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Akamai’s report on the State of the Internet reveals some pretty interesting facts about the penetration, adoption and evolution of internet services in world. Internet adoption and usage in a country is an important statistic to gauge the state of ICT ( Information and Communication Technology in a country ). While China, India’s no. 1 competitor in terms of growing markets is ranked higher on most of the scales used in the report, the statistics for India are not so impressive. Here’s a look at what the study has concluded about the state of the internet in India and how it compares with China.

Average Measured Connection Speed

India ranks 143 globally with an average connectivity speed of 0.8 Mbps in Q3 of 2010. India’s connectivity speeds took a hit with an overall decline and reflects in the negative QoQ ( quarter on quarter ) change. India’s QoQ change of Internet speed is -6.9%. The year on year change ( this quarter compared to this quarter last year) also took a downturn showing the decline in average connectivity speeds in India. The YoY change is recorded at -9.1%.

China comparatively did better with the QoQ change negative but relatively smaller compared to India. China is ranked globally at 129. the QoQ change was -1.5% but the YoY change was 9.3%.

Average Peak Connection Speed

Average peak connection speed is average of the maximum measured speed at city level. India ranks 135 globally in terms of global average peak connection speed globally. The average peak connection speed measured in India was 5.1 Mbps in Q4 of ‘10. While the QoQ was -0.4%, the YoY change was calculated as 13%.

China’s average peak connection speed was measured at 3.1Mbps. The YoY change for China is a whopping 48%.

High Broadband Connectivity

India ranks 80th globally for high broadband connectivity with 0.4% connections measured to have a speed in excess of 5Mbps. India’s comparison to itself in its previous quarter and previous year suggest a big decline in high broadband connectivity. The QoQ change is calculated at -18% and the YoY is -30%.

China ranks 85th worldwide and the QoQ was -14% while the YoY change was 13%.

Japan ranks 1st globally when it comes to high broadband connectivity.

Broadband connectivity

Broadband connectivity measures the increase in number of broadband connections. India ranks 129th in the report globally. The adoption of broadband internet has been rather disappointing. India has only 4.5% internet connections above 2Mbps. The QoQ change and YoY change too were unimpressive at -17% and -24% respectively.

Slow adoption of broadband services in India will hamper businesses that depend on high internet broadband consumption , like digital media providers and such.

China however did well with 8% internet connections measured over 2Mbps. The QoQ change was calculated at 5% and the YoY change an impressive 36%.

Narrowband connectivity

India has a high rate of narrowband consumption according to the report. India ranks 43 globally with 35% of its internet connections below 256Kbps. the QoQ change was calculated at 5.9% while the YoY change, a strong 39%. This suggests that although the internet connectivity speeds are not high, internet adoption is growing.

China can boast that only about 9.6% of its connection speeds are below 256Kbps.

While the report focuses on Internet connectivity, it does not provide any stats regarding India’s mobile Internet connectivity. India’s mobile connectivity is growing faster than any other country in the world and is expected to continue this growth trend. The recent roll out of 3G services in the country will be complete by the end of Q3 of 2011, so expect upward movement in this list.

This report (link) should look very different next year if the ISP in India provide mobile broadband services at affordable price.

What’s your opinion?

Kris Hoet wrote a new blog post: Nutricia launches unique dual-screen pregnancy iPhone app for couples Young parents all over Belgium rely on Nutricia babyfoods every day. And now, Nutricia has found a way to support mums even before their baby is born – with Baby Connection: a unique iPhone app that helps gets the dad more involved in the pregnancy. Baby Connection works best when you use it as a [...]

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DMK MP Kanimozhi on Saturday appeared before a special CBI court for her bail hearing in connection with the 2G spectrum allotment case.

Ex-North Dakota man linked to Hawaii human trafficking conspiracy In-Forum HONOLULU – A man with ties to the Red River Valley pleaded guilty this week to a federal charge in connection with a massive human trafficking conspiracy in Hawaii. HONOLULU – A man with ties to the Red River Valley pleaded guilty this week to a ...

ErrorCode<ERRCA0017>:SubStatus<ES0009>:There is a temporary failure. Please retry later. (The request failed, because you exceeded quota limits for this hour. If you experience this often, upgrade your subscription to a higher one). Additional Information : Throttling due to resource : <Resource>

Azure AppFabric Caches come with quota limits. Quota limits are mentioned here.

In case the <Resource> in the exception you get is:

1. Bandwidth or Transactions: This means that you are actually in need of a bigger cache since your cache usage is pretty huge. (or need to re-architecture the app so that it uses less bandwidth & does fewer transactions)

2. Connections : This might point to a bug in your code or erraneous setting in DataCacheConfiguration. Lets take the example of 128 MB cache. The allowed connection count is 5. For you to exceed this count, following are the possibilities:

a. DataCacheFactoryConfiguration.MaxConnectionToServer is set to value of more than 5 : In this case, whenever you instantiate a DataCache object from a unique DataCacheFactory, your DataCache is going to open more than 5 connections to Azure AppFabric Cache service. That would mean that you are exceeding the allowed count.

Solution: Try setting the value to 1 and try again.

b. Several instances of DataCaches created from different DataCacheFactory: If in your code you are initializing several DataCacheFactories and do a GetDefaultCache() from each one of them, then each instance of DataCache you create is going to have it's own connections to the Azure cache service.

Solution: Create only a single instance DataCacheFactory in your code and re-use it as much as possible. If you really need to have several instances of DataCacheFactories, please ensure to Dispose() them off, once they are not needed.

c. Several instances of application running with Windows Azure: It might also be a case that your application has several instances deployed and each one of them is using the same cache. In such a case you are exhausting the connections since each instance is creating connections to Azure cache service.

Solution: Upgrade your cache subscription.

 

If none of the above is a symptom for you and you still get the error mentioned in the title, feel free to post back. I'll be glad to help out.

 

Toby Anstett of Long Grove was presented an Outstanding Tutor Award from the Literacy Volunteers of Illinois and the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Literacy for her work with Adult Learning Connection through the Waukegan Public Library.

Joe Lewis Harris III, 19, of Richmond, in connection with this week's fatal shooting of one man and the wounding of another male.

Young parents all over Belgium rely on Nutricia babyfoods every day. And now, Nutricia has found a way to support mums even before their baby is born – with Baby Connection: a unique iPhone app that helps gets the dad more involved in the pregnancy. Baby Connection works best when you use it as a couple. There’s a mum version and a dad version – and everything each parent adds is automati...

View the campaign Nutricia launches unique dual-screen pregnancy iPhone app for couples

APPLY ONLINE: www.adidas.jobs

adidas is hiring for Store Associate opportunities in Elizabeth, NJ. Working at adidas is much more than a job. It's a place where you can experience a connection with your favorite athlete and shape the future of sport. At adidas, you'll take your passion for sport and create a career so fulfilling, you'll go home every night with a win.

Retail Store Associates contribute to the achievements of Store KPI targets by building an emotional connection with customers and living the Brand Values. The core expectations include utilizing expertise and experience to; serve and sell to customers and achieving operational excellence, flawlessly execute store operations when responsible for product flow to and from sales floor and/or cashier procedures.

Qualified candidates will have a minimum of three to six month’s experience working in a sports/fashion customer & commercial focused retail environment.

adidas' founder, Adi Dassler, was inspired by a single idea when he made his first shoes, at the age of just 20: to provide every athlete with the best footwear for his or her respective discipline. And 85 years later, we have almost 16,000 employees worldwide who put this same passion and commitment to innovation into each concept, component, process and product we produce.

Our mission is to be the leading sports brand in the world. At adidas we understand it takes a village to accomplish this mission. adidas provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, national origin, citizenship, creed, age, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran status, mental or physical disability, or any other protected status unrelated to the performance of the work involved. You may have heard us say "Impossible is Nothing" or "Celebrate Originality"; to us, these phrases are more than just words. If you share this same passion then apply today!

• Location: Jersey Gardens
• Compensation: DOE
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
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Tributes to Gurudev !

Today is Birth Anniversary of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, India Post will issue two special postage stamps on this occasion. A week long celebration is being organaized all over India and also in Bangladesh. A one month long special philatelic exhibition will be held in Kolkata “ Tagore in Philately” from 9th May.

Tagore Stamp Exhibition will be inaugurated on 9th May by Prof Dr. Bharati Ray at 6.30 PM and will remain open till June 9, 2011at Nandalal Bose Gallery, Rabindranath Tagore Centre, Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 9A, Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Kolkata - 700 071.

Tagore Centre, Kolkata

ICCR Nandalal Gallery

Club News

Best Maximum Card Competition (created during 2010)

Maximaphily is the most beautiful and exiting way in stamp collecting. It is one of the eleven recognized classifications of Philately. All types of visitors in the F.I.P. exhibitions find it very attractive, because of the beautiful illustrations on postcards and because the purpose of Maximaphily is to collect exclusively Maximum cards.

A Maximum card is made up of three elements:

1. The postage stamp. 2. The picture postcard. 3. The postmark.

The three elements are joined together in a fascinating way conforming to the following very precise regulations adopted by the International Philatelic Federation (F.I.P.). The meeting of the above three elements having a close visual relation constitutes the Maximum card .

The postage stamp

- It must be in perfect condition.

- Only one postage stamp should be affixed on the view side of the picture postcard. Before 1978, when the “International statute of Maximaphily” was approved, maximum cards showing several postage stamps are tolerated, if one or more of those are concordant with the picture on the postcard.

- In the case where a postage stamp has multiple, secondary or partial subjects, each subject must as far as possible, be dealt with separately.

- The postage stamp (or the souvenir sheet it belongs to, if it is stuck on the postcard) must not exceed a quarter of the postcard area.

- When the same subject is spread out on several se-tenant stamps making a panorama, the set can appear on a single postcard. However, when a subject is isolated on one of the se-tenant stamps only the one on which the treated subject is illustrated should be affixed to the postcard.

- The use of an illustrated postal prepayment impression dispensed by automatic vending machines, affixed on the view side of the postcard, is allowed.

- In general, abstract or symbolic subjects do not suit Maximaphily and are excluded from its field.

The picture postcard

• The picture postcard must be, if possible, on sale before the issue of the stamps or if it has been specially published, it must reproduce an existing document.

