it was my fault that I am not a Buddhist and as if the action was completely fair,” Wayne wrote.

Wayne said that his relatives back home now face even greater difficulties because of the radical Buddhist movement, which calls itself 969.

“Because of these, some of my friends and relatives there in Myanmar now are having difficulties in running their businesses,” he wrote.



Parents Mourn Photographer Killed in Cairo

Last Updated, Saturday, 11:09 a.m. The parents of Ahmed Assem, a 26-year-old photographer for a Muslim Brotherhood newspaper who was killed on Monday in Cairo shortly after recording video of an army sniper, described their grief in an emotional interview broadcast by CNN on Friday.

CNN interviewed the parents of a photographer for an Islamist newspaper who was killed on Monday just after recording an army sniper during clashes in Cairo.

Mr. Assem's father, a doctor who did not share his Islamist politics, conducted his son's autopsy and described the fatal gunshot wound. The young man's mother said that she had warned him of the danger posed by his work, but her son had insisted that he was not afraid of death and was driven by an urge to uncover the truth.

His family also spoke to Leila Fadel, National Public Radio's Cairo bureau chief. Her audio report, posted on the broadcaster's Web site Friday, included comments from the dead man's older brother, Eslam, a police officer who told The Lede earlier this week that the family would pursue legal action against the sniper whose image was captured on video.

Despite political differences that caused the brothers to stop speaking during the recent upheaval in Egypt, Eslam Assem posted an image on Facebook on Friday showing a graffiti tribute to his dead brother that called him a martyr.

An image of a graffiti tribute to Ahmed Assem, a photographer for a Muslim Brotherhood newspaper who was killed on Monday in Cairo, posted on Facebook by his brother. An image of a graffiti tribute to Ahmed Assem, a photographer for a Muslim Brotherhood newspaper who was killed on Monday in Cairo, posted on Facebook by his brother.

In a discussion of Mr. Assem's death online Friday, Egyptians who are even more skeptical of the Brotherhood's ideology pointed to disparaging remarks about Egypt's Coptic Christians posted on the young man's Facebook page just two days before his death.

In a note apparently motivated by the conspiracy theory that Christians had played an important role in the overthrow of the Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, Mr. Assem attacked the Coptic pope, Tawadros II, who was present (along with a senior Muslim cleric) when the president's removal was announced at the defense ministry last week.

As the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr explained, the note was addressed to “Nazarenes” - a term frequently used by Egyptian Islamists to refer to followers of Jesus of Nazareth, but “associated with sectarian rhetoric” and considered deeply insulting. According to a translation circulated by Ms. Carr, the note read:

Morsi had kept a lot of catastrophes away from you, and with your stupidity you've lost the chance to live safely. Take this, cowards; Tawadros threw you into the fire. So you may understand that your safety lies in the application of Islam, not fighting it. You are the first to lose.



Social Media\'s Reaction to the Acquittal of George Zimmerman

Protesters outside the courthouse in Sanford, Fla., after the jury's not-guilty verdict was read in the George Zimmerman case.

As my colleague, Michael Schwirtz reports, the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin prompted an impassioned debate on Sunday about race and the judicial system, amid calls for more protests to be held across the country.

On Twitter alone, more than a million posts about the verdict went up in the 12 hours after it was announced Saturday night. Mr. Zimmerman's supporters expressed relief, while others responded with a mix of outrage and frustration.

Both Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, the parents of Mr. Martin, posted on Twitter after the verdict was read.

Mr. Zimmerman's brother, Robert Zimmerman Jr., also used Twitter to deliver a message on behalf of his father.

On Sunday, he posted a link on his Twitter account to a statement he gave Breitbart News, expressing disappointment to the reaction of the verdict. In it, he specifically cited the Rev. Al Sharpton Jr.'s comments on MSNBC, calling the jury's decision an “atrocity.”

“The hallmark of our judicial system is a trial by jury of your peers,” he said. “People called for George's arrest and called for him to have his day in court, and both of those things have come to pass. The hallmark of our society is the rule of law. It should go without saying that respecting the rule of law and the outcome, this verdict, is our duty.”

The jury accepted the defense's argument that Mr. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch leader, had acted in self-defense when he shot and killed Mr. Martin, who was unarmed and walking through a residential neighborhood in Sanford, Fla.

Bernice A. King, the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., expressed her thoughts about the case in a Twitter message to Benjamin Crump, a lawyer who has been representing Mr. Martin's family.

On the Be a King Facebook page, Ms. King called for nonviolence protests “to honor the dignity of Trayvon Martin's life and not add further tragedy to what his family and the people of Sanford have already experienced.”

