In Hamra? Near AUB? Can anyone confirm? RT @Psypherize: Apparently there is gunfire in ‪#Beirut‬, at the Hamra and Karakas areas. ‪#Lebanon‬

@muckrack if you want ALL followers to see a reply, start .@ username. All will see it, not just those who follow you & @ username ‪#muckedup‬

Russian President Gorbachev are false

The battle began after members of the Future Movement, the party of former Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, attacked the offices of the Arab Movement Party, which backs Mr. Assad. The affiliation of the fighters shown in the video images was not immediately clear.

The burst of violence stoked fears in the capital that the bloody and intractable 15-month conflict in Syria was spreading into the heart of Lebanon. While deadly clashes have previously erupted in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, the overnight fighting was the worst yet in Beirut to stem from the Syrian conflict.

The clashes in Beirut appeared to have been sparked by events in the north, after two anti-Syrian Sunni Muslim clerics died at a checkpoint near Tripoli after an altercation with a soldier at the checkpoint that resulted in gunfire by the soldier. After the killings, protests erupted before the violent clashes.

"The thinking behind the site is that it's about news now," Jason Mills, editor of web development for ITV News

"News is a live process, news continuously comes in and stories develop the whole time. So what we are trying to do is to tell that news in real time. People now are used to consuming content in a stream, from Twitter to Facebook timelines, and we wanted to take that concept and adapt it to all news, not just a particular story, such as Leveson."

"We have a small number of curators to the site and they are curating content, the vast majority of which comes from our correspondents, our producers in the field, and the news desks.

"The curators are then using things like Twitter to add to the telling of that story as well."

Twitter is used in a variety of ways, including adding tweets from the broadcaster's reporters. "For example, from a court case when you are trying to break the verdict, Twitter is often the best way now," Mills said.

WASHINGTON — A powerful House committee voted Thursday to cut by nearly one-third the Pentagon’s budget for “military information support operations.”

The House Defense Appropriations Committee also called on Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to submit a report within 30 days of the law’s enactment that, among other requirements, would have the Pentagon detail the effectiveness of so-called MISO programs, previously known as psychological operations.

Why her, why not another of us? All of us make snap judgements – to travel down that road – to engage with those troops – to fly on that plane, and we live. But sitting in the church this morning surrounded by some of the very best of British journalism, I felt overwhelmed by a sense of what is good about our trade. So much bad has flowed from the scandal that has gushed across Lord Leveson’s desk, in and out of assorted police stations, back pockets and the rest, that one begins to feel tarred with the same brush.

And we are not and she was not. We are the servants of the people – their eyes and ears, and what we do is of profound value to understanding the world in which we live. Amid the democratisation of information, we are the tribunes. Sometimes we fail to recognise the pivotal role we play and the responsibility that flows from it.

The UK Government should consider using 'kitemarks' awarded to defence industry companies that meet high cybersecurity standards as a part of its procurement process, shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy has said.
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Speaking to The Guardian this week, Murphy said an insistence of the highest possible security standards was now essential to head off the threat that smaller firms in the supply chain were being targeted by cybercriminals as a weak link.
"Kitemarks for those with high standards of cyber security must become a reality across the private sector," Murphy told the newspaper.

The key measure of Twitter usage is total users, total active users and total messages sent. And according to a source close to the company, these are the current Twitter usage stats:

March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

Note: It’s not clear what the 1 million total users refers to, since there are many more registered users (see comments below). It may be users who’ve left at least one message, or an active user number that is over a longer period than the weekly number (monthly, for example). Those stats have roughly doubled just since January, when Twitter had just 100,000 active weekly users. Previously it took nine months to double in size – In April 2007 the service had 50,000 active weekly users. What’s most interesting is the rabid Twitter usage by active users – they send an average of 15 Twitter message per day.

Halfway through 2011, users on Twitter are now sending 200 million Tweets per day. For context on the speed of Twitter’s growth, in January of 2009, users sent two million Tweets a day, and one year ago they posted 65 million a day.

Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)

Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We'll make time to share more information so please stay tuned.

The study – part of operational research aimed at improving our field practices – exposed important gaps in understanding among geographically and culturally diverse communities, ranging from Monrovia, Liberia to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. While most people recognize MSF’s medical nature, the project revealed that we have a ways to go to facilitate two-way communication with our beneficiaries.

One of the first struggles of figuring out how to leverage social media to improve communication with the populations receiving humanitarian aid is the basic step of knowing what platform or tool to use. It can be difficult to gauge the penetration of media – social or otherwise – in the regions where the greatest humanitarian needs exist today.

These gaps in information also pose a challenge in terms of making decisions about how much to invest in different forms of communication – whether new or old – to support programs on the ground. Practically speaking, time and resources are precious commodit

Geofeedia, a service that comes out of private beta today, aims to solve this problem by enabling location-based searches for social media content. Users can type in a place name, address, even the name of a sports venue, or they can simply outline an area on a map. The service will display the latest geotagged content — from Twitter, Instagram, Picasa, Flickr and YouTube — within that area.

“Most news happens at a location,” said Phil Harris, CEO of Geofeedia. When time is of the essence, “filtering through an unbelievable number of social media posts, it’s daunting.”

Hear about a shooting at a high school in near Cleveland? Draw a circle around the area on a map and start looking at what is being posted, pretty close to real-time. From there, you can filter by keywords and time.

I have had it, I have been pushed beyond any patience or consideration I could humanly posses for the policies and strategy in Afghanistan. I have been wanting to blog for several months that is is time time bring our troops home.

A new Facebook program provides military personnel, veterans and their families with customized resources when their content is flagged as harmful or suicidal.

It is an extension of a suicide prevention effort Facebook launched in December, which lets friends alert the social network when other users express suicidal thoughts by clicking a link next to the comment. Facebook sends an email with suicide prevention resources to the author of the comment.

“While this is helpful for a military family, there are several specific resources provided to our nation’s military that we wanted to make sure they were aware of at their time of need,” military support organization Blue Star Families, which along with the Department of Veterans Affairs partnered with Facebook for the effort, wrote in a statement.

This morning the Taliban were not able to talk their way past the gate guards so they blew their VBIED on the road at exactly the time when one would expect 200 to 300 school children to be walking by.

This is a picture from 2005 of kids waiting for their school bus on the corner of Jalalabad Road and the Green Village road. There are hundreds more children walking to schools along that road every morning now. At least one of those killed and many of the wounded today were school children.
The VBIED was followed up by three-man assault force who approached their objective wearing burkas, and started battling with the Serbs and Nepalese guards from the Green Village guard force. At some point I guess they took the burkas off; that would be weird for Taliban dudes to attack in burkas I would think. The optics would be all wrong.

Anyway, one of the three attackers blew himself up, another was gunned down and the third made it into the laundry building which is still well outside the

The UK retained its place as the world's second largest exporter of defence and security equipment in 2011, with some £8bn of equipment exported worldwide, government body UK Trade and Investment has announced.

Despite the success, defence export figures fell by some £400m year on year to around £5.4bn, and were bolstered by security exports, which rose by £600m to £2.6bn in the same period.

The UK held on to 15 per cent of the world defence market, behind only the US with 35 per cent.

The Issue of preparing for the Tenth Anniversary, and how it
will be marketed in the Media, and How to Exploit the Media in
General:

But if the display -in the next anniversary for example- of a
special type, like a special interview with Shaykh Usama or
Shaykh Ayman, and with questions chosen by the channel, and with
a good camera, we might find a channel that would accept its
broadcasting. But they would accept this time, so as to get an
exclusive press scoop: The first press interview of Shaykh Usama
or Shaykh Ayman since 10 years ago! Particularly if the Shaykh
is the one to be interviewed. This is because of the scarcity of
his appearance during the last nine years. Because of the poor
photographic quality of the last two releases –I do not know the
photo quality this time- this led those believers in conspiracy
theory to speculate if the person was the Shaykh, and you may
have seen the program (Ben Ladin, alive or dead?) that was
broadcast by Al Jazeera.