• Its size must conform to dimensions accepted by the “Universal Postal Convention”. However, postcards of square or rectangular shape available on the market are accepted, provided that their size allows them to be laid out on a sheet to the A4 format (210 x 297 mm) at a rate of two per sheet. Out of respect for its designer, it is strictly prohibited to reduce the size of a postcard by cutting it.

• The picture must offer the best possible concordance with the subject of the postage stamp or with one of them, if there are several. Mere reproduction of stamp design on a picture post card should be avoided.

• The picture must emphasize the subject of the postage stamp.

• The postcards on the market are accepted as they are. They can have margins and a text directly connected with the subject. Old postcards can have on the view side an area for correspondence. With the exception of these old postcards, the larger the picture is, the better the quality of the maximum card is considered to be.

• All postcards fully reproducing the postage stamp, that is to say with perforation, face value, country name, are forbidden.

• Postcards with multiple pictures as well as ones with holograms are forbidden.

What about the postmark and the time of cancellation?

The pictorial design of the cancellation and the place of cancellation (name of the post office) should have a close and direct connection with the subject of the stamp and of the picture postcard, and its date should be within the validity of the stamp and as close as possible to the date of its issue.

What is "appropriate material"?

The Maximaphily items should conform to the principle of maximum possible "visual" concordance between: The postage stamp, the picture postcard and the postmark. Special attention must be paid to the observance of the three concordances: of subject, of place and of time.

• The concordance of subject is the most important condition to characterise a Maximum card, e.g. the best concordance between the subject of the stamp and the illustration of the picture postcard.

• The concordance of place requires a connection between the name of the place or the locality written in the postmark and the subject of the stamp and the card.

• The "first day cancellation" can only be used when it is in accordance with the above mentioned condition

• For monuments, landscapes and sites the only place giving the required concordance is the one where the monument, the landscape or the site is located.

What is not appropriate material?

Any other material which does not conform to the above mentioned regulations is considered as not appropriate material for this classification of Philately.

Furthermore, the following items cannot be used for maximum cards: collages, cut-outs, private photographs on photo paper, colour or black and white photocopies, photo-montages, drawings, documents specially devised for the stamp issue to be printed privately on photo paper thanks to a computer, digital printouts, illegible postmarks, bigger size or different shapes of postcards: only square and rectangular formats are allowed; all others are excluded.

FIP Maximaphily Commission organizes a Best Maximum Card Competition every year. We at India are also participating this year in this competition. All those interested in participation are requested to send their entries to me by email at ajaymittal1957@gmail.com at an earliest possible. Best three cards will be selected and send for participation in the world competition. You may submit your card by post also at my address given below. A small information about the quantity printed and concordance between the three aspects of maximum card (i.e. Picture Post Card, Stamp and Cancellation) may also be sent alongwith the card.

We are compiling a catalogue of the Indian Maximum Cards issued by Individual collectors. Kindly send me details with scans by email of the cards issued on Indian stamps by any society or individual collectors.

All are requested to kindly send a high resolution scan of the cards issued by them till date with a small information about the card and quantity printed. If available for sale the price of the card may also be mentioned.

As it is not yet decided the location of the Next Competition of the Best MC. There is a possibility that the FIP Maximaphily Commission can first publish all the National Selections for this Competition at their FIP Maximaphily Commission website and then request all National Associations (and/or Delegates) to submit their votes by email or letter.

Any clarifications and/or suggestions regarding FIP Rules and regulations of Maximaphily are also welcome.

With Regards

Ajay Kumar Mittal

FIP Maximaphily Representative from India

D-57 South Extension part-1

New Delhi-110049

+91-9811032311

On May 7, 1994, Norway's most famous painting, "The Scream" by Edvard Munch, was recovered almost three months after it was stolen from a museum in Oslo. The fragile painting was recovered undamaged at a hotel in Asgardstrand, about 40 miles south of Oslo, police said.

The iconic 1893 painting of a waiflike figure on a bridge was stolen in only 50 seconds during a break-in on February 12, the opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Two thieves broke through a window of the National Gallery, cut a wire holding the painting to the wall and left a note reading "Thousand thanks for the bad security!"

A few days after the theft, a Norwegian anti-abortion group said it could have the painting returned if Norwegian television showed an anti-abortion film. The claim turned out to be false. The government also received a $1 million ransom demand on March 3, but refused to pay it due to a lack of proof that the demand was genuine.

Eventually, police found four pieces of the painting's frame in Nittedal, a suburb north of Oslo, and what may have been a cryptic messages that the thieves wanted to discuss a ransom. Finally, in January 1996, four men were convicted and sentenced in connection with the theft. They included Paal Enger, who had been convicted in 1988 of stealing Munch's "The Vampire" in Oslo. Enger was sentenced this time to six-and-a-half-years in prison. He escaped while on a field trip in 1999, and was captured 12 days later in a blond wig and dark sunglasses trying to buy a train ticket to Copenhagen.

In August 2004, another version of The Scream was stolen along with Munch's The Madonna, this time from the Munch Museum in Oslo. Three men were convicted in connection with that theft in May 2006. Police recovered both works in August with minor marks and tears.

Munch developed an emotionally charged style that served as an important forerunner of the 20th century Expressionist movement. He painted "The Scream" as part of his "Frieze of Life" series, in which sickness, death, fear, love and melancholy are central themes. He died in January 1944 at the age of 81.

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — President Obama on Friday privately thanked the U.S. Special Forces who killed Osama bin Laden. “Job well done,” he said of their daring raid.In a series of closed-door meetings, Mr. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with some of the Special Operations forces who went on the raid in Pakistan and with members of the assault force who supported the mission.The President later addressed more than 2,000 soldiers in a hangar at Fort Campbell. “I came here for a simple reason: to say thank you on behalf of all America. This has been a historic week in the life of our nation,” he said. “Thanks to the incredible skill and courage of countless individuals, intelligence, military, over many years, the terrorist leader who struck our nation on 9/11 will never threaten America again.” The President said he had visited New York the day before to pay homage to the victims of bin Laden’s 2001 terrorist attacks and to the firefighters and police who responded to the catastrophe.“I promised that our nation will never forget those we lost that dark September day,” he said.“And today, here at Fort Campbell, I had the privilege of meeting the extraordinary Special Ops folks who honored that promise,” he said. “It was a chance for me to say, ‘On behalf of all Americans and people around the world, job well done. Job well done.’”During the meeting with the SEAL team, Mr. Obama awarded it and other units involved in the operation a Presidential Unit Citation, the White House said. The President also received a PowerPoint presentation on the raid, with maps, photos, and a scale model of the compound, from members of the assault force. Even the trained dog used in the raid attended.Speaking later to the troops of the 101st Airborne Division, he drew another connection, between the soldiers there and the commandos he called “America’s quiet professionals.”“Like all of us, they could have chosen a life of ease,” the President said. “But like you, they volunteered.”Describing the SEAL commandos as “battle hardened” and tirelessly trained, Mr. Obama said: “When I gave the order, they were ready. And in recent days, the world has learned just how ready they were.”While the SEAL team is not based at Fort Campbell, it is home of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers. The unit, which pilots aircraft for Special Operations troops, flew the helicopters that carried the commandos to bin Laden’s compound.Mr. Obama linked the killing of bin Laden to the broader war, saying it showed the progress the United States had made in disrupting and dismantling al-Qaeda. The soldiers of the 101st Airborne, he said, were pushing back insurgents and allowing Afghans to reclaim their towns. “The bottom line is this,” he said in a statement that drew the loudest cheers of the day, “our strategy is working, and there is no greater evidence of that than justice finally being delivered to Osama bin Laden.” Among the soldiers, there was satisfaction at the killing of bin Laden. Several said they were relieved, though most said they did not believe it would bring the Afghan war to an end any sooner.“It helps to know that we finally got him,” said Sgt. Marion Githens, who coordinated Army helicopters at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan before returning to the United States two days ago. But she said she was still ambivalent about the war. “Some days, you feel like it’s not going anywhere,” she said. “Other days, you think, OK, maybe we really can help these people.”Soldiers expressed gratitude Mr. Obama had come. “It’s tough coming home,” said Capt. Jimos Reese, a company commander. “It does mean a lot that the President cares about you.”The Pentagon recommended Mr. Obama come to Fort Campbell, a senior official said, because the 101st Airborne had taken significant casualties, having served in a Taliban stronghold south and west of Kandahar that is some of the most lethal terrain in Afghanistan.Mr. Obama acknowledged that, noting 125 soldiers from the base had died in Afghanistan. Some soldiers in the 101st Airborne, he said, had been deployed to Afghanistan three or four times.Among those who greeted the President at Fort Campbell was Vice Adm. William McRaven, a former commando in the SEALs who oversaw the raid as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. After Mr. Obama’s arrival, the President’s motorcade left immediately for low buildings on the far side of the airfield, where the meeting with the SEAL team and other units lasted more than an hour.The meetings were kept private to protect the identities of those involved and to shield them from becoming targets of terrorist reprisals. In his speech to the troops, Mr. Obama said the American military had “broken the Taliban’s momentum” to promote terrorism in Afghanistan.“We are ultimately going to defeat al-Qaeda,” the President said to loud cheers. But he said he didn’t want to fool anyone. “This continues to be a tough fight.”Soldiers were careful not to celebrate bin Laden’s death, voicing instead a sense of professional pride for the work of the commandos.“We’re not done,” said Major Luis Ortiz.

Joe Bowen, the Toronto Maple Leafs play-by-play man isn't the only Joe Bowen with a connection to Toronto's pro sports scene.

valerie cifaldi commented on C. Dianne Zweig Editor's Desk's group 'Estate, Yard, Tag Sale Connection'

Adnan Shukrijumah has been a fugitive since 9/11, was rumored to have crossed the Mexican border, and was indicted last year in the NYC/Zazi bombing plot. Pakistan may be harboring him, as noted earlier this week.

And there is also — of all places — a Shukrijumah tie to Trinidad and Guyana.

An Al Qaeda fugitive with ties to Trinidad and Guyana may rise to the top post in the global terror network whose iconic leader Osama Bin Laden was killed Sunday.

Adnan Gulshair El Shukrijumah, who is known to have lived in and visited Trinidad, was last year elevated to head Al Qaeda’s external operations council—with a mission to recruit, plan and execute terrorist attacks against the United States and its western allies.