It's '63 once again. NOT GUILTY. Just like those who got off for the bombing of the 16th Street church in Birmingham back in '63. I'm stunned and disappointed. It's a sad day in the history of American jurisprudence that our justice system continues to fall short of the truth, especially when a person can be going about their daily business and ultimately be killed because of a false assumption. In the words of a friend, “Any law that justifies the actions of Zimmerman is an unjust law.” In the words of my father, “We've got some difficult days ahead.” Let us seek God for his guidance during this time. God is a God of justice, mercy and grace. All protests against the verdict must demonstrate an irrevocable commitment to nonviolence, to honor the dignity of Trayvon Martin's life and not add further tragedy to what his family and the people of Sanford have already experienced. Now is the time to create a culture of nonviolence.

And while race relations was banned from discussion in the courtroom during the trial, it dominated the discussion online, as well as in churches and on the Sunday morning talk shows.

On Instagram, a woman from Jacksonville, Florida, posted a video, asking the question, “They say the case isn't about race, but my question is if Zimmerman had been black, and Trayvon black, would they have given Zimmerman still no time, or would they have charged him with manslaughter, or second-degree murder?”

Dozens of musicians, sports figures and celebrities also weighed in with their reactions to the verdict.

Both online and offline, amid calls for a peaceful response, people began organizing protests to be held across the country on Sunday, with the Occupy Wall Street movement posting a map and locations of planned demonstrations.

In Jackson, Miss, C.J. Lawrence, a lawyer posted a video on his Instagram account, and said: “As I sit and reflect on this trial I look at it two ways. It could be something that could discourage us, or something that inspires us. Let Trayvon Martin be the fuel to the fire that inspires us to change our communities, our society, our world. Remember…”


Deborah Acosta contributed reporting.



Comparing Black Minister to an Orangutan Was Not Racist, Italian Senator Insists

Roberto Calderoli, the vice president of Italy's senate and a leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, at a news conference in 2011.Andrew Medichini/Associated Press Roberto Calderoli, the vice president of Italy's senate and a leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, at a news conference in 2011.

Faced with calls for his resignation, a senior Italian senator insisted that it was “an aesthetic judgment, not meant to be racist,” when he said that Italy's first black minister looked like an ape.

Roberto Calderoli, a leader of Italy's anti-immigrant Northern League, had told supporters on Saturday that whenever he sees photographs of Cécile Kyenge, the Congolese-Italian minister for integration, “I can't help but think of her resemblance to an orangutan.”

In interviews with Italian newspapers published on Monday, Mr. Calderoli, who is the vice president of Italy's Senate, cast himself as a misunderstood animal lover whose remarks were harmless. “There was nothing racist about it. I didn't even mean to be offensive,” he told La Repubblica. “I'm always comparing people to animals.”

In an apparent effort to prove the point that he is an equal-opportunity offender, Mr. Calderoli told Corriere della Sera that he often thought of a heron when he saw Prime Minister Enrico Letta - “the long legs, the paw in the swamp,” he said - and compared the female justice minister to a dog. Asked if he regretted his choice of words with regard to Ms. Kyenge, whose vision of a multicultural Italian identity is at odds with his views, Mr. Calderoli said he was only sorry that “out of a 45-minute speech to 1,500 people, everything is reduced to this question of the orangutan.”

Mr. Calderoli was forced to resign from then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's cabinet in 2006 after he ripped open his shirt on live television to display a cartoon insulting the Prophet Muhammad. As my colleague Ian Fisher reported at the time, that stunt prompted anger in Libya, where 11 people were killed when protesters stormed the Italian Consulate in Benghazi and the security forces opened fire.

In 2006, the Italian politician Roberto Calderoli ripped open his shirt on television to reveal a cartoon insulting the Muslim prophet.Rai Tg3/European Pressphoto Agency In 2006, the Italian politician Roberto Calderoli ripped open his shirt on television to reveal a cartoon insulting the Muslim prophet.

Later that year, a blogger for La Repubblica recalled on Monday, Mr. Calderoli suggested that Italy had defeated France in the World Cup final because the French team was made up of “Negroes, Muslims and communists.”

In a statement posted on Twitter, Mr. Letta, the prime minister, urged Ms. Kyenge to continue with her work and called the remarks about her unacceptable.

Other members of Mr. Letta's Democratic Party, including Khalid Chaouki, a Moroccan-Italian deputy, called on Mr. Calderoli to resign, rallying at the Pantheon on Monday and collecting more than 115,000 signatures on an online petition.

Asked, in an interview with Corriere della Sera translated into English, if Mr. Calderoli should resign, Ms. Kyenge replied: “I prefer not to say. But I will say that if he is unable to translate discontent into language that is respectful, however harsh it may be, then he should perhaps hand over to someone who can.”

