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Monday, August 19, 2013

Egypt’s Media Cheers on Army Crackdown

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports from Cairo, criticism of the deadly crackdown on Islamist protesters by the security forces has all but disappeared from the Egyptian media since channels that supported the Muslim Brotherhood were shut down last month.

State television broadcasts, like an interview this week with a former supreme court judge who endorsed the widespread conspiracy theory of covert American support for the Brotherhood â€" and took it one step further by claiming, without evidence, that President Obama’s Kenyan half-brother was a financial backer of the Islamist organization â€" are now framed by on-screen graphics reading, in English, “Egypt Fighting Terrorism.”

An Egyptian state television interview of Tahani el-Gebali, a former supreme court judge who claimed that President Obama’s family provides financial support to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Not to be outdone, private channels eager to help the military-installed government win international support for its use of deadly force have also added English-language captions and voice-overs to reports that cast the killing of hundreds of protesters in Cairo last week as a necessary part of Egypt’s “war on terrorism.” The satellite channel ONTV, once known for its sympathetic coverage of anti-Mubarak activists during the 2011 revolution, is now running a live stream of its ongoing special report “Egypt Under Attack,” dubbed into English for foreign viewers.

As the activist blogger Gigi Ibrahim reported on Monday, ONTV has even produced a sort of trailer for the security crackdown. The 45-second spot, which features police images of Islamist violence that have been broadcast by American news organizations, blames the Western media for supposedly failing to report on the “Real Holocaust in Egypt” being carried out by the Brotherhood.

Against this backdrop, some Egyptian bloggers and journalists have been trading examples of the apparent competition among the various channels and newspapers to outdo one another in the fervor of their support for the military crackdown.

Among the strangest of these efforts was a weekly newspaper’s front-page tribute to Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the defense minister who deposed the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, last month.

As the blogger who writes as The Cairene Penguin demonstrated, the template for that photo-illustration, which showed the whole of Egypt’s population as manifestations of General Sisi, appears to have been a poster for “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” complete with yellow New York City taxi cabs still visible in the background.



Egypt’s Media Cheers on Army Crackdown

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports from Cairo, criticism of the deadly crackdown on Islamist protesters by the security forces has all but disappeared from the Egyptian media since channels that supported the Muslim Brotherhood were shut down last month.

State television broadcasts, like an interview this week with a former supreme court judge who endorsed the widespread conspiracy theory of covert American support for the Brotherhood â€" and took it one step further by claiming, without evidence, that President Obama’s Kenyan half-brother was a financial backer of the Islamist organization â€" are now framed by on-screen graphics reading, in English, “Egypt Fighting Terrorism.”

An Egyptian state television interview of Tahani el-Gebali, a former supreme court judge who claimed that President Obama’s family provides financial support to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Not to be outdone, private channels eager to help the military-installed government win international support for its use of deadly force have also added English-language captions and voice-overs to reports that cast the killing of hundreds of protesters in Cairo last week as a necessary part of Egypt’s “war on terrorism.” The satellite channel ONTV, once known for its sympathetic coverage of anti-Mubarak activists during the 2011 revolution, is now running a live stream of its ongoing special report “Egypt Under Attack,” dubbed into English for foreign viewers.

As the activist blogger Gigi Ibrahim reported on Monday, ONTV has even produced a sort of trailer for the security crackdown. The 45-second spot, which features police images of Islamist violence that have been broadcast by American news organizations, blames the Western media for supposedly failing to report on the “Real Holocaust in Egypt” being carried out by the Brotherhood.

Against this backdrop, some Egyptian bloggers and journalists have been trading examples of the apparent competition among the various channels and newspapers to outdo one another in the fervor of their support for the military crackdown.

Among the strangest of these efforts was a weekly newspaper’s front-page tribute to Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the defense minister who deposed the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, last month.

As the blogger who writes as The Cairene Penguin demonstrated, the template for that photo-illustration, which showed the whole of Egypt’s population as manifestations of General Sisi, appears to have been a poster for “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” complete with yellow New York City taxi cabs still visible in the background.



Web Site Down? How Dare You!

SEATTLE â€" On occasion, I visit a small store in my neighborhood only to find a sign saying the store is closed for an hour or so. It’s mildly irritating, but it has never occurred to me that those moments are worth freaking out over.

Such restraint was not universally exercised on Monday, when people ran to social media to voice outrage about a rare Amazon service hiccup.

That followed a pattern that we have come to expect now, after a week in which several of the Internet’s biggest companies went dark for a time. Google did not work for five minutes the other day, while parts of Microsoft’s Outlook.com Web mail service were out of commission for several days last week. A problem during regular site maintenance knocked the Web site of The New York Times offline for a couple of hours last week, too.