…Intelligence officials in the US report that El Shukrijumah, who studied computer science and chemistry in the US, came to Trinidad months before the September 11, 2001 terror attack that killed 3,000.

He is reported to have stayed on the compound of a Muslim organisation in Central Trinidad which some reports claimed was linked to a mosque in the US with ties to terrorism.

Despite a search by the FBI in Trinidad in 2003, with the assistance of local law enforcement, El Shukrijumah, 35, has not been found.

Head of the Islamic Missionaries Guild Imtiaz Mohammed said on Wednesday he and others were interviewed by the FBI who they believed knew Shukrijumah.

The FBI in 2004 set up a permanent office in Trinidad, to continue its counter terrorism operations.

Lesson: There is no respite from Muslim terrorists.

Erick Stakelbeck puts it all together in The Terrorist Next Door.

bin Laden is dead. Jihad lives.

***

Previous:

5/30/11 – Where is Adnan Shukrijumah? We’re looking at you, Pakistan.

6/30/10 –
The return of Adnan Shukrijumah

6/8/07 – Nothing to see here, move along

6/2/07 – Busted: NYC terror plot; Updated with criminal complaint

6/9/06 – 9/11-linked pilot on the loose

10/22/04 – THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION/TERRORIST CONNECTION, PART XXXLVIII

8/18/04 – WHERE IS ADNAN SHUKRIJUMAH?

Unless you live under a rock, you know Donald Trump is thinking about running for president. His sensational public endeavors—pushing the White House to release President Obama’s long-form birth certificate and, most recently, questioning the authenticity of the president’s academic record—have met with astonishment, outrage, and dismay. A recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover featured a photo of Trump in mid-rant with the one-word headline, “Seriously?” Journalists, commentators, and even Jerry Seinfeld (who recently canceled an appearance at a Trump fundraiser) have taken to calling Trump a demagogue.

In recent decades, this powerful term, traditionally a scalpel for taking apart dangerous leaders, has become blunt and ineffectual through overuse. I’ve been thinking and writing about demagogues for a decade. I’ve been watching with a mix of bemusement and concern as Trump strains to elevate himself into an actual political figure, rather than the ego tornado he’s been for decades. But one of the lessons of history is that, while it’s easy to underestimate demagogues, it’s also easy to overestimate them. For the time being, I’ve concluded that Trump is not a demagogue. He lacks both the common connection and the lawlessness of classic demagogues, whether Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez today or, in the past, figures ranging from Benito Mussolini to George Wallace to Joseph McCarthy. Instead, call him a quasi-demagogue: a political figure with the desire, but not the chops, to manipulate the masses. 

 

Demagogues are part of the natural life cycle of democracy. So much so that the Founding Fathers designed our various checks and balances and circuit-breakers in part from their mortal terror that a predatory mass leader—a demagogue—would convert popular adulation into American tyranny. James Madison, for instance, explained that “provisions against the measures of an interested majority,”such as an independent judiciary, were required to control “the followers of different Demagogues.” This doesn’t mean, however, that demagogues haven’t popped up throughout the country’s history.

During my years studying and watching demagogues, the one lesson that has stuck with me is this: Many politicians could become demagogues if they wanted to. They could choose the gross emotional appeal, the naked ambition, and the cunning blend of vulgarity and artistry that is the true demagogue’s métier. They don’t because most of them are governed by an ethic of shame. Where others blush and quail, the demagogue happily blusters ahead—crossing boundaries, coloring outside lines, toppling walls. 

Demagogues often look most ridiculous to the people they’re most uninterested in impressing. When the colorful, autocratic Louisiana Governor Huey Long was sworn into the U.S. Senate in 1931, it was precisely his clownishness that gave him such political amplitude. He prompted a firestorm of controversy when he met a German naval commander paying an official call in a pair of green silk pajamas and a bathrobe. One scholar writes, “[T]he lesson he learned from the incident was less the importance of diplomatic niceties than the value of buffoonery in winning national publicity.” With these techniques, Long soon attracted more attention from the press than his 99 Senatorial colleagues combined. He would have challenged FDR for president in 1936, had he not been assassinated by the son of a political opponent in 1935.

You might think that Trump’s own clownishness puts him in the class of a Huey Long. But let’s take a closer look. As I argued in my book Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies, a true demagogue meets four tests. First, he presents himself as a man of the people, rather than the elites. Second, he strikes a very strong, even overpowering emotional connection with the people. Third, he uses this connection for his own political benefit. Fourth, he threatens or breaks established rules of governance. This fourth test is the most important, distinguishing a demagogue like Huey Long (who routinely used the National Guard to intimidate or brutalize political opponents, for instance) from populists like William Jennings Bryan (who, as rambunctious as he may have been, tended to play by the rules).

For Trump, let’s take the four tests in turn. With his Theater of the Absurd hairdo and his massively knotted silk ties, his Manhattan address and his glitzy brand, Trump is hardly a man of the people. True, he’s employing incautious bluster as a proxy for common appeal. “Authenticity” has become the coin of today’s reality-television realm, and there is a mass appeal to his straight-talkin’ persona—this is why his recent use of the “f bomb” plays to his curious political strengths, even while appalling elites. But for Trump to swap his fancy persona for that of a commoner would require him to blow up the brand he’s spent decades building, a task for which he is probably not constitutionally capable.

Second, Trump does not have the broad emotional appeal to the masses that marks the classic demagogue. Over the last decades, Trump has enjoyed billions of dollars of both paid and earned media exposure. He couldn’t be better-known by the American people. Yet he is consistently polling under 20 percent right now among Republicans and right-leaning independents (a recent CNN poll has him at only 14 percent), giving him a base of well under one in ten among the general voting population. The emotional surge for Trump among the very hard-core Tea Party right should certainly be noted. But it’s more likely this brushfire halts at a particular firebreak: the general American public’s hostility and suspicion to the Tea Partiers.

On the third test, it’s very unclear whether Trump is interested in actual political power, or just in increasing his personal brand and wealth. Even now, we can’t tell whether he will run—and keep running, after the glitz of the initial launch wears off—for president. Even if he gets into the race, will he slog through the hard work of an 18-month campaign, including getting on the ballot in all 50 states, participating in debates, developing policy positions? And, if he drops out, will he really have an interest in putting his shoulder to a real political end? Time will tell, but the initial signs are that this is mostly about Trumpery rather than government.

The most important test is the fourth—that demagogues, unlike populists, bend or break the rules. Trump clearly has no inhibition about lying for political benefit. But real demagogues go much further. Look at Joseph McCarthy, who used his selected issue of anti-communism to demolish people’s personal and professional lives. It’s hard to imagine that Trump really wants to encourage threatening behavior. But, if he ever started to ask his followers to test boundaries of lawfulness, to “challenge authority,” our hackles should quickly rise.

 

None of this means Trump isn’t worth taking seriously. To the contrary: Where Trump is succeeding in his demagogic appeals, he’s also illuminating shadowy corners of the American public. And we have to take a hard look at how this is happening. Demagogues, like nightshade, have always flourished in dark places of extreme economic or social distress. The 1920s were the last great era of American demagoguery, when Huey Long and the Detroit “radio priest” Father Coughlin rallied millions of terrified Americans against elites. It’s been no surprise that the 2010s, a time of similar distress, have fostered divisive figures from Sarah Palin to Glenn Beck to Trump.

The lesson here is that today’s restless, upset public needs reassurance—and vigorous economic policy that addresses their concerns. But we also need the media to exercise some discretion. In today’s fragmented, 24-7 echo chamber, where 500,000 nightly viewers qualify you as a pundit and one persistent blogger can take over a news cycle, the media has more responsibility for steering the ship of state toward calmer waters. Trump—as quasi-demagogue—is a creation largely of the media. The real conspiracy isn’t Trump’s mania du jour; it’s hundreds of news editors, assignment editors, reporters, and bloggers who he’s playing like fiddles.

More broadly, though, history shows that the only real antidote to demagogues is an alert, vigilant civic culture. The ancient Athenians, exhausted by a series of vicious demagogues, passed a law exiling anyone who “proposed a measure contrary to democratic principles.” We probably don’t need to go so far, though some watching Trump today doubtless wouldn’t mind moving him to Canada. America, after all, is the land of the civic mores the visiting Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville chronicled and admired. And we almost always eventually turn on demagogues. The stars of Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, and David Duke all rose for a time, but, when they fell, they crashed hard.

We can never be complacent about our constitutionalism, and the Trump phenomenon bears careful watching, lest the little fires he’s clearly capable of starting spread into a larger conflagration. But, in general, Americans have shown they’ve got what it takes to nip even quasi-demagogues in the bud. Take note of Palin and Beck’s recent fates: Under heavy fire from the public for their own excesses (a persecution complex in Palin’s case, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in Beck’s), they both are retreating to the sidelines.

We’re early in Trump’s political career, so I offer these judgments cautiously, but my suspicion is that Trump, too, will burn out, like a hot fuse on a cold rocket. This may already have started. When President Obama took the stage last week in his stunner of a press conference to take on Trump’s birther attacks, he declared, “We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.” A hilarious tweet I received shortly after said that carnival barkers were protesting that the comparison with Trump was giving them a bad name. And, of course, the president easily made Trump look both inane and irrelevant when the coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death interrupted “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

There’s also a final thing Trump himself should remember, before he goes farther down what is likely a dead-end road to demagoguery: History remembers Joseph Welch’s famous question to McCarthy—“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”—as well as it remembers McCarthy himself. Trump has shown he doesn’t take criticism well, sending an angry retort to Vanity Fair and appearing openly thin-skinned after jokes were made at his expense at the White House Correspondents Dinner. He will likely realize soon, if he hasn’t already, that his brand, not to mention his ego, will not sustain the sort of historical thrashing that will inevitably follow any further pf demagogic aspirations. Indeed, in the end, The Donald’s self-love might just be his own best friend.

Michael Signer is Managing Principal of Madison Law & Strategy Group, PLLC and an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech. He was a 2009 candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia and chairs the New Dominion Project, a Virginia political action committee.

Follow @tnr on Twitter.

 

Mexican prosecutors have detained four local policemen, five Guatemalans and one Honduran in connection with mass kidnappings of migrants in the border city of Reynosa.