She also confirmed that she had endured a large number of threats since taking up her post in April. “Every day, through every channel - letters, e-mails, phone calls,” she said. “The worst, including death threats, arrive online. There's no law yet, and there should be. Instigation to racism is shading into instigation to violence. It's the same for everyone. I'm thinking about attacks on the Jewish community. We've got to work on this.”

On Monday, the Italian edition of The Local reported, “nooses appeared on lamp posts with posters signed by far-right group Forza Nuova in the city of Pescara, where the minister for integration was visiting for a conference on immigration and citizenship.”

A noose hung next to a placard reading Massimiliano Schiazza/European Pressphoto Agency A noose hung next to a placard reading “Immigration is the noose of the people,” before a debate on immigration in Pescara, Italy, on Monday.


New Pussy Riot Video Asks Where Russia\'s Oil Wealth Goes

Last Updated, Wednesday, 9:50 a.m. In a new song released online Tuesday, the Russian protest group Pussy Riot claimed that billions of dollars of the nation's oil wealth have been looted by President Vladimir V. Putin and his allies.

A music video for the new Pussy Riot song “Like a Red Prison.”

The song, “Like a Red Prison,” was accompanied by a music video showing masked members of the group tossing black crude onto a portrait of Igor Sechin, a Putin confidant and former spy who is chief executive of Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, during a guerrilla performance at an oil facility. Later in then video, an image of Alexander Bastrykin, who leads Russia's Investigative Committee, known for harassing groups critical of Mr. Putin, was also doused in oil.

A photojournalist who was present during the video shoot, Denis Sinyakov, said in a telephone interview that it was recorded in recent months, with one sequence, showing the group's banner unfurled on the roof of a Rosneft gas station, filmed in June. He added that the video was finished in a rush, according to the activists, so that it would appear before the trial of a protest leader, Aleksei Navalny, concludes this week.

A member of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot throws oil on a portrait of Alexander Bastrykin, a senior law-enforcement official, known for harassing groups critical of the president.pussy-riot.info A member of the Russian protest group Pussy Riot throws oil on a portrait of Alexander Bastrykin, a senior law-enforcement official, known for harassing groups critical of the president.

Mr. Sinyakov, who is not part of the collective, but has been granted access at the planning stages to anti-Putin stunts carried out by other groups, said that he traveled with the women while they were not wearing masks. To the best of his knowledge, Yekaterina Samutsevich, a member of the group who was jailed with two others last year for performing a song at Moscow's main cathedral calling on the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Mr. Putin, but later released by an appeals court, was not involved in the production.

For her part, Ms. Samutsevich claimed on Tuesday that the new release was not an official one, despite the fact that it was described as such on the group's Twitter feed.

The new song was also heavily promoted on a Twitter account run by Pyotr Verzilov, whose wife, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, is one of the two women still serving time in a penal colony for the cathedral performance. Liner notes posted on a new Web site, pussy-riot.info, described Ms. Tolokonnikova as one of the authors of “like a Red Prison.”

There have been signs of division between the women in the past, and the music video was uploaded Tuesday to a new YouTube channel registered in the group's name.

As the American-financed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports, the liner notes also claim that Russia's oil revenues amounted to 7 trillion rubles (about $215 billion) in 2012, “but only Putin and several of his friends see this 7 trillion.” To focus attention on this, the group said, “We therefore decided to independently look into oil production and sing our new song about the red prison to oil and gas workers.”

By coincidence, the new song was released just one day after a music video for “Oil,” a dance track from Russia's DJ Smash that mocks the deep affection for black gold among the nation's oligarchs.

A music video for “Oil,” a dance track mocking the great love of Russian oligarchs for black gold.

The Pussy Riot song's lyrics include a reference to Mr. Navalny, the popular blogger and anti-corruption lawyer who expects to be convicted this week on charges of corruption filed against him by state prosecutors last year, after he emerged as a leader of anti-Putin street protests. In an interview with The Guardian last week, Mr. Navalny said that when the state's wealth boomed with a surge in oil prices, Mr. Putin “just bought everyone off. Now the money is ending … so now he has turned to repression as a means of running the country.”

As the Guardian correspondent Miriam Elder reports, despite the threat of jail hanging over him, on Tuesday Mr. Navalny published the results of an investigation into corruption by a senior Russian official on his Live Journal blog and invited Mr. Putin to look at the evidence.

Last week, video posted online showed Mr. Navlany and his supporters marching to an election office in Moscow to submit the papers necessary to allow him to run for mayor of the city.

Video of Aleksei Navalny and his supporters marching to an election office in Moscow last week.

Mr. Navalny also invited readers of his blog to watch another video clip, “that depicts my wacky detention,” after he emerged from the election office to address supporters and was hauled off by the police.

