Poverty Study in Egypt

Take a look at:

Obstaclesto Access Basic Services and Households' Strategies to Manage Risks and Copewith Existing Poverty in Egypt.

معوقات الحصول على الخدمات الأساسية وكيفية مواجهة الأسر للمخاطر والتعايش مع الفقر 

The Women of Asgarda

Check out The Women of Asgarda in Spotlight 

The Quint Border Region: The World’s Most Under-Reported Terror Hot Spot

By: Kerry Patton

10/09/2012 (11:54am)

 

 Anyone who researches terrorism has likely come across a place in South America known as the Tri-border region, a remote area where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina border one another that is often mentioned as a safe haven for Islamic radicals. But as more and more intelligence officers begin to understand this very old South American safe haven, they also need to start paying attention to another hotspot: The Quint-border region in Africa.

South America's Tri-border region is certainly unique. Very few travel inside the region. And for good reason; it is a remote, semi-lawless and often times extremely dangerous place. But imagine that there’s a new place in the world that's very similar to the Tri-border territory -- that includes an additional two nation states. That’s the Quint-border expanse, and it’s just as remote and lawless, but also far more dangerous.

The Quint-border region is thousands of miles from South America situated in the west-southwest region of Africa. It’s called the “Quint” region because it consists of five different borders -- Nigeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. It’s the location counterterrorists need to begin paying close attention to in order to stay on top of our enemy’s initiatives.

The Tri-border region in South America may never have become what it is today if it weren’t for the treacherous terrain in the region. It is comprised of heavy jungle with thick canopies making it difficult even for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) air platforms to monitor.

But with all things considered, a lot of hard evidence is missing from much of the continuing claims about this region being South America’s terror “hot spot.” While there’s little question that the Tri-border region is filled with illegal activity that ranges from black markets to organized crime, the extent of Islamist terrorist groups operating in the region remains questionable.

Terror groups such as Hezbollah, Al-Jihad (Islamic Jihad), Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), Hamas and Al-Qaeda probably had a presence in the Tri-border region - evidence points to this - but most of this evidence is historical; there’s little proof that these groups have a significant presence in the region today. Multiple nation states’ have worked to weed out some of the bad guys from the region.

Today, there is absolutely no definitive evidence of any largescale terrorist operations in the region. Yes, some active terror supporters have been captured in the region as of late, but that does not mean the region should still be considered a terror hot bed.

When it comes to definitive evidence about terror hot spots, though, there is substantiation that one such area location exists, and it’s the Quint-border region. Africa is unique. Over the years, it has shifted multiple times from a heavily influenced Islamic region to a Christian zone. Today, it is shifting back to a very influential Islamic continent. Geospatial mapping shows a rapid movement of Islamic infiltration throughout Africa, starting in the north and moving southward. Unfortunately, this Islamic shift is filled with extreme radicalization.

We rarely hear about such terror safe havens because they aren’t all that sexy. Most safe havens lack physical violence. Terrorists are smart and they don’t necessarily enjoy “defecating where they eat.” But violence has imploded inside Africa’s Quint-border region.

Northern Nigeria has been ravaged by Islamist violence in recent years. Boko Haram, an Al Qaeda-linked Islamic terror group, has consistently been on the offensive, committing mass genocide against Christian communities living in the northern half of the country.

Hezbollah also has a relatively heavy presence in the Niger Delta. The official website of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria quoted an African security expert explaining why Hezbollah has a relatively large presence in the region: “One reason is the large population of Lebanese Shi’ites who left their country during the civil war in the 1970s. They deal in trade, communications, minerals and other fields. Ironically, so do many of the Israelis in the region, which means people from both groups may meet up in the business world … the warning must be taken seriously by business people in the area, at least for the time being.”

That "warning" comes from multiple threats related to kidnappings -- a terror tactic frequently used by terrorist groups in the region.

Mali recently experienced a coup that was heavily influenced and led by Islamists closely aligned with Al Qaeda. As mentioned in my May, 2012 Homeland Security Today commentary, West Africa: Al Qaeda’s New Home, “Today, the nation of Mali has been seized by Al Qaeda elements. This once democratic nation has been toppled by a military coup, and those who arguably now control the nation in the aftermath of its instability have allied themselves with Al Qaeda. And there have been talks between the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) Tuareg rebels and Al Qaeda.”