New niche directory specializing in links to the Bangladesh readymade garment industry as an extension of Clothes Connection int'l website, primarily added to offer more value to visitors.

Sacramento police have arrested a 48-year-old man in connection with a 1987 homicide in midtown, after cold case detectives and the Sacramento County Crime Lab were able to use DNA to identify a suspect, the Sacramento Police Department reported.

A former Indian National Lok Dal MLA from Meham assembly constituency has been booked, along with 21 others, in connection with the murder of a youth in a firing incident in Kalanaur village of Rohtak district on Thursday night

32-year-old Surrey man arrested Friday in connection with four attacks. The latest robbery happened in Coquitlam when a woman was rear-ended, got out of her car, then was beaten by the other driver.

Belltown Dog Walker, Seattle’s premier pet care company, seeks dog walkers and pet sitters. You must be a true animal lover with previous pet care experience, ideally dog walking, pet sitting, volunteering in a shelter, or working at a doggy daycare, kennel, or veterinarian's office. Because we pride ourselves on providing a high level of service to our clients, you must have excellent presentation and communication skills. Our assignments provide part-time work to supplement an existing income, not a full-time wage. Pet sitting can be a great supplemental income for the right people who would like to earn around $100-$250 a week.

Job Duties
Pet sitters and dog walkers are responsible for:

The well being and overall care of our clients' pets
Managing clients' needs and preferences with a commitment to providing a superior level of care
Being free to work every day of the week between 11:00am and 4:00pm. Please do not apply for the job if you cannot guarantee availability during those hours.

Additional Candidate Requirements
Pet sitters and dog walkers must be:

True animal lovers comfortable handling dogs of all sizes
Resistant to inclement weather, including cold, snow, humidity, and rain
A resident of Seattle. Please specify which neighborhood you live in on your application
US citizens with a clean criminal record
Available to start work immediately and make a long-term commitment of at least 12 months
Equipped with a cell phone and working home internet connection

Submitting an Application
If you meet all the above requirements and would like to be considered for a position, please email your application to christa@belltowndogwalker.com. Please note that due to the high volume of the applications we receive, we will only contact qualified candidates for interviews.

Your application should include:

A resume detailing your experience with animals (we want to hear about any/all pet experience even if it was for a neighbor/boss/friend), copied and pasted into the body of your message (attachments will not be opened)
Your phone number(s) and home address
Desired location(s) for work
Any other interesting information that you think sets you apart from the other candidates

We look forward to hearing from you. Good luck!

• Location: Queen Anne/Belltown
• This is a part-time job.
• This is a contract job.
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Crime and Public Safety, May 7 Inland Valley Daily Bulletin A 40-year-old Covina man was arrested Thursday on suspicion of auto insurance fraud. Edson Sanchez was arrested at his house after San Bernardino County district attorney fraud investigators with assistance from the Covina Police Department served an ... Man is arrested for allegedly committing auto insurance fraud in connection ...Fontana Herald-News all 3 news articles »

Reporting by Sarah Phelan and Linda Man. Photographs by Sarah Phelan
Thirty-six candidates have filed papers in the 2011 mayor’s race, but only former Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, Sup. John Avalos, Board President David Chiu, former Sup. Bevan Dufty, former Sup. Tony Hall, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, venture capitalist Joanna Rees, City Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, and Sen. Leland Yee got to publicly race out of the starting gate May 5 during the first official mayoral forum. And while the decision to exclude the other 25 candidates was understandable from a logistical perspective, it raised the perennial question as to how the concerns of marginal communities and marginal candidates will be addressed during the campaign. (N. B. Write-in candidate and taxi driver Harold Miller used the forum to circulate his campaign literature, a strategy he also employed during this week’s cab driver protest around MTA credit card fees)<!--break-->

The May 5 mayoral forum, which the University of San Francisco’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good and buildOn, a national non-profit organization, hosted, was apparently modeled on the 2008 Presidential Candidate Forum on Service. And it was intended to enable candidates to ‘address substantive questions about the future of service and engaged citizenship in San Francisco,” according to a USF press release.

But while the forum gave the audience a chance to meet nine mayoral candidates up front and personal, and though the candidates sought to differentiate themselves as best they could, the open-ended nature of the questions that students got to pose, resulted in more talking around the issues, and less answering of the questions. By forum’s end, the one message that the mostly student audience seemed to have gotten was that the city is out of money, thanks to a $350 million dollar deficit, and that folks need to volunteer, and, come to think about it, why not volunteer for someone’s mayoral campaign.

“It was more like mayors promoting themselves. Are they supposed to be like that?! The main thing I learned was that the city is in huge debt,” one student observed, after listening to the candidates talk about their experience giving back to the community and what they hope to change if elected.

 USF student Christina Lopez, in her junior year and majoring in Politics, told the Guardian that if she had to vote at last night’s candidate forum, she would have chosen Yee. She said that out of all candidates, Yee offered more insight on how he would change things and what he would do if he was mayor. “The forum was helpful because I didn’t really know all the candidates,” Lopez said. “ I will follow the campaign and see how they actually fall through with what they said about rebuilding SF.”

Audience member Jack Frohlich said he still has no idea who to vote for. “I want to hear where we are going to get the money to do what we are going to do,” Frohlich said. “I want to hear somebody proposing a surcharge on the richest people in the state to close the budget gap.”

USF student Andriana Duckworth, a sophomore majoring in Politics, said she would vote for Avalos. “I liked how he said that we don’t need to take money from other local budgets to fix our public school system,” Duckworth said. She also noted that she liked how Alioto-Pier talked about disabilities and would like to hear it addressed more.  “When people hear diversity, they think of race and class but not disability,” Duckworth said.

So how did the candidates seek to frame and differentiate their candidacies?

Hall characterized himself as “an independent,” but then waffled his way through a long and confusing explanation of his 34 years in public service that included the claim that he was “very successful” as a supervisor.

Alioto-Pier talked about the defining moment in her life: the day she broke her back when she was only 13 years old, thanks to a ski lift accident, and how she subsequently began, “fighting for equality and the rights that I knew were mine.”

Herrera, like the bright lawyer he is, won Brownie points for noting that the location for the mayoral forum on public service was very apt, given Leo McCarthy’s service-oriented political career. Herrera then highlighted the positive changes that his office has made in recent years, including its efforts to promote marriage equality and universal healthcare. “These are real changes that started in San Francisco and had a positive impact,” he said.

Board President David Chiu cast himself as a champion of immigrants, civil and tenants’ rights, and took credit for helping usher in a new era of civility at City Hall. “For the last ten years, City Hall has not been as functional as we would have liked,” Chiu said. “I’m very proud that the tone at City Hall has changed.” He said that balancing the budget, reforming pensions, bringing in the America’s Cup and nurturing and retaining tech companies like Twitter, and creating a world-class public transit system were top priorities. ‘We’re losing families, tenants and homeowners,” Chiu warned.

Venture capitalist Joanna Rees made the biggest visual impression of the night, thanks to a bright orange jacket that made this reporter speculate that Rees was trying to raise her name recognition by making a subliminal connection with the famously bright orange wrapped Reese's Pieces. Either way, Rees cast herself as a political outsider who would breathe fresh air into an otherwise, allegedly, uninspired room. “We’ve lost the spirit of innovation at City Hall,” Rees claimed, as she committed to creating an online clearinghouse that would allow people to share their talents and meet the needs of various services, and thereby “foster more public and private partnerships.”

Sup. John Avalos stressed his roots as a social worker and a community and labor organizer. “I’m running because I want to fight for immigrants and support families and diversity,” he said. “We need to figure out how we can bring neighborhood leaders together, and how communities can come together.”

Former Sup. Bevan Dufty was the only candidate to use the linguistically persuasive technique of talking about himself as if he were already mayor. “I’m excited to be mayor, I love San Francisco, it’s a city where you can achieve your dreams,” Dufty gushed, as he pledged to fight to “uphold diversity and buck the trend that’s anti-immigrant." Dufty also did the good job of relating to the audience, largely through his ability to tell funny stories to make his points. And he wins credit from this reporter for crediting Sup. John Avalos for authoring the local hire legislation that Dufty helped pass in December by becoming the eighth vote when then Mayor Gavin Newsom wanted to veto the legislation, and that interim Mayor Ed Lee recently enacted citywide.

Sen. Leland Yee highlighted his long track record of public service, including the times he used to tutor immigrant youth in San Francisco’s Chinatown, when he was a UC Berkeley student. And he stressed his seniority as an elected official, as he ruminated on his experiences on the school board and the Board of Supervisors, and then in the state Assembly and now in the Senate.

“These are extraordinary times,” Yee said. “We don’t have enough money to do all the things we want, but through civic engagement and leadership we can provide.” He stressed that his priority is not to cut education, social services, and services that are in need. “The government is about taking care of people that are in need of help," he said.

Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting talked about his decision, five years ago, to start resetting how things worked in his office, by training his staff, investing in their future and holding them accountable for the work they do. “We were able to bring in $260 million over our budget,” Ting said, stressing that the effort proved that government works better if you have more say and more power. He also noted that his office introduced the city’s first solar incentive program.

"Now we have four times the solar roofs, we’ve doubled the city’s megawatt production, and we’ve created green collar jobs,” Ting said, lamenting that the city now wants to get out of the program. “You are missing from the dialogue,” he told the audience, as he promoted his Reset San Francisco theme.

And then, after a two-hour round of questions, it was back to the campaign trail, where raising money will be one key to getting out the message in this otherwise crowded race. The other key? Having the stamina and staying power to keep on message while pounding the pavement for the next six months.

In the meantime, you can listen to the candidates' closing statements here:

Lanna Cafe: A Project for People ABC30.com One Valley faith-based organization jumped into the coffee business in Thailand and many people are benefiting from that connection. Coffee drinkers can't wait for that first cup of the day. And Bryan Acosta is hoping and praying that the Central ... and more »

Meet the other Joe Bowen Toronto Sun Joe Bowen, the Toronto Maple Leafs play-by-play man (seen here) isn't the only Joe Bowen with a connection to Toronto's pro sports scene. Blue Jays catching prospect Joe Bowen is turning heads with the Lansing Lugnuts. ...

