In case big email providers like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo hadn’t already been scared stiff by recent online communication trends, this news should wake them up.
A huge French company has just banned the use of email within the company. Instead, having concluded that the vast majority of email is just time-wasting noise, it is switching all employees to a Facebook-like interface and instant messaging.
CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam. That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.
Caroline Crouch, a spokeswoman for the company, told ABC News the goal is focused on internal emails rather than external emails with clients and partners. Atos has already reduced the number of internal emails by 20 percent in six months.
When asked how employees have responded to the policy, Crouch told ABC News the overall response “has been positive with strong take up of alternative tools.”
Breton, Atos’s CEO, says he hasn’t sent an email in three years. (And he’s obviously managed to keep his job.)
This trend at the corporate level mirrors email trends among young people–the future workforce. As the chart below shows, the use of web-based email by the younger crowd is plummeting, as these folks communicate via Facebook, IM, and texting instead.
Email is still an extremely convenient way to communicate, so it’s not likely to go anywhere. But there’s no question that email is losing share of digital communications, including in the workplace. And that’s not good for companies that depend on it for their livelihoods.
French presidential officials have been caught illegally downloading copyrighted material; ironic, as the officials could have broken the French ‘three strikes’ laws twice over.
Just as both employees of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the RIAA, one of the main proponents behind the controversial SOPA bill currently going through Congress, more high-profile organisations and government departments are found to be illegally downloading copyrighted material.
Enter the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Members of staff at the Lysée Palace, home and office of the French president, could be found to be breaking some of the toughest anti-piracy measures in Europe, France’s own ‘three strikes’ law.
Sarkozy’s anti-piracy legislation involves cutting off pirates after three proven conditions, known as the ‘three-strike’ rule.
Husband to musician Carla Bruni, Sarkozy pushed through the controversial rule in the French parliament last year, thought to be the toughest anti-piracy law in Europe.
According to TorrentFreak, a total of six infringing downloads were tracked back to Sarkozy’s residence, double the three-strike limit.
The Irishgovernment had previously implemented a three-strike rule, but on Monday indicated that it would be replaced with a UK-like system where court orders could be invoked to block access to sites instead.
Along with the U.S. Department for Homeland Security and the RIAA, copyright holders themselves, from Sony, Universal and Fox employees were found to be downloading content — some of which belonged to their employers.
It would have been an almost perfect hypocrisyhad Bruni’s music been illegally downloaded. Alas, it’s not the case. Someone clearly has a taste for The Beach Boys though.
Murder of Gadhafi is next step to wider U.S. wars in Africa
The brutal lynching of Moammar Gadhafi, the leader of Libya, is the latest criminal act in NATO‘s seven-month war of regime change and conquest.
Gadhafi died resisting to the very end U.S.-NATO war, as he said he would. He refused to negotiate with NATO an ignominious departure for himself or to surrender. He chose a martyr’s death for Libya’s independence and sovereignty. Despite ridicule in the West, in Africa Gadhafi will be remembered as an anti-imperialist fighter.
The gross and disrespectful behavior of the National Transitional Council (TNC) in the display of Moammar Gadhafi’s body confirms to the world in the most graphic way that these elements, who the imperialist powers have given official recognition, are in fact crude, low-life gangsters.
Instead of burying Gadhafi within a day as required under Islamic law, they chose to display Gadhafi’s battered, half naked body — bloody, unwashed and uncovered — on a soiled mattress in a meat locker at a shopping center.
This affront to religious and national custom will further deepen outrage and resistance.
TNC militias did no real fighting. These divided, competing military bands operate as scavengers or vultures, calling in air strikes and lying in wait to pick over the death that NATO bombers have blasted in front of them. In seven months of NATO bombing they have shown themselves capable of firing endless weapons in front of cameras and brutalizing Black Libyans, yet incapable of conducting any independent military action.
U.S. and NATO forces bear responsibility for this latest crime and the way it was carried out. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded like a gunslinger in a Hollywood western in Tripoli the day before Gadhafi’s murder, demanding his capture – dead or alive.
Loyalist forces in the city of Sirte, Bani Walid and several other cities have held out heroically two months after NATO seizure of Tripoli.