Of course, the downtime presents some sort of financial consequences for these companies. BuzzFeed took out its calculator and decided that Amazon could lose $1,104 in sales for every second its American site was down.

If you’re like me, you simply went back when the site resumed service and made your purchase then. Around the time Amazon went dark, I was about to buy an air mattress for some house guests coming to visit. Once the short shutdown was over, I made my order, and I have the utmost confidence my mattress is being stuffed into a corrugated cardboard box at an Amazon warehouse.

Some Web breakdowns are, of course, more serious. EBay had a well-known one that lasted nearly a full day back in 1999, when people were just beginning to realize how vexing it could be when always-on dot-com services vanished from their browsers. Investors crushed eBay’s stock back then.

Amazon’s stock closed up slightly on Monday.

Still, there is still impatience when the Web’s favorite sites disappear, as Amazon did Monday. And people let it be known. These microfailures have become a curious new form of entertainment, like a fire drill that forces everyone to empty out an office building.

The Twitter user Pourmecoffee captured the spirit of the moment on Monday with a joke about the primitive state of existence people must revert to in an Amazon blackout:



Video and Images of Killings in Egypt

As my colleagues David D. Kirkpatrick and Rod Nordland in Cairo report, Egypt has seen two grisly mass killings in the last 24 hours. The government has acknowledged killing 36 Islamists in its custody under circumstances that remain unclear, and an attack by suspected militants in a remote corner of the Sinai peninsula left at least 24 police officers dead and 3 injured.

These killings are part of an unprecedented spasm of violence that has left hundreds of people dead across Egypt since last Wednesday, when more than 600 people died as security forces dispersed two protest camps supporting the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi.

Egyptian officials struggled on Monday to provide consistent accounts of the two mass killings. As The New York Times has reported, the authorities initially said the officers had been killed by militants who fired rocket-propelled grenades at police minibuses near Rafah, a town on Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip. Later, though, they said that militants had forced the officers off the bus, forced them to lie on the ground and then shot them to death.

Samer al-Atrush, a Cairo-based reporter for Agence France-Presse, drew attention to a picture on Twitter that he said showed several of the slain officers lying on the side of the road. Some had their hands behind their backs, and all were in civilian clothes. The image appeared to support the second official version of events.

There was also confusion over the deaths of the Islamist prisoners, who were being held at Abu Zaabal, a facility in the countryside north of Cairo. Egyptian officials said the prisoners were killed in the course of an escape attempt, while the Muslim Brotherhood said they were tear-gassed and shot in cold blood while being held in a locked police van. Egypt’s Interior Ministry changed the official account of their deaths at least three times on Sunday night, according to Mayy El Sheikh in The Times’s Cairo bureau.

Osama al-Mahdy, a Cairene lawyer, posted a series of graphic pictures to Twitter that he said showed the bodies of several of the prisoners killed on Sunday. Mr. Mahdy said he took the pictures himself at Zeinhom Morgue, the main morgue in Cairo. Two of the bodies appear to be blackened and burned from the shoulders up.

Graphic video posted to YouTube by an account that specializes in news-related clips about Egypt showed similar images, including one of the body of a bearded man on a dirty examining table, his head blackened and burned. There appeared to be bruises and burns on his torso, which was marked by a long autopsy scar. When asked for his opinion, the medical examiner said one word: “Torture.”

Graphic video posted to YouTube claimed to show the body of one of the men killed at Abu Zaabal prison lying on a table in Cairo’s Zeinhom Morgue.

A second video posted by the same YouTube account showed hysterical family members of the men killed on Sunday, overcome with grief in the dirty courtyard of Zeinhom Morgue.

Video posted to YouTube on Monday showed the family members of prisoners killed on Sunday overcome with grief in the courtyard of a Cairo morgue.



Children Lost in War Zones and Disasters Find Their Families With an App

Entrepreneurs often talk about the “pain points” their new app or service will ease, but as it has been repeatedly pointed out, the problems they solve are more often than not the problems of affluent and hyper-connected 20-somethings in cities with great cell service and ample Wi-Fi.

The problem and pain encountered by a lost child in the developing world, though â€" someone with maybe no parents and no last name, and almost certainly no cellphone â€" are tended to less often.

But for Jorge Just, a student in a class called “Design for UNICEF,” at New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts, it was exactly the kind of problem he wanted to tackle â€" and one in which he though a little technology could make a real difference for people suffering under tremendous emotional distress.