Mexico detains 4 cops, 6 foreigners in kidnappings The Associated Press MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican prosecutors have detained four local policemen, five Guatemalans and one Honduran in connection with mass kidnappings of migrants in the border city of Reynosa. The federal Attorney General's Office says the Central American ... and more »

CBC.ca

Man arrested after stolen car and baby found CBC.ca The SUV was stolen near Langelier Boulevard and Breton Street, in the east end of Montreal. ((Google Maps)) (Note:CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external links.) Montreal police have arrested a man in connection to the ... Montreal police find baby that went missing in stolen carMontreal Gazette Man arrested after baby, SUV stolen in MontrealGlobal Edmonton all 25 news articles »

Online businesses typically operate nationally, if not internationally, and that means court disputes can take place in a variety of venues. But a lawsuit filed by Facebook against Teachbook.com, alleging that Teachbook’s name violates Facebook’s trademark rights, has been thrown out for an unusual reason. The California federal judge overseeing the case has ruled that Teachbook can’t be sued in California, because it doesn’t accept California users and therefore doesn’t even have minimal contact with the state.

Facebook sued Teachbook, an online community for teachers, back in August, demanding that the site remove the “-book” suffix from its name. Teachbook responded with a motion asking the judge to dismiss the case or transfer it to a court near its home base in Northbrook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Facebook said that it was perfectly appropriate to hear the case in California, because “Facebook, a Palo Alto resident, suffered injuries in this district.” The company accused Teachbook of “intentionally adopt[ing] an infringing trademark for use on social networking services that directly compete with Facebook.”

U.S. District Judge Ron Whyte didn’t see the issue that way, however. Teachbook’s actions weren’t “expressly aimed” at California. Indeed, Teachbook went out of its way to avoid California, actually banning California users from joining the site. The company said it did that because it didn’t want to be subject to California’s powerful anti-SPAM laws. That was enough to convince Whyte to dismiss the suit, although Facebook is free to re-file in another venue.

However, if Whyte had heard the case in California, it sounds like he may well have seen it Facebook’s way. He wrote (emphasis mine): “Teachbook, somewhat implausibly, insists that it did not intend to trade on Facebook’s mark, and that it selected the TEACHBOOK mark in 2009 because of the connection between teachers and books.” Whyte also wrote that Facebook had made at least an initial showing that Teachbook’s selection of a trademark was “confusingly similar” and would hurt Facebook.

A Facebook spokesman said the company is likely to re-file the case, but declined to comment beyond that. Teachbook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Last year, Teachbook told a reporter from Wired.com that Facebook was trying to own the term “book,” calling its fight “a David and Goliath situation.”

This isn’t the only trademark dispute Facebook has been involved in; it’s also sued sites like Lamebook and FacebookOfSex.com. (Facebook reached a settlement that allowed Lamebook, a parody site, to remain up; the litigation against FacebookOfSex.com, which is owned by the parent company of FriendFinder Networks, is ongoing.)

»  Facebook v. Teachbook Dismissal Order [PDF]

Related

• Facebook Sues FriendFinder, Peeved Over FacebookOfSex.com Website
• Facebook Calls In The Lawyers To 'Ban' A Zuckerberg Figurine
• Updated: Facebook Sues German Knockoff Site StudiVZ; Will Others Follow?

Ron, I am disappointed in you. And here I thought I was going to consider supporting a republican for a change. Oh well, it's back to the drawing board for me. I wonder how my man Herman Cain did last night?

The secret to the region’s most prolific attack may be an inseparable friendship. Last year, toward the beginning of their freshmen year at Stone Bridge, Ashley Herndon and Murielle Tiernan met as prospective high school soccer teammates.

They knew of each other, having faced each other in club soccer games before, but the moment their connection took off. Now the sophomores spend plenty of time off together, catching soccer games or just hanging out. Their tight-knit relationship is reaping dividends for the second-ranked Bulldogs (10-1-1).

Read full article >>

The secret to the region’s most prolific attack may be an inseparable friendship. Last year, toward the beginning of their freshmen year at Stone Bridge, Ashley Herndon and Murielle Tiernan met as prospective high school soccer teammates.

They knew of each other, having faced each other in club soccer games before, but the moment their connection took off. Now the sophomores spend plenty of time off together, catching soccer games or just hanging out. Their tight-knit relationship is reaping dividends for the second-ranked Bulldogs (10-1-1).

Read full article >>

Albert Cipoletti, 62, of Northport, N.Y., was sentenced to more than six years in prison in connection with a scheme to divert $20 million from Sacramento County and two companies. United States District Judge Garland Burrell in federal court in Sacramento on Friday also handed Cipoletti three years parole and an order to pay $19.1 million in restitution. Cipoletti pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in diverting money from Sacramento, SanDisk Corp. and Stanley Works and Stanley Solutions...

Sacramento police have arrested a 48-year-old man in connection with a 1987 homicide in midtown, after cold case detectives and the Sacramento County Crime Lab were able to use DNA to identify a suspect, the Sacramento Police Department reported.

Years ago, I told Tyler Cowen, "It's surprising that IQ tests predict life outcomes so well, because there's usually no financial incentive to get a high score."  He replied, "People try out of pride - an under-rated motive."  So when Tyler blogged Duckworth et al, "Role of Test Motivation in Intelligence Testing" I naturally took notice.  Key claims:

1. Material incentives boost IQ scores:

In 46 independent samples (n = 2,008), the mean effect of material incentives on IQ was medium to large: g = 0.64 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.39, 0.89], P < 0.001.

2. Material incentives have a bigger effect on the IQs of people with low scores:

Because exact baseline IQ scores were not reported in some samples, we created a binary variable where 1 = below average (i.e., IQ < 100) and 2 = above average (i.e., IQ ≥ 100). The effect of incentives was greater for individuals of below-average baseline IQ: Qbetween(1) = 9.76, P = 0.002. In 23 samples with IQ scores below the mean, the effect size was large: g = 0.94 (95% CI = 0.54, 1.35). In contrast, in 23 samples of above-average IQ, the effect was small: g = 0.26 (95% CI = 0.10, 0.41). A similar analysis in which baseline IQ scores (available for 43 of 46 samples) were treated as a continuous moderator indicated that a 1 SD increase in IQ is associated with about two-thirds of an SD decrease in the effect of incentives: b = −0.04, P < 0.001.

The authors reasonably infer that IQ is more of a composite intelligence/motivation measure than usually believed - especially by inter-disciplinary researchers.  Their words to the wise:

Our conclusions may come as no surprise to psychologists who administer intelligence tests themselves (49). Where the problem lies, in our view, is in the interpretation of IQ scores by economists, sociologists, and research psychologists who have not witnessed variation in test motivation firsthand. These social scientists might erringly assume that a low IQ score invariably indicates low intelligence.

It's hard to evaluate a piece like this without re-doing the underlying research, but the presentation is compelling and plausible.  My main complaint is statements like this:

[W]e hypothesize that test motivation is a third-variable confound that tends to inflate, rather than erode, the predictive power of IQ scores for later-life outcomes.

This is especially odd given Duckworth et al's effort to distinguish unobserved "true intelligence" from IQ.  As far as I can tell, the authors do nothing to show that their results make IQ is less predictive.  They don't even show that IQ is more mutable than earlier studies find; boosting incentives boosts scores while the incentives remain in place, but there's no reason to think the boost lasts after the test-takers receive their pay.  All the researchers require us to reconsider is the reason why IQ is so predictive and hard to durably improve. 

For example, instead of saying, "IQ tests show that people are poor because they're less intelligent - and intelligence is hard to durably raise" we should say, "IQ tests show that people are poor because they're less intelligent and less motivated - and intelligence and motivation are hard to durable raise."  If, like me, you already believed in the Conscientiousness-poverty connection, that's no surprise.

In any case, I urge you to read the original article.  I've been reading IQ research and personality psychology for over a decade, but these results really are news to me.  Your thoughts?
 

Computerworld New Zealand

Index Engines extends e-discovery appliance to Data Domain Computerworld Computerworld - Index Engines announced today that its data collection software has been integrated with EMC's Data Domain's de-duplication technology. The API integration allows Index Engines' appliance to run policies that ... EMC Introduces Avamar 6.0Zawya (press release) Index Engines Announces Collection Engine For EMC Data DomainData Storage Connection (press release) all 5 news articles »

A man wanted in connection with a murder in Detroit was arrested in Kent on Thursday.

Among the fears communication service provider executives sometimes have is that customers will not pay for better service or new features. A new survey of 2,500 mobile subscribers by Amdocs, including mobile consumers in five European nations suggests subscribers are willing to pay for an improved customer experience and new services.

Fully 90 percent of Russian subscribers indicated they are willing to pay higher premiums to receive the products and services they want.

Only 30 percent of subscribers from all of the surveyed countries said they would be unwilling to pay for additional services.

Connectivity and the ability to make mobile payments were cited by European consumers as the top reasons they would increase their mobile usage. Subscribers also expressed a willingness to pay a
premium for the ability to consume all services from any device and for a single data bundle option.

Forty-three percent of respondents from all five European countries viewed connectivity as the most important industry development of the next decade.

Fifty-two percent of surveyed Russians and more than half of the Germans felt connectivity and synchronization between all devices would be the most important development of the next 10 years, and
almost 50 percent of German end users felt that the connected world would encourage them to increase their mobile usage.

In the U.K., more than 70 percent of respondents cited connection to other devices as the first or second most influential factor in increasing their mobile consumption.

European respondents chose improved network quality as the service they would be most likely to pay a premium for and 46 percent said this is the aspect they would most like to change or improve about their current mobile reality.

Users in the United Kingdom are most likely to pay a premium for increased network quality (39 percent) and 50 percent of surveyed consumers in the United Kingdom cited network improvements as their top concern, reflecting a growing reliance on access to mobile communication and information wherever they are.

The survey also included subscribers in France, Germany and Sweden.

As with all such surveys, there often is a difference between what consumers ay they will do, and the ways they actually behave.

Still, as with any product, the notion that customers will not buy new features, products or applications can be wrong. Whether they will, or will not, depends on the value of the innovations and the cost of using those new innovations.

Nobody seems to think "paying" is an issue with iPhones, iPads or virtual goods used in online games. What service providers must do is what all suppliers must do: create more compelling products.

read more here

Episode 84 seemed to be doomed from the start, I was running so far behind schedule it was untrue, then I had problems with my webcam, then a bad connection to my mixer, then my ipod just died for no apparent reason, but even then I managed to start m ...