Video of Aleksei Navalny being detained outside a Moscow election office last week.

As he prepared to hear his fate in court, Mr. Navalny continued to press ahead with the race, posting images on Instagram of his “bustling” campaign office.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.

Follow Andrew Roth on Twitter @ARothmsk.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 17, 2013

A caption in an earlier version of this post misstated the identity of a Russian official whose portrait was being doused in oil in a photograph taken during the Pussy Riot video shoot. It was Alexander Bastrykin, not Igor Sechin.



Prominent Gay Rights Activist Is Found Dead in Cameroon

An Amnesty International report, from January, on rights abuses in Cameroon.

Eric Ohena Lembembe, a prominent activist in Cameroon for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people, was found dead in his apartment in the capital of Yaoundé, soon after he wrote about attacks in the country on organizations that support homosexuals, Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Tuesday.

The rights group, which has collaborated with Mr. Lembembe on the reports, said his body was discovered by friends who had gone to his home after they had been unable to reach him by telephone for several days.

His front door was padlocked on the outside, but through the window they could see his body on the bed, and alerted the police, who broke down the door. According to one friend, the Human Rights Watch statement said, Mr. Lembembe's neck and feet appeared to have been broken, and his face, hands and feet had been burned with an iron.

“We don't know who killed Eric Lembembe, or why he was killed, but one thing is clear: The Cameroonian authorities' utter failure to stem homophobic violence sends the message that these attacks can be carried out with impunity,” Neela Ghoshal, a senior L.G.B.T. rights researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in the statement.

As part of his activism, Mr. Lembembe was an author and a writer about issues affecting the L.G.B.T. community.

In his last blog entry this month for a Web site to which he contributed, Erasing 76 Crimes, Mr. Lembembe described attacks on groups that support gays and lesbians, the latest of which targeted the Access Center of Alternatives-Cameroon.

“At about 7 a.m. on June 26, the staff discovered flames coming from the office of paramedics/psychosocial counselors. Firefighters did not respond to the blaze, nor did neighbors. The center was consumed by the fire. Although no one was killed, most of the equipment (desks, chairs, computers, fans, patients' medical records, cooking utensils, etc..) was completely destroyed,” Franz Mananga, a director of the center, was quoted as saying in Mr. Lembembe's report.

“Cameroonian officials show no signs that they are aware of the problem. No one has denounced the attacks. No one has visited the scenes of the fire and the burglaries,” Mr. Lembembe wrote in the post, published on July 5.

76 Crimes monitors the human toll of anti-gay and anti-LGBT laws and the struggle to repeal them in 76 countries.

Mr. Lemembe also spoke out about other attacks in a Human Rights Watch statement published on July 1. Ten days before the June 26 arson attack on Alternative-Cameroun, he wrote, assailants broke into the Yaoundé office of a prominent human rights lawyer, Michel Togué, stealing confidential information, and on June 1, a headquarters of the Central African Human Rights Defenders Network (Réseau de Défenseurs des Droits Humains en Afrique Centrale, or Redhac) was burglarized.

“There is no doubt: antigay thugs are targeting those who support equal rights on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity,” Mr. Lemembe said in the Human Rights Watch statement. “Unfortunately, a climate of hatred and bigotry in Cameroon, which extends to high levels in government, reassures homophobes that they can get away with these crimes.”

Mr. Lembembe's death was mourned by people involved in rights and social justice groups, including Eileen C. Donahue, the United States ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council, and Wilson Cruz, a spokesperson for GLAAD.

Cameroon is one of 38 African countries that criminalize homosexuality, said a report in June by Amnesty International, which also produced a video about rights abuses in Cameroon. As my colleague Adam Nossiter wrote last month, arrests of gay men, and long and abusive imprisonments, are regularly reported there, among other places in Africa.

Two of the organizations mentioned in Mr. Lemembe's Erasing 76 Crimes blog post, Alternatives-Cameroun and Association for the Defense of Gays and Lesbians, were among the authors of an extensive report in March that noted that Cameroon prosecutes people for consensual same-sex conduct more aggressively than almost any country in the world.

The other contributors to the March report, the Cameroonian Foundation for AIDS, of which Mr. Lembembe was executive director, and Human Rights Watch â€" said they found that at least 28 people have been prosecuted for same-sex conduct in Cameroon since 2010. Most cases are marked by grave human rights violations, including torture, forced confessions, denial of access to legal counsel and discriminatory treatment by law enforcement and judicial officials, it said.

It included 10 case studies of arrests and prosecutions under an article of Cameroon's penal code, which punishes “sexual relations between persons of the same sex” with up to five years in prison.

“Dozens of Cameroonians do jail time solely because they are suspected of being gay or lesbian,” it said.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)