I further noted that the “Tuareg rebellion of 2012 is an independence war against the Malian government in the Sahara desert region of the Azawad led by the MNLA, which is composed of former insurgents and a significant number of returning and heavily armed Tuareg fighters who fought for either the National Transitional Council or the Libyan army during the Libyan civil war.”

Niger, the landlocked country bordering Mali, Nigeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Libya and Chad, is located in the heart of Africa’s hell. Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) saturates its north, Boko Haram is to the south, and Mali unrest is to its west. It also sets in the middle of a major illegal goods trafficking route. Since the French left Niger in 1960, the country witnessed approximately two dozen coups making it incredibly unstable … and prone to radicalization and a safe haven for terrorist activities.

Not every nation within the Quint-border region is filled with violence. Burkina Faso is relatively peaceful with a relatively strong government that so far has been willing to fight crime and corruption even though crime remains high. However, Burkina Faso is an African nation involved in a multi-million dollar a year cigarette smuggling adventure that contributes to multiple financial advancements for terror groups. What other illegal activities exist in Burkina Faso that contribute to an ongoing global terror dilemma?

The small African country of Burkina Faso is also a known drug and weapon smuggling hot zone. According to the US Department of State, “The organized crime that exists in Burkina Faso mostly revolves around the smuggling of weapons, commercial goods, illegal drugs and, to a lesser extent, human trafficking. Burkina Faso is known as a transit country for these activities although a small portion of these weapons, goods, drugs, and trafficked humans do remain in the country.”

According to a 2005 US Department of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs report, “Benin is a source, destination and transit country for the trafficking of children. Children from Benin are trafficked into Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, the Gulf States and Lebanon; children from Burkina Faso, Niger and Togo are sold into servitude in Benin.”

Make no mistake; those involved in human trafficking around the world often have ties to terror networks. They are identified as transnational criminal organizations, or TCOs. These TCO’s are major players in the Quint-border region responsible for financing terror.

There are serious locations in the world that are prone to mass terror activities. The identified Quint-border region could easily be construed as the world’s most dangerous hot spot with significant terror connections. A book could be written about the region’s activities, but we’ll leave that endeavor to intelligence officials.

There is enough data to support the foundation of a good working intelligence report. And this material comes at a critical time -- the war on terror continues, Africa has imploded with violence, and the US continues to run amok searching high and low for the snake’s head of terrorism to be cut off. Unfortunately, that head does not come in the form of a person; look at Al Qaeda’s capabilities even after the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

To effectively target terrorists, you must go to the location where they receive the most active and passive support, because without this support, they have nothing. There is no question that when it comes to Islamic terrorists, a great amount of their support comes from a key region, and that’s the Quint-border region.

Kerry Patton is a combat service disabled veteran who has worked in South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe focusing on intelligence and security, and has interviewed current and former terrorists, including members of the Taliban. Author of, Sociocultural Intelligence: The New Discipline of Intelligence Studies, you can follow Kerry on Facebook or at www.kerry-patton.com. 

http://www.hstoday.us/briefings/correspondents-watch/single-article/the-quint-border-region-the-worlds-most-under-reported-terror-hot-spot/d3a2696632954d92c74ec688a04d3bde.html 

Guevara is dead جيفارا مات

On the 8th of October 1967, this man, Mr. Ernesto Che Guevara, died.

You can look up his life but I prefer to speak of his death . 

Look up  an extensive chronology of his death here

 On Guevara's assassination:

On October 9th, 1967, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was put to death by Bolivian soldiers, trained, equipped and guided by U.S. Green Beret and CIA operatives. His execution remains a historic and controversial event; and thirty years later, the circumstances of his guerrilla foray into Bolivia, his capture, killing, and burial are still the subject of intense public interest and discussion around the world. 
 