NEW YORK-( Business Wire )- TradersHuddle.com Levi & Korsinsky is investigating the Board of Directors of Green Bancshares, Inc. (“GRNB” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: GRNB) for possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of state law in connection with the acquisition of a 90.1% stake in ... and more »

The Guardian

Holidays with celebrities: star-spangled banter The Guardian Photograph: Stock Connection Blue/Alamy The beardy botanist will be your new holiday buddy on a cruise around the coasts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. On one day he will lead an excursion to Costa Rica's Playas del Coco, where many species of marine ...

Click here to view the full photogallery. Plenty of people love the job prospects and cultural enrichment of urban environments, but all that hustle-and-bustle can blot out any healthy connection to nature. So what's better than an island with easy...

Tracey Emin's raw unpretentiousness – and the use she's made of her life in her work – has captured the nation's attention for 20 years. But its brilliance lies in its use of words

A cunt is a rose is a cunt. This is the title of a Tracey Emin monoprint from 2000. It's a reclining female nude, legs and torso neatly nicked off above the chest and at ankle and shin level, a body sloping backwards from the raised legs downwards, so that, held vibrant and prominent right at the centre of the drawing, there's not just the vibrating smudge and scribble of female genitalia but also a sense of something solid emerging from it, a shape cut in air, made by the crook of the upper knee and the line of the lower thigh.

"A cunt is a rose is a cunt" is Emin's reworking of the famous/notorious line from Gertrude Stein's 1913 poem "Sacred Emily": "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose". This was probably inspired in turn by Juliet's comment on Romeo's name, 300 years before Stein: "What's in a name? – That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet" (and Shakespeare was a writer not averse to the odd pun on the word "cunt" himself). What would Stein, the great literary experimenter, have made of Emin's emendation? Here's what she said in 1935 when some students in Chicago questioned her about it:

Now listen. Can't you see that when the language was new – as it was with Chaucer and Homer – the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there. He could say "O moon", "O sea", "O love", and the moon and the sea and love were really there? And can't you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just worn out literary words? The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it's hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, as something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality . . . Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. All those songs that sopranos sing as encores about "I have a garden! oh, what a garden!" . . . Now listen! I'm no fool. I know that in daily life we don't go around saying ". . . is a . . . is a . . . is a . . ." Yes, I'm no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.

The "can't-you-see?" of this. The insistence on "listen". The repeating immediacy – now, now, now. The emphasis on the importance and excitement of aliveness; the intensity. The focus on strangeness; the understanding that something strange introduced into the structure of things renews things: Stein's isn't a bad lens through which to see Emin's own practice. For Emin a word like "cunt" is excitingly multiple. In her work it ranges across the whole spectrum of resonance, from affirmation, celebration, punchy frankness to unpleasantness, insult and mundanity, via the still-thrilling buzz of the just-not-said, and all simultaneously, all in the swivel of a repetition, the shape a word cuts in time. There's also, here, the cheek, the wit of her retake on Stein's rose, since for sure Stein knows that a rose means more than just a rose. "And then later," Stein says of her ring of words, "what did I do? I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun." Emin, too, is a caresser and addresser when it comes to verbal and conceptual certainties and ambiguities. Inherent ambiguity is something she's well aware of if you look at the photograph, from the same year as A cunt is a rose is a cunt, called I've got it all, in which she sits with her legs splayed open, clutching notes and coins to her cunt as if either the cash is exploding out of her in fairground fecundity, spilling out as though she's a giant fruit machine, or she's in the act of cramming it into herself.

The thing about Emin is that she's really good with words. Maybe no one, until now, has so energised, understood, made visible, the possibilities of this particular, powerful word: cunt. Partly such energising is art's responsibility, one that works, by means of what WG Sebald calls "keeping faith with unsocial, banned language", to question, understand and, with any luck, transcend the proscriptions and the inarticulacies of whatever time we happen to live in. There's a parallel in Emin's punk insertion of the word "fucking" into the construct "red, white and blue" in her neon of 2002, Red, White, and Fucking Blue, where the word "red" is red neon, the word "white" and the "&" are white neon, and the words "Fucking" and "Blue" are blue neon, and suggest everything that could make you feel blue (in all senses of the word) in the cliché of the concept of being British. Plus, there's her general democratising, the total unpretentiousness – for instance, in one of her Princess Diana monoprints of 1999, on which she writes "Regardless of class or status no woman deserves what thoes cunts put you through – LOVE WAS ON YOUR SIDE." With Emin, art is about articulation: its questions, impossibilities and, above all, the fluidity and changeability of register. At the same time it's really very British, reminiscent of something a bit Lawrentian. Mellors, the close-to-nature gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) – a novel that's all about chatter, and the upper, the lower, the chattering classes – can switch rhetorical registers with ease, talking to his penis one minute ("Ay, th' cheek on thee! Cunt, that's what tha're after. Tell lady Jane tha wants cunt"), the next minute laughingly aphoristic to Constance Chatterley ("Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in kindred love"). Something in this resembles the versatile split-second shift from cloy to edge, from acrid to sentiment and back again, in Emin's work; the neon Be Faithful to your dreams (1998) next to Good Smile Great Come (2000) next to MY CUNT IS WET WITH FEAR (1998) next to Love is What You Want (2011). (Elsewhere in her work Emin has played this last one as Love Is What You Wont.)

Something in it is prefigured, too, in work by groundbreaking writers like Angela Carter, a genius of verbal and narrative reclamation and emendation, and the American post-beat writer Kathy Acker, whose seminal, anarchic 1978 novel Blood and Guts in High School is also a work of words and pictures with its graphic genital line drawings, including one of the labia labelled underneath in typewriter typeface "My cunt red ugh". (Acker was influenced, in turn, by the 1960s and 70s feminist performance artists, for instance Carolee Schneemann, one of whose practices was to pull a rolled scroll out of her vagina then read out what was written on it.) Somehow Emin goes beyond; with her, it's as if Warhol and Valerie Solanas were rolled into the same person, but minus his posture of obliquity and spaciness, minus the violent fixity of her political focus. Something else, something unexpected and difficult to articulate happens. As Jennifer Doyle says, about looking at Emin's repeated graphic versions of what Courbet calls "the origin of the world", "I couldn't help but think: 'Isn't this how Judy Chicago and Georgia O'Keeffe are supposed to make me feel (but don't)?'".

Emin's ear for the right word in the right place, and for the resonances of "rightness" and "wrongness" in word and place, are at the basis of her art. Take her play on meaning in the pair of neons, Is Anal Sex Legal and Is Legal Sex Anal (both 1998), so simple and so complex at once, so centrally about how (and where) words mean, and so witty about proscription, with shades too of Lewis Carroll's Alice lazily falling down the rabbit hole in a swoon pondering do cats eat bats, do bats eat cats? "And what is the use of a book", thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" Emin – while she brings straight to the surface all the things, including survival, Freudian strangeness, child/adult sexualities and innocences, which go unsaid or remain subconscious in the work of a writer like Carroll – is drawn to the place where meaning and consumption come together, fascinated by the conversation that happens when words and pictures meet, a dialogue most of us come across as soon as we first look at books. "I love writing," she says. "I think every artist has a backbone to what they do. For some it could be photography, painting, the ability to make a formal sculpture stand, but for me it's writing." For her, art is language and, as she put it in the press release for her very first show, "art has always been, a lot of the time, a mysterious coded language. And I'm just not a coded person . . . What you see is what I am."

This unpretentiousness has made Emin a national symbol. Her uncodedness, her frankness, her direct use of her own life in her work, have made her a repository, in the media and to some extent in the general public's eye, for all that's contentious in contemporary art. It's easy to dismiss, simplistically, her complex and redolent use of self-portraiture as ego-posturing. But the thing is, there's no pinning her down. There's no reducing Emin. No matter how – or how much – the media strings her up (one minute lunatic, the next the new William Blake), her work engages the nation, and has engaged it now for more than 20 years, in a dialogue about art and life and the crossovers between both. It does this at what might be called a language-sensitive place. She is multitalented, multifaceted; aesthetically endlessly versatile; there's no form she won't try. Somehow nothing circumscribes her.

From Blake's illuminated books to Stevie Smith's strange, pithy little illustrated verses, from Fra Angelico to Magritte's not-pipe; from the terrible increasing tension in Charlotte Salomon's Leben? oder Theater? to Gilbert & George's Dirty Words Pictures: artists and writers have worked for centuries with what happens when text and visual art come together. For Emin, it's another of her many modes of dialogue. In one of her monoprints, a girl wearing high-heeled shoes, with a smudge for a face, stands next to the words "dog" and "brains". Is she saying it about herself? Is she hearing it said about herself? The instability makes something momentary into something piercing and shaming.

In her book those who suffer love (2009), 11 monoprints by Emin of a woman masturbating accompany the text like a restless flickerbook; but the repeated shifts of the body up against the text make the text come alive, while the text itself, sometimes banal, sometimes funny, sometimes anguished, rubs up against the body to make the whole thing both pathetic and satisfying. Its title, a statement in its own right and an adjectival phrase, is a typical Emin reflexive. Considered carefully, it becomes more than itself, in the same way that the title of her celebrated tent-work, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) played on the phrase's colloquial sexual meaning and was mischievously, seriously, quite literally, a list of everybody she had ever gone to sleep next to.

I wonder if, along with My Bed and the now lost Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (which was destroyed in the Momart fire of 2004, and which Emin refuses to remake), one of Emin's most enduring images will prove to be the photograph Monument Valley (Grand Scale) (1995–97). In it, the artist is off centre, sitting in the desert on an old bright-green chair whose sides are lined with orange piping, so much in the foreground that the great slabs of Monument rock are miniaturised behind her, with the wide blue sky above her only slightly scuffed with clouds, the word "THANKS" appearing from behind her right leg and a book called Exploration of the Soul in her hands, open as if she's about to give a reading. She's looking straight at us. Her gaze is direct but distanced – shrewd, serious. There's both silence and the promise of voice in it. There's a waiting, a discrete openness.