Two Canadians were among a select group of international journalists singled out by al-Qaida to receive "special media material" on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, according to declassified documents captured during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year.

Eric Margolis and Gwynne Dyer were to have been provided with a password and site address to download information provided by the terrorist group "at the right time," according to the documents, released Thursday in a report by the Combating Terrorism Centre at the United States Military Academy at West Point titled, Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?

Margolis and Dyer were among a dozen journalists named in one of the letters, including renowned British war correspondent Robert Fisk and American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. It also named journalists from Norway, Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan.

Based in Abu Dhabi, Sky News Arabia is a joint venture between BSkyB of London and Abu Dhabi Media Investment Corporation owned by Sheikh Mansur bin Zayed Al-Nahayan, a brother of UAE President Sheikh Khalifa.

Under the Coalition’s defence cuts, the Army is to be reduced from 102,000 members to 82,000. There will also be fewer units in the Army, Mr Hammond said.

“The Army is getting smaller,” Mr Hammond said. “Clearly the Army can’t get smaller by 17 per cent without losing some units. I can’t say to you that there will be no loss of battalions in the infantry as we downsize the Army. We are looking at the options in the Army and the armoured corps.”

Mr Hammond said reforms in 2005 effectively did away with many of those names as battalions were merged into larger units.

For instance, the Black Watch is now officially known as The Black Watch, 3rd Bn, the Royal Regiment of Scotland. Within the Army it is referred to as 3 Scots.
“The ancient cap badges have largely gone, they are attached in brackets to some unit names,” Mr Hammond said.
The 2005 restructuring led to a strong local opposition, including a major campaign in Scotland against the abolition of its infantry units.

Although we run these courses on a regular basis it is always rewarding for both the instructors and the participants and we are of course grateful to Crown Media our contracted support for media simulation. Many of the lessons in this area are not new but it always pays to have them reinforced for media engagements. The value of practice can never be emphasised enough no matter who you are or where you sit in the hierarchy. Equally the impact of media engagements - or engagement with key audiences through the media - needs careful consideration and understanding. And increasingly that engagement is not just happening through traditional media but also through social media and those other channels that have the ability to really resonate with the audience one is trying to reach.

In an op-ed published in Aftenposten a communication advisor, Stefan Brunvatne, who was present at the start of the trial, wrote:

"While the commentators are crawling over each other in their efforts to paint a picture of an incoherent man who is sitting there, giving us insight into evil incarnated, and 'experts' make critical comments on everything from his body language to his historical facts, Anders Behring Breivik is sitting there in the eye of the storm appearing surprisingly calm and collected.

"For someone who has been present at two of the key days during Breivik’s testimony, Friday 20 April and Monday 23 April, the shocking thing is not Breivik’s behaviour but the discrepancy between it and the monster image painted by the media."

What may be more telling is how both of these highly engaged Twitter groups — in addition to an “overall disregard for verification” — ignored traditional media, and one another. In instances when Twitter users did attempt to provide verification, it often came in the form of a link to an outside source. But rarely was that source a traditional journalistic outlet.

While Facebook has highly customizable privacy tools, giving users control over how much information apps are allowed to see, according to the study, only 37% of them have actually put this feature to use.

Consumer Reports released some interesting figures on what kinds of personal information is being shared publicly online:

39.3 million identified a family member in a profile
20.4 million included their birth date and year in their profile
7.7 million “liked” a Facebook page pertaining to a religious affiliation
4.6 million discussed their love life on their wall
2.6 million discussed their recreational use of alcohol on their wall
2.3 million “liked” a page regarding sexual orientation
While a lot of the responsibility lays firmly on the shoulders of the users, Facebook’s own responsibility cannot be ignored.

Reason for Disciplinary
Number of cases
Behaviour/Conduct
108
Bullying & Harassment
19
Fraud/ Theft
19
Gross Misconduct
3
Substance Abuse
11
Reason not recorded
51
Grand Total
211