NATO bombers targeted Sirte and Bani Walid’s electrical grid, communications, food storage, the citywater supply, the water towers on apartment buildings and even the water tower on the roof of the hospital. Again and again the TNC has announced that all resistance in these small cities have has been destroyed, only to be driven out each time.
The imperialist war in Libya is reminiscent of past colonial wars in Africa and Asia. Targeting of any civilian necessities, such as water, food, medicine, and communication is specifically prohibited under international law and considered a war crime under the Nuremburg and Geneva Conventions. Yet during seven months of war those are exactly the civilian targets that NATO planners focused on again and again.
The bombing of lines of cars fleeing the NATO besieged city of Sirte that led to Gadhafi’s capture is an example of systematic targeting of civilians.
U.S. British, French and Italian imperialist forces claimed to be protecting civilians and implementing a United Nations Security Council No-fly zone. But the Libyan government used no aircraft at all. U.S. and other NATO jets ruled the skies and civilians were their targets. This is an expanding war. Today U.S. drones strike with impunity at defenseless peoples around the world.
Gadhafi’s greatest threat to the imperialist countries was promoting a development plan for an African Federation and a stable African currency backed by Libya‘s $90 billion reserves to help Africans free themselves from the IMF and World Bank’s onerous dictates.
Forty-two years ago Libya was one of the poorest, least developed countries of Africa. Gadhafi and other young military officers overthrew the Western-supported Libyan monarchy of King Idris in 1969, then held the imperialist’s off as the Libyans built with nationalized oil revenues a series of modern cities and infrastructure. Before the NATO bombing this year, the Libyan people had achieved the highest educational and health standards in Africa, according to UN development statistics.
In the same week that Secretary of State Clinton traveled to Tripoli and that Gadhafi was murdered, President Barack Obama ordered U.S. Special Forces and military advisors to Uganda, South Sudan, Central Africa Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo. These are countries that hold a vast reservoir of strategic minerals, including cobalt, coltan, industrial diamonds, copper in Congo and newly discovered oil in Uganda and South Sudan.
Anyone who expects that U.S./NATO forces or their corrupt collaborators will rebuild the schools, hospitals, modern housing, sports complexes, vast underground water system, electricity, advanced communications, reorganize free health care or reconstruct essential infrastructure that they have laid waste to in months of bombing need only look at their ignominious record in Iraq after eight years or in Afghanistan after ten years. The promised peace, national reconciliation, democracy and development were empty words.
Today, the vast majority of Iraqi people, even in the capital city of Baghdad, still struggle with a few hours of electricity a day. Potable water is a memory of a past, pre-occupation epoch, so is free education and health care. NATO is a war machine for corporate profit, not a social service agency. It has shown itself as incapable of reorganizing a decent life.
In Afghanistan after a decade of occupation, the rubble of U.S. bombs and rusting tanks still litter the roads. None of the promised social progress has reached beyond Pentagon press releases and politicians visits.
In Iraq the indignities and humiliations were so numerous and such an affront that even the government of compliant collaborators established by the U.S. has been forced by mass sentiment to refuse immunity to U.S. troops scheduled to remain in Iraq as relabeled trainers and advisors.
As in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen the resistance in Libya to U.S. NATO domination will continue and take on new forms.
The imperialists never expected mass mobilized resistance to their plans. They predicted a war that would be over within a week. Instead a small population of six million, spread across a largely desert country, managed through mass mobilizations of millions of people, military resistance and emergency measures to withstand more than 200 days of non-stop bombardment, more than 9,000 air strikes.
U.S., British and French corporate looters are planning a new assault on Africa, but they are finding that this is not the world of 100 years ago.
The tens of thousands of youth occupying sites in cities across the U.S. and Europe need to stand in solidarity with resistance to corporate domination at home and to imperialist wars abroad.
00% sure this was supposed to be an album but its 2011 &..you know…
1. Welcome To The Darkside (Feat. French Montana) 2. Dopeman (Feat. Jadakiss & Dre of Cool & Dre) 3. So Fly (Feat. Arland) 4. Big Business 5. Angels Say 6. Pushing Keys (Feat. Raekwon) 7. Drop A Body 8. My Lord 9. Fuck Them Other Niggas 10. Around The World (Feat. Arland)
ChineseactressShao Xiaoshan, 31, says the Chinesegovernment has forced her to date the children of western diplomats to gather intelligence for them since she was 17.