The book is one she wrote in 10 days, an autobiographical work written with the considered rawness for which Emin has now become known. In the early 90s she toured America, giving readings to anyone who came to hear, sitting on her travelling storyteller chair, which was a gift to her from her grandmother (it originally belonged to her great-grandmother), which she patched with the names of the places she visited, like a suitcase. The chair is now an exhibit in its own right (There's a lot of money in chairs, 1994). It's a dialogue itself in the form of a chair, one that holds its own narrative shape between Emin and her grandmothers, between past and present histories. The work is about a girl who comes of age via the legends of her English mother and her Turkish-Cypriot father, their material ups and downs, then the girl's own horrific early sexualisation, first by abuse, then by rape, at the age of 13, at the hands of a local man, someone well known for having "broken in girls". "When I got in, my mum said, 'Tracey, what's wrong with you?' I showed her my coat, the dirt and the stains, and told her 'I'm not a virgin any more.' She didn't call the police or make any fuss. She just washed my coat and everything carried on as normal, as though nothing had happened." Exploration of the Soul ends with the story of Emin at the age of seven going to a children's party, from which she is sent home because "you don't have an invitation". The next morning the child Emin asks her mother, "What's an invitation?" It is a model fable of exclusion, of how language itself is used to exclude.

Emin is a great recycler. Much of Exploration of the Soul appears again in her book of "memoirs and confessions" Strangeland (2005), a work of echo and resonance and rewrite, in which – as in her video-poem Why I never became a dancer (1995) – she works with a repeating structure, one that shifts from abjection to empowerment and transformation. In it she declares "You don't have to be born with balls to have balls."

By her own authority, Emin writes with a gift of fused subjectivity and objectivity reminiscent of a writer like Nell Dunn (the titles of whose 1960s novels Up the Junction and Poor Cow read now almost like the titles of Emin works). Dunn, an upper-class girl who decamped to south London and wrote with what proved to be a transformative lack of judgmentalism about the working classes, has a talent for fusing roughness and beauty into something at once fragmentary and whole, seen from both outside and inside simultaneously.

"Instead of feeling on the outside, I realised that there was an outside and it was called 'being an artist'." Strangeland's first image, of her birth, is an infant vision between death and life, somehow wrong, voiceless: "When I was born they thought I was dead. Paul arrived first, ten minutes before me . . . I just rolled out, small and yellow . . . I somehow felt a mistake had been made. I couldn't scream or cry or argue my case . . . They put me into a little glass box and slowly I came round." Its final image, of the adult Emin in Egypt longing to smash through the glass case in a tomb and take into her arms a "tiny mummified foetus" is one of sheer empathy. "Dead for thousands of years, not completely formed, but he had soul. He still had soul," writes the artist who knows what spirit is, who can go from the word "drunk" to the word "soul", from inebriation to metaphysic, in the space of a single strip of material, and hold them both in equal measure (Drunk to the bottom of my soul, 2002).

It's all about connection. It's one word after another, with Emin. Give her a blanket and she'll make it speak. Give her the fabric of things and she'll find voice in it. Give her a cliché and she'll take it apart to give it back its full original whack of power again. Give her words, she'll write them backwards and forwards; she'll send them off in all directions; she'll work them into everything; she'll put them where you least expect. She'll make you wonder what they mean; she'll show you they're right and they're wrong. She'll take them to pieces then sew them back together again. She'll light them up.

Tracey Emin: Love Is What You Want is at the Hayward Galley, Southbank Centre, London SE1 (0844 875 0073), from 18 May to 29 August 2011. www.southbankcentre.co.uk

MIT SENSEable City Lab: Borderline

The Data Dimension at FutureEverything 2011 (Manchester, UK) features an eclectic mix of design and art projects which gesture towards a data-driven culture. The first microscope was designed by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). The microscope, like the telescope, revealed entirely new worlds, at scales impossible for humans to perceive. Today, like their predecessor, scientists, artists, academics and amateurs, re-purpose, extend, and invent new technologies to observe and comprehend the things no one has seen or understood before. This not only reveals a previously unimagined realm, more than this it constructs a new reality, giving shape and life to a new dimension. The artworks featured in The Data Dimension are an example of the type of experiments taking place. They are spyglasses to study the microscopic, immaterial and infinitely complex. This is about illuminating a future, and creating a new perspective, on a world that is only beginning to emerge. The Data Dimension presents a selection of these Digital Microscopes; artworks that nurture new insights into the invisible infrastructures that make up our world. Here designers and artists visualise the invisible layer of complex data that surrounds our daily lives, making data come alive.
Nicholas Felton

Before we can do anything with data, we first need to gather the information. The devices and applications we daily use automatically capture data on the electronic interactions in our everyday lives. Some people voluntarily record everyday data, in some cases as a performative act, recording their daily routines and habits. One such data obsessive is Nicholas Felton, whose Annual Reports transform the minutiae of his daily interactions into graphic design. Seemingly mundane happenings such as his conversations with friends accumulate over time to reveal startling new dimensions on the everyday. Felton has released an app, Daytum, which enables all of us to similarly become hoarders of the everyday and to discover new dimensions on our own lives. New social realities emerge through capturing and making sense of everyday data. How do we come to know, or see, or experience something which has no physical form? To make sense of it we need to turn it into something we can understand. One way to do this is through visualisation. To visualise is to give form to something not yet known as a visual image; to turn it into something we can make sense of with sight. A commissioned artwork, FlavourCollider by Marcos Lutyens, gives visual form to the sense of taste. Located in a bar within the art space, users drink cocktails while wearing a EEG headset and their brain activity is translated into a real-time visualisation. The work explores the neurological condition of synesthesia, and the connection between taste and shape.
reMap from Bestario

Complexity is the consequence of our increased capacity to measure more accurately the world around us. The more we discover, the more complex the world becomes. reMap from Bestario, is a meta-visualisation; a visualisation of visualisations and, as such, serves as an excellent introduction to this domain. Curated by Manual Lima, this is a comprehensive review of visualisation projects that relate to complex systems. Bestiario pushes forward the technical display of world class data visualizations and allows audiences to instinctively search a huge database of visualizations using tags and keywords, allowing navigation using a semantic approach and depicting relations among them. This brings to life the way it is possible to search and navigate the new data domains. A regular collaborator in FutureEverything, Aaron Koblin, now heads the Google Data Arts department. Search is also an issue for the media industries and the BBC. Bill Thompson is part of a team working on the BBC Archive and building a Digital Public Space. Increasingly, we need more innovative ways with which to navigate this data terrain. BBC Data Art for example offer a glimpse of the future of television. We are still in search era, in which we are all just looking for things. A trio of projects, Political Atmospherics, NewsTraces and TV Related Content: News 24 suggest that in the future, we will have more systems that will do more for us, in ways that we can't yet comprehend. Berg, with Timo Arnall and Dentsu London, document real-time material representations that grow from an originating data source in Making Future Magic. This is a video sketch of an inventive technique for creating three-dimensional forms in light by moving an iPad through space. It is one of a series of experiments in giving tangible form to 'Immaterials' (Matt Jones), formless dimensions in our daily environments such as data and wifi clouds. The data dimension is immaterial, it affects everything, and yet we cannot reach out and touch it. Its physical reality is in the server farms, vast rooms full of computers hosting the data and applications. We make sense of it through metaphors such as the cloud, the domain of remote services and applications we access from any point in space. By transposing it from the confines of the screen and into the physical world, focus is drawn to the materiality of the data itself.
Nathalie Miebach

There is potential for us to do more than simply paint space with data. Art works include Form Follows Data, a data sculpture project in which Iohanna Pani presents her quantified self and her domestic encounters in the form of everyday objects, such as a cup which physically reflects the volume consumed each day, making tangible the language of personal statistical data. Capturing obscure weather data using very simple data-collecting devices and transforming it into abstract sculptures, Nathalie Miebach creates intricate wall pieces that function both as musical scores and weather almanacs. In Food of Art, Nadeem Haidary conducts data analytics on still life paintings, analysing twelve masterpieces for their nutritional content, breaking down food values from Frans Snyders' 39,851 calorie feast to Vincent Van Gogh's four meager onions. Presenting a witty analogue take on digital metrics in physical space, Hit Counter by Zach Gage is an interactive piece which narcissistically counts its own visitors and proudly presents this number as the art work itself.
Kevin MacDonald

New forms of narrative and personalisation are also possible. Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin's groundbreaking music video experiment for Arcade Fire, The Wilderness Downtown, shows a user her childhood streets after submitting postcode data. Search and mass participation strike a deeply cinematic note in a preview of 'The YouTube movie', a Kevin MacDonald directed feature film Life In A Day, edited together using thousands of YouTube clips uploaded in a single day, July 24, 2011. From intimate moments of personal experience, to vast themes of birth and death, an epic self-portrait emerges via mass participation, as editor Joe Walker creates a kaleidoscopic compilation from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 140 nations. Upon viewing Borderline, from MIT SENSEable City Labs, we realise that lines on a map are in fact meaningful connections — a multitude of human interactions, unfolding before you in real time. Borderline redraws the map of Great Britain based on the complexity of billions of human connections, and asks if regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space. It reveals for instance that the effects of a possible secession of Wales from Great Britain would be twice as disruptive for the human network as that of Scotland.
Iohanna Pani

The Data Dimension also imagines a future beyond the computer screen. In the Media Surfaces video sketch, Berg present data in physical context. Travellers in a train station are able to interact with a panoply of screens and smart surfaces reflect our data back to us. Here, we imagine the built environment as interface, in what could be described as a form of data signage. A useful analogy to help explain this idea is to think of the world as a computer, with these signs playing the same role icons or menus do on a computer desktop, indicating objects and their operations; a graphical user interface for interaction with the world. Combine this characteristic with innovation in touch-screen display, which includes 'shape-memory' layers that when activated lend the displayed image physical texture. It is possible to imagine a future where data really is without boundaries and it shapes the physical world around us. Dr. Drew Hemment is an artist, curator and writer based in Manchester England. He is Founder and Director of FutureEverything (formerly Futuresonic, est. 1995), and is Associate Director of ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster University. Winner of the Lever Prize 2010, Shortlisted for the Big Chip International Award for Innovation 2010 and the Arts & Business Award 2010, Runner Up Lever Prize 2009, Honorary Mention for Director at Prix Ars Electronica 2008. His work has been covered prominently by New York Times, BBC and NBC, and he has served on many prominent international Art Juries including UNESCO DigiArts. In 1999, awarded a PhD at Lancaster University, in 2009 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK), and in 2010 an Eyebeam resident (USA).