As part of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project is posting a selection of key CIA, State Department, and Pentagon documentation relating to Guevara and his death. This electronic documents book is compiled from declassified records obtained by the National Security Archive, and by authors of two new books on Guevara: Jorge Castañeda's Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (Knopf), and Henry Butterfield Ryan's The Fall of Che Guevara (Oxford University Press). The selected documents, presented in order of the events they depict, provide only a partial picture of U.S. intelligence and military assessments, reports and extensive operations to track and "destroy" Che Guevara's guerrillas in Bolivia; thousands of CIA and military records on Guevara remain classified. But they do offer significant and valuable information on the high-level U.S. interest in tracking his revolutionary activities, and U.S. and Bolivian actions leading up to his death.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB5/ 

 

White House Memorandum, October 11, 1967: In another daily update, Walt Rostow reports to President Johnson that "we are 99% sure that 'Che' Guevara is dead." Rostow believes the decision to execute Guevara "is stupid," but he also points out his death "shows the soundness of our 'preventive medicine' assistance to countries facing incipient insurgency--it was the Bolivian 2nd Ranger Battalion, trained by our Green Berets from June-September of this year, that cornered him and got him." 

 

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB5/

Frilly Faces by Fatma El Mosallamy

You can see the entire online expo on the Art Dungeon

Twitter, PR & People

How Twitter is Changing Public Relations

The PR industry is changing for good. Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter have completely redefined the paradigm of public relations. A couple of years back, it would have been hard to imagine a micro-blogging service, all of 140 characters messages and that too not landing directly in your Inbox could be used as an effective means for maintaining public relations.

Social Media vs. Public Relations
It might sound surprising but for a long time, social media was viewed as a competitor to conventional PR techniques. While social media analysts predicted that PR industry is now dead, the latter retaliated by arguing that social media isn’t well suited for public relationships. And then, Twitter happened. As its popularity increased, it reduced the gap between social media and PR industry. And now, with thousands of Twitter’s PR success stories, it is widely viewed as the best PR technique in today’s age of Web 2.0

Is Conventional PR Dead?
Of course not! Twitter is a fascinating way of augmenting your organization’s PR capabilities. It’s not a tool to replace conventional PR techniques. Rather, it helps spread the message to a much wider audience than any other legacy PR mode. You can tweet about a press release or about a new media event for your organization and then see how the news spreads like fire in Tweetverse.

Good Customer Service, Great Public Relations
In order to get good publicity, it is important for an organization to provide good service. Twitter provides an unparallel mode of instant & real-time customer service. Queries can be answered instantaneously and the word spreads faster than wild fire.
Many companies have realized that Twitter is not only a great tool for marketing, it’s also an innovative medium of providing great customer service, thereby leading to a good public reputation and strong public relations.

Brand Monitoring
Twitter is a great place to monitor your brand’s reputation online. You get to know what people are talking about your brand. You can search for people who’d potentially be interested in your brand and reach out to them. Using Twitter’s advanced search functionality and several 3^rd party tools, you can determine if your brand is loosing its charm amongst customers and appropriately take corrective action.

Knowledge is Power
The PR industry thrives on knowledge and what better than an easily presentable source of vast knowledge like Twitter. As you follow and interact with more people, you gain more knowledge. Be it peers, competitors or clients, following them on Twitter makes sense as you gain more insights into their opinions.
Twitter is an always online 24 x 7 community with several knowledgeable and thoughtful people, so why not make the best out of it? As a wise man once said, there’s nothing better than learning from the pros.
Bill Gates once said “If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relationships”. I’d rather say “If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it accessing Twitter to build public relations”

Douglas Idugboe, Digital and New Media Marketing Strategist. Founder and Chief Editor of Smedio! A Canadian Bestselling Author, Marketing Strategist, Speaker and Trainer, Who Loves Technology

 http://ht.ly/2UXer

 

Social Media Virality: Why Do People Retweet?