According to NTDTelevision, Xiaoshan’s claims appeared on Sina Weibo and Tincent Weibo — two Chinese, Twitter-like sites.
Famous for her appearance as a body double in the 2006 film The Banquet, the actress says she was told to “control” the son of the French Ambassador when they Shao Xiaoshan
Image: NTD dated in 2007, was not paid for her spying, and was threatened with death if she disobeyed.
Asking to be taken in by western governments, she says she’s come forward in an effort to preemt being killed by the Chinesegovernment. “I don’t want to die before no one knows why I’ve died,” she wrote.
Not everyone is buying her claims, with many thinking it could be a publicity stunt. No stranger to controversy, Xiaoshan was recently criticized for seeking a foreign husband online. Her response to critics was, “It’s not that I like foreigners, but because for all these years I’ve had no personal safety in China!!!”
The Dogon are an ethnic group living in the central plateau region of Mali, south of the Niger bend near the city of Bandiagara in the Mopti region. The population numbers between 400,000 and 800,000 The Dogon are best known for their mythology, their mask dances, wooden sculpture and their architecture. The past century has seen significant changes in the social organization, material culture and beliefs of the Dogon, partly because Dogon country is one of Mali‘s major tourist attractions. Certain researchers investigating the Dogon have reported that they seem to possess advanced astronomical knowledge, the nature and source of which has subsequently become embroiled in controversy. From 1931 to 1956 the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule studied the Dogon. This included field missions ranging from several days to two months in 1931, 1935, 1937 and 1938 and then annually from 1946 until 1956. In late 1946 Griaule spent a consecutive thirty-three days in conversations with the Dogon wiseman Ogotemmêli, the source of much of Griaule and Dieterlen’s future publications. They reported that the Dogon believe that the brightest star in the sky, Sirius (sigi tolo or ‘star of the Sigui’), has two companion stars, pō tolo (the Digitaria star), and ęmmę ya tolo, (the female Sorghum star), respectively the first and second companions of Sirius A. Sirius, in the Dogon system, formed one of the foci for the orbit of a tiny star, the companionate Digitaria star. When Digitaria is closest to Sirius, that star brightens: when it is farthest from Sirius, it gives off a twinkling effect that suggests to the observer several stars. The orbit cycle takes 60 years. They also claimed that the Dogon appeared to know of the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter.
On March 11, 2008 a new documentary was aired on French television – a documentary that Americans won’t ever see. The gigantic bio-tech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.
Christine Lagarde can count on at least one thing Wednesday during her first news conference as chief of the International Monetary Fund: few softball questions.
The former French finance minister is under pressure on many fronts. Lagarde must convince the developing world that her IMF will be a more open place for non-Western nations. At the same time, she’ll have to persuade her fellow Europeans to take painful steps to avoid a default by Greece.
Lagarde is taking over after a scandal, so she will have to restore confidence in the institution. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, her predecessor, resigned in May to fight charges that he sexually assaulted a New York City hotel housekeeper.
If all that weren’t enough, Lagarde is the first woman to lead the global lending giant.
“The IMF top job has never been in the spotlight like it is now,” said Kevin Gallagher, a professor of international relations at Boston University.
Economists and former IMF officials say Lagarde would do well to make a few points clear when she answers questions Wednesday:
—- Take a tougher line with Europe. She should show a willingness to push her former European colleagues to accept that a default and restructuring of Greece‘s debt may be necessary. European governments fear such an approach would harm European banks, which have lent billions to Greece‘s government.
The European Union and IMF provided Greece with a $159 billionbillion bailout package last year — a third of that came from the IMF. Greece has received more assistance from the IMF, relative to its size, than any country in history. That has caused some grumbling among developing countries about favorable treatment.
“She needs to make it clear that she’s taking off her French finance minister hat and putting on her global financial institutions hat,” Gallagher said.
—- Change the subject away from Greece. One way to show her break from Europe would be to discuss issues other than the continent’s debt problems. Many emerging economies, such as China and Brazil, are struggling with high inflation. They also want to know her plans for making the IMF a more open institution.
Eswar Prasad, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former IMF official, said Lagarde could start by making a firm commitment to changing the governing structure. She should be willing to give emerging markets more voting rights and increased representation.