Kevin Smith is an academic at HighWire, Lancaster University. His research focuses on the concept of Adaptive Signs- an entity that signifies the change in state of another entity by adapting accordingly. His research sits at the intersection of Information Design, Data Visualisation, Context Aware Computing and Organic User Interfaces.

Osama bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs ignited debate about al-Qaeda's future as well as the future of militancy in Pakistan, where various outfits retain the capability to strike locally and globally. In the near term, analysts expect al-Qaeda Central's leaders in Pakistan will seek to ensure their security and execute a succession plan in the wake of bin Laden's capture, necessitating a communications lockdown and forestalling any direct retaliation. Instead, al-Qaeda Central is likely to rely on other outfits to respond on its behalf, either locally or globally. It already has called on fellow Muslims in Pakistan "to rise up and revolt to cleanse this shame that has been attached to them by a clique of traitors and thieves who sold everything to the enemies."[[BREAK]]

The threat of retaliation comes from a mélange of militants from various established outfits, splinter groups and independent networks. The internecine nature of this confederation also means that even if bin Laden's demise does provide space for a political resolution in Afghanistan, the threat from militants in Pakistan is unlikely to disappear. Despite understandable frustration, the United States must continue to engage with Pakistan. But the nature of that engagement should change, with a view toward the longer term, which means a greater focus on building civilian as opposed to military capacity. 

Taking Stock of the Major Players

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has already promised retribution in Pakistan, which is understandable given that it has acted as a stalking horse for al-Qaeda in the past. Although the TTP has been on the front end of attacks in Pakistan, bin Laden's organization is believed to have been pulling some of the strings behind the scenes. Militants formerly associated with Punjabi outfits, such as Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), could contribute to a fresh round of attacks, as they have to previous operations in the past. These groups forged ties with al-Qaeda during the 1990s and some of their members began working with it to launch attacks in Pakistan soon after 9/11. Thus, at precisely the same time the army and ISI can expect additional (and deserved) pressure from the U.S. to stop playing favorites and crack down on all of the militants on Pakistani soil, the country may also be poised to witness a new wave of violence.

Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, maintains the most robust transnational networks of any Pakistani militant outfit and is viewed as an increasingly global threat. However, despite the fact that its above-ground wing Jamaat-ul-Dawa organized street demonstrations to mourn bin Laden, it is far from certain the group would be willing to launch an operation on behalf of al-Qaeda. The army and ISI are believed to be putting significant pressure on LeT's leaders to refrain from overtly engaging in attacks on Western interests abroad. Unless Pakistan wants a showdown with the United States this is unlikely to change. However, this also presumes a level of organizational coherence and control that may be at odds with the ground reality. LeT militants are present on both sides of the Durand Line, meaning not all of them rely on safe haven in Pakistan. Furthermore, individuals or factions within LeT can utilize its infrastructure as well as transnational capabilities to pursue their own operations without the leadership's consent. Enhanced organizational integration with other outfits heightens the opportunities for freelancing, with former LeT members acting as an important bridge to al-Qaeda as well as other militant outfits.

Al-Qaeda is not a significant military force in Afghanistan, and any organizational turmoil it experiences is unlikely to impact the start of the spring fighting season. Neither the Taliban nor the Haqqani Network, the two most prolific actors in the Afghan insurgency, has embraced out-of-area attacks or operations in Pakistan, though the latter has supported actors that do. The bigger question is how bin Laden's demise will impact their respective Pakistan-based leaderships.

The army and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) are unlikely to end their support for either entity, both of which are considered essential to protecting Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan. However, America's ability to unilaterally strike bin Laden's compound in the heart of Pakistan provides it leverage, in part because the operation raised questions about the ability of the army and ISI to protect senior leaders in the Taliban and Haqqani Network. More importantly, although al-Qaeda's connection to both of those entities goes deeper than just bin Laden's history with either outfit, that personal relationship was an important one. Osama's demise creates space for a political reconciliation in Afghanistan, in the event the U.S. chooses to pursue such a path. Problematically, there is no guarantee the army and ISI could, or would attempt to, dismantle the militant infrastructure in its entirety even if Afghanistan is settled according to Pakistan's interests.

The Protean Militant Milieu

Historically, there were three loci in which militants in Pakistan were active: Afghanistan, Indian-administered Kashmir and sectarianism attacks at home. Two new areas of activity have emerged during the past several years: a revolutionary locus manifested by the insurgency against Pakistan, and a global locus characterized by out of area attacks against America and its allies. Sectarian attacks continue, and have become a means of destabilizing the state. The Kashmir jihad has stagnated, though LeT remains committed to that cause and to attacks against India. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has become a focal point for every major militant outfit as well as a host of smaller networks and splinter groups.

Regardless of official army and ISI policy vis-à-vis militants on its soil, any political settlement in Afghanistan is likely to have positive and negative ramifications at the ground level. With the Kashmir jihad moribund, the abatement of the Afghan insurgency would mark the first time in decades that Pakistani militants were not faced with active open fronts on which to fight. A solution deemed acceptable by the Taliban would provide an impetus for many militants to demobilize and would rob jihadist leaders of a valuable rallying cry. However, those unwilling to lay down their arms could drift further into the sectarian, revolutionary or global orbits. Furthermore, whereas the Taliban might be willing to break ties with al-Qaeda, other actors might not. At this point the country is host to a consortium of established outfits, splinters, networks and freelance operators whose most enduring feature is its protean nature. These actors will continue to pose a threat to Pakistan, its neighbors and the West until the entire militant edifice is torn down.

Too Big To Fail

The response in Pakistan has not been promising. By focusing on the raid into Pakistani territory and glossing over the fact that bin Laden was living on Pakistani soil, the army appears to be doubling down on obstinacy. Nor is it helpful that the government says it will refuse the U.S. access to those who survived the raid. The one glimmer of hope thus far was the statement earlier this week by the Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, that the government would launch an investigation into how bin Laden managed to live for so long in Abbotobad and whether his support system included any serving officials. It now appears the military has taken charge of the investigation, which does not bode well for transparency. None of this is particularly surprising; even after being humbled by the U.S. raid the army remains the most powerful institution in the country, and regardless of what misgivings they may have, those in the civilian government have a history of circling the wagons in times like this.

Despite all of this, the United States must continue to engage Pakistan: first, because the Pakistani populace should not be punished for the behavior of its military leadership; second, because the United States cannot degrade the militant threat emanating from Pakistan on its own; third, because doing so would help to disprove the narrative in Pakistan that American will abandon it after objectives vis-à-vis al-Qaeda are achieved; and fourth, because Pakistani stability is necessary for greater stability in South Asia, a region in which the United States will continue to have equities for a long time to come.

The question is, who should the United States engage and assist? While recognizing the contributions and sacrifices the Pakistani military has made in the struggle against some militant outfits, it should also be apparent by now that relying so heavily on the military is not a recipe for long-term stability in a militant-free Pakistan. Instead, the U.S. should focus more attention on capacity building for civilian intelligence agencies and law enforcement, which are precisely the institutions that should be on the front lines of counter-terrorism in Pakistan.

This must be part of a wider realignment of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship and one that sees greater emphasis given to building up civilian institutions in Pakistan. For too long the United States has relied on the army as its primary interlocutor out of perceived operational necessity, often with frustrating results. The military-to-military relationship is an important one, but over-reliance on the army is at odds with the aim of fostering civilian governance in Pakistan. The United States finds itself with additional leverage this week, and should use some of it to promote that cause. Doing so is in keeping not only with American interests, but also American values.

Stephen Tankel is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the forthcoming book, "Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba."

From University Board Chairman Benno Schmidt today:

“I believe the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees needs to reconsider the Board’s decision to table the motion to approve the award of an honorary degree to Tony Kushner.  I would not ordinarily ask for reconsideration of a decision so recently taken.  But when the board has made a mistake of principle, and not merely of policy, review is appropriate and, indeed, mandatory.

“Freedom of thought and expression is the bedrock of any university worthy of the name.  If it were appropriate for us to take politics into account in deciding whether to approve an honorary degree, I might agree with Trustee Wiesenfeld, whose political views on the matters in controversy are not far distant from my own.  But it is not right for the Board to consider politics in connection with the award of honorary degrees except in extreme cases not presented by the facts here.  The proposed honorary degree for Mr. Kushner would recognize him for his extraordinary talent and contribution to the American theater.  Like other honorary degrees, it is not intended to reflect approval or disapproval for political views not relevant to the field for which the recipient is being honored.  Any other view is impractical as well as wrong in principle.  Would we want it thought that we approve of the politics of everyone who receives a CUNY honorary degree?  Certainly I have moved the approval of honorary degrees for persons with whose opinions I differ.

“In addition, I am concerned about the procedural unfairness of our action.  The objection arose at the eleventh hour without any opportunity for research and preparation necessary for the presentation of a full and balanced appraisal.  Accordingly, the Chancellor and I agree that reconsideration of the motion to table the honorary degree for Mr. Kushner is not only the right thing to do, but is our obligation. I will ask the Secretary of the Board to convene an Executive Committee meeting to reconsider this matter.”

All well and good. And proof once again that the only effective response to unfair pressure is...counter-pressure!

But do note that phrase "not intended to reflect approval or disapproval for political views not relevant to the field for which the recipient is being honored." So, if Mr Wiesenfeld doesn't like Kushner's screenplay for the film Munich, for example, canceling the award is ok? Dangerous precedent...

(I'll put aside for the moment Schmidt's statement of solidarity with Wiesenfeld's extreme rightist views. Perhaps he's just trying to quell the firestorm on both sides.)

I maintain, though, that the key issue here is not free speech in the abstract (important thought that is) but the utter and deliberate distortion of Kushner's actual views.  Wiesenfeld characterized him in terms usually reserved for Holocaust deniers. So I agree with Kushner that someone owes him a direct apology (or at least retraction) for putting slanderous statements about him in the public record.

Let's save the "Israel-haters have free speech rights, too" for another time--when such a person needs defending. Here Kushner's own respectful record of nuanced dissent from Israeli-Likud military policy is defensible enough for to justify his not being academically blacklisted.

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