This post is a preview of some of the content in tomorrow's webinar, Virality: How to Catch It, with special guests Jay Baer and Tom Webster. Sign up now!
Want to get more retweets? We’ve found the key: Start tweeting about sports.
In a recent study I conducted on the social activity of Argyle's customer base, 21 of our 50 most retweeted accounts were sports-focused. For comparison, no other category had more than three accounts in the top 50. The most retweeted post in Argyle history was from an LA Lakers community site: "Steve Nash, Kobe Bryant, Ron Ron, Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard. That's not a bad starting five." (Hard to disagree.)
Why do accounts that post about sports get such high retweet rates? Should we really all just start tweeting about sports, or are there deeper factors at work?
Before diving into that, let me just take a moment to satisfy the budding statisticians in the audience. I'm defining the "retweet rate" of a given post as the number of retweets it got divided by the number of followers that the account has. So, if an account with 10,000 followers posts something clever and gets 100 retweets, that's a retweet rate of 100 / 10,000, or 1%.
The retweet rate for an account, then, is just the average of the retweet rates of all of its posts. And based on the data we've collected, a "typical" account has a retweet rate of .1%. So for every 1,000 followers the account has, a post receives, on average, about one retweet.
Back to the original question: what's with all these sports-related retweets? To get to the bottom of this question, we have to understand why people retweet.

Why do people retweet a post?

Many community managers make the incorrect assumption that people retweet content because they like said content. This is false. People click links that they think will be interesting. They favorite posts that they find particularly notable. But they retweet content they think will resonate with their followers.
A retweet is like retelling someone else’s joke. Sure, you found the joke funny when you heard it the first time. But you're retelling it to someone new because you think they will find it funny.

When someone retweets you, they are telling their followers "Hey! You might like this!" And that begs the question: Who are your followers' followers? And do they care about your content?

Consider Your Followers' Followers

Sometimes there's a natural overlap between your followers and your followers' followers. For instance, if you really love Breaking Bad and you follow @BreakingBad_AMC, it's likely that a healthy number of your followers also watch the show. Therefore, content posted by the community managers running @BreakingBad_AMC have a very receptive group of followers' followers.
Now consider that you're the community manager for a company that makes accounting software. Your customers all have one thing in common--they're all accountants. But who follows accountants? (Yes, you're allowed to chuckle at that.) The answer is actually really simple: all kinds of people follow accountants. Their wives, kids, neighbors, friends, coworkers and golf buddies.
Get where I'm going with this? Most of their followers aren't accountants. So if you're the aforementioned accounting software's community manager, tweeting a torrid stream of accounting-related content simply won't get retweeted. You may be incredibly successful at generating clicks and favorites, but retweets will be few and far between.
Use the tried-and-true cocktail party analogy. If you were at a cocktail party and you met an accountant, the last thing he would want to talk about would be work. He'd be worried that your eyes would glaze over and you'd immediately look for a way out of the conversation. In social media, the unfollow button is incredibly close at hand at all times, so that accountant is much more likely to start a conversation about Breaking Bad, both in real life and on Twitter.
(@BreakingBad_AMC isn't an Argyle customer, so I can't run an easy report on their all-time retweet rate. But after eyeballing some of their most recent posts they're getting a retweet rate five to ten times higher than an "average" account. Hardly surprising.)

So what do I do if I sell B2B accounting software?

Many community managers will be in a similar predicament as the aforementioned accounting software community manager. So what do you do if your followers' followers don't care about your content? Some suggestions:

• Identify commonalities in your followers' followers. Many of Argyle's followers' followers are 25-40 years old, putting them solidly in the group of people who remember the 90s fondly. On a recent Friday, we created a campaign around the hashtag #90sSentence asking people what their favorite 90s-themed sentence was. These posts got a ton of retweets.
• Participate in targeted hashtag conversations. The goal of a retweet is to amplify your message, but it's not the only way to achieve this. If you regularly participate in a targeted community formed around a hashtag, your message will be seen by exactly the people you care about. Amplification achieved.
• Optimize for different metrics. While retweets are a powerful tool for some brands, it's totally valid for you to optimize your efforts for metrics such as mentions, favorites and clicks while discarding retweets as an important KPI. There's nothing wrong with admitting you're not the LA Lakers.

http://socialmediatoday.com/tristanhandy/868616/social-media-virality-why-do-people-retweet  

برنامج "أجرأ الكلام" أحمد أبو بركه وثروت الخرباوى