During five visits to Uganda, Mr. Just found that older systems for lost children depended on lots of legwork, picture walls and suitcases full of paper-based forms that were manually entered into large databases.

“A child might be on one side of a refugee camp, and their parents might be on the other side, but for all intents and purposes, they might as well be on different continents,” he said. “Even small distances in those situations can feel insurmountable.”

So he started working on a way to help. After three years of development, his Rapid Family Tracing and Reunification app, or RapidFTR, is now connecting lost children with their families much more quickly than ever before.

According to UNICEF, RapidFTR’s ability to photograph, record and share information about lost children has reduced the time it takes to reunite families from over six weeks to just hours.

The app was not particularly complicated, from a technical standpoint, but Mr. Just wanted to make sure it was something aid organizations would actually adopt.

To do that, he resisted the temptation of dreaming up a grandiose plan to revolutionize refugee camp systems and processes. Instead he focused on creating a simpler and digital version of processes that had once been carried out with paper and pencils.

“You have to remember that people who are using it are not as nearly as comfortable with technology as the people who are building it,” he said. “And they’re using it in times of pure distress.”

Meant to run on hardware already in the field, like Blackberry devices, RapidFTR can add a child to the system with only scant bits of information. If a child cannot give their full name, or is too young or too scared speak, a photo alone can begin the process. The app works both with and without a wireless connection, by syncing to a server later, if needed.

RapidFTR is being deployed in South Sudan and has already been used at the Nyakabade Transit Center and the Rwamwanja Refugee Settlement camp in Uganda, where children from Democratic Republic of Congo often arrive after fleeing attacks by rebel groups. Mr. Just said that he was aware of at least 70 children who have been reunited with their families through the app so far.

His earlier projects in the N.Y.U. program were more whimsical. He created things like automated telephone pranks, but the child reunification app became his master’s thesis, and he later joined UNICEF as an employee. With the assistance of some pro-bono engineering from the software company Thoughtworks, he was able to get the program going and then recruited an army of volunteers to build RapidFTR.

Today the program is entirely open-source and driven by volunteers. Mr. Just, too, has now become a volunteer for his own app, in addition to teaching the “Design for UNICEF” class that he was once a student in.

Last week, UNICEF awarded $50,000 to develop three applications by students in the N.Y.U. program, including a cheap device for extracting power from car batteries, a pop-up network for sending text messages when cellular networks are not working and an application to deliver medicine disaster sites, using drones.

In considering his own project, as well as those of his future students, Mr. Just said, “one of the things I kept telling myself, was: you don’t have to ‘change the world’ to change the world.”



Baidu Deal May Help Reduce App Piracy in China

The move should also help Baidu regain ground against two other Chinese Internet giants, Alibaba and Tencent, which were quicker to add mobile capabilities.

Baidu Deal May Help Reduce App Piracy in China

The move should also help Baidu regain ground against two other Chinese Internet giants, Alibaba and Tencent, which were quicker to add mobile capabilities.

Daily Report: ‘Digital Inequality’ Holds Back Millions in U.S.

The Obama administration has poured billions of dollars into expanding the reach of the Internet, and nearly 98 percent of American homes now have access to some form of high-speed broadband. But tens of millions of people are still on the sidelines of the digital revolution, Edward Wyatt reports.

“The job I’m trying to get now requires me to know how to operate a computer,” said Elmer Griffin, 70, a retired truck driver from Bessemer, Ala., who was recently rejected for a job at an auto-parts store because he was unable to use the computer to check the inventory. “I wish I knew how, I really do. People don’t even want to talk to you if you don’t know how to use the Internet.”

Mr. Griffin is among the roughly 20 percent of American adults who do not use the Internet at home, work and school, or by mobile device, a figure essentially unchanged since Barack Obama took office as president in 2009 and initiated a $7 billion effort to expand access, chiefly through grants to build wired and wireless systems in neglected areas of the country.

Administration officials and policy experts say they are increasingly concerned that a significant portion of the population, around 60 million people, is shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education, and that the social and economic effects of that gap are looming larger. Persistent digital inequality â€" caused by the inability to afford Internet service, lack of interest or a lack of computer literacy â€" is also deepening racial and economic disparities in the United States, experts say.

“As more tasks move online, it hollows out the offline options,” said John B. Horrigan, a senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “A lot of employers don’t accept offline job applications. It means if you don’t have the Internet, you could be really isolated.”

Seventy-six percent of white American households use the Internet, compared with 57 percent of African-American households, according to “Exploring the Digital Nation,” a Commerce Department report released this summer and based on 2011 data.



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