She could also commit to diversify the fund’s staff, both in gender and expertise. Gallagher said the staff is “stacked” with European and American economists. She could promise to add more economists from China, Brazil and other developing nations.
– Restore confidence in the institution. Lagarde will likely try to address the IMF‘s reputation as male-dominated and insensitive to the concerns of some female employees.
Lagarde “can pledge to make the place more gender-balanced, more respectful of people from different countries and backgrounds,” Gallagher said. “Those kinds of things are key signals.”
When Britain lost control of Egypt in 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden said he wanted the nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser “destroyed … murdered … I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt”. Those insolent Arabs, Winston Churchill had urged in 1951, should be driven “into the gutter from which they should never have emerged”.
The language of colonialism may have been modified; the spirit and the hypocrisy are unchanged. A new imperial phase is unfolding in direct response to the Arab uprising that began in January and has shocked Washington and Europe, causing an Eden-style panic. The loss of the Egyptian tyrant Mubarak was grievous, though not irretrievable; an American-backed counter-revolution is under way as the military regime in Cairo is seduced with new bribes and power shifting from the street to political groups that did not initiate the revolution. The western aim, as ever, is to stop authentic democracy and reclaim control.
Libya is the immediate opportunity. The Nato attack on Libya, with the UN Security Council assigned to mandate a bogus “no fly zone” to “protect civilians”, is strikingly similar to the final destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999. There was no UN cover for the bombing of Serbia and the “rescue” of Kosovo, yet the propaganda echoes today. Like Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Gaddafi is a “new Hitler”, plotting “genocide” against his people. There is no evidence of this, as there was no genocide in Kosovo. In Libya there is a tribal civil war; and the armed uprising against Gaddafi has long been appropriated by the Americans, French and British, their planes attacking residential Tripoli with uranium- (more…)
On April 5 the chairman of the African Union, Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, condemned French military operations in fellow West African nation Ivory Coast and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s war against Libya, stating: “Africa does not need any external influence. Africa must manage its own affairs.”
Though hardly a model of a democratic ruler, having come to power in a coup d’etat in 1979 and governed his nation uninterruptedly since, Obiang Nguema is the current head of the 53-nation African Union and his comments stand on their own regardless of their source.
In reference to the mounting violence between the Western-backed Alassane Ouattara’s self-styled Republican Forces army and “Invisible Commandos” on one side and incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo’s military and security forces on the other in Ivory Coast, the AU chairman said that it should not “imply a war, an intervention of a foreign army.”
He spoke after French attack helicopters struck Ivorian military bases in the commercial capital of Abidjan and destroyed over ten armored vehicles, four anti-aircraft weapons and the broadcasting station of the state-run Radiodiffusion-Télévision ivoirienne as (more…)
Army General Carter Ham told Congress today that while sending a globalist ground invasion force including American troops into Libya may not be “ideal,” it is probably the only way to make sure the CIA organized rebels and al-Qaeda defeat Gaddafi and his troops.
The use of an international ground force is a possible plan to bolster rebels fighting forces loyal to the Libyan leader, Ham said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, the AP and CBS report today.
“I suspect there might be some consideration of that,” the general responded when asked directly about ground troops. “My personal view at this point would be that that’s probably not the ideal circumstance, again for the regional reaction that having American boots on the ground would entail.”
Ham admitted that the poorly trained rebels are incapable of pulling off a decisive victory in the north African country. The general characterized the current situation as a stalemate. In fact, Gaddafi has pushed the rebels back and dealt them one defeat after (more…)
Exit Through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film is a film that tells the story of Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles, and his obsession with street art. The film charts Guetta’s constant documenting of his every waking moment on film, from a chance encounter with his cousin, the artist Invader, to his introduction to a host of street artists with a focus on Shepard Fairey and Banksy, whose anonymity is preserved by obscuring his face and altering his voice, to Guetta’s eventual fame as a street artist himself. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 24 January 2010. It is narrated by Rhys Ifans. Music is by Geoff Barrow. It includes Richard Hawley‘s “Tonight The Streets Are Ours.“ The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Academy Awards.
In case big email providers like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo hadn’t already been scared stiff by recent online communication trends, this news should wake them up.
