The World We Live In !!

Recently, I started using an old family friend as a travel agent. Before then, we’d never had occasion to email one another. From the start, I was shocked to find that she regularly wrote her emails exclusively in all uppercase letters. I politely mentioned that using all caps in an email is the equivalent of screaming in voice conversations and she said she appreciated the tip. Still, I couldn’t help wondering how a professional could get by today without mastering one of the most basic tenets of email manners.

And that’s not the only email etiquette breach that makes me scratch my head. Every time I have to scroll through 50 email addresses before reading a message from a colleague who used the cc rather than bcc function, I find myself wishing that some kind of licensing or training were required before people were allowed to get on email.

Since that’s never going to happen, here are a few ways to ensure that your email style makes you look as smart as possible and doesn’t annoy those on the receiving end of your messages.

• by Marci Alboher, Working the New Economy, on Sun Jun 28, 2009 7:22pm PDT

How to improve your email etiquette – Manage Your Life on Shine.

News corporation uses photo from pro-Ahmadinejad rally, claims it represents anti-government protest

The BBC has again been caught engaging in mass public deception by using photographs of pro-Ahmadinejad rallies in Iran and claiming they represent anti-government protests in favor of Hossein Mousavi.

An image used by the L.A. Times on the front page of its website Tuesday showed Iranian President Ahmadinejad waving to a crowd of supporters at a public event.

In a story covering the election protests yesterday, the BBC News website used a closer shot of the same scene, but with Ahmadinejad cut out of the frame. The caption under the photograph read, ‘Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi again defied a ban on protests’.

The BBC photograph is clearly a similar shot of the same pro-Ahmadinejad rally featured in the L.A. Times image, yet the caption erroneously claims it represents anti-Ahmadinejad protesters.

See the screenshots below (click to enlarge).

“Well I guess it sure was a popular fictional rally for Mousavi, because I later noticed while browsing the news sites a familiar picture on the BBC’s lead Iran story – it shows the same crowd, zoomed in to cut out Ahmadinejad,” a reader told the WhatReallyHappened website. “It is clearly the same protest as in the background are the same tree and odd circular building. However, the BBC managed to outdo the LA times in quality reporting – their actual comment under the photo from the huge PRO-Ahmadinejad rally reads ‘Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi again defied a ban on protests’ – a blatant lie and deliberately misleading description of what is actually occurring in Iran!”

BBC Caught In Mass Public Deception With Iran Propaganda.

We can all remember a moment when we gazed up at the sky and used our imagination to make familiar shapes out of the clouds.  In folk wisdom, seers practice aeromancy, a form of divination that involves observing atmospheric phenomena and nephomancy, the divination by studying clouds).

What we are witnessing in the Iranian situation resembles this practice, only now the clouds are made of information. This infosphere is not the same as the old chestnut, the “fog of war.” It’s more like what I call the fog-machine of war, and its analysts are performing infomancy.

People are seeing their hopes, fears, and their shadows in this data mist. One of these faith-based assertions is that more info equals more democracy. It’s not just that observers consider the anti-regime protests to be democratic, but they believe the use of social media is inherently democratic (i.e. more freedom of expression).  But we were given official notice early in Obama’s administration that cyberwar is a renewed threat, so why not take heed and understand Iran as a case of warfare? In that light, more info = more infowar; more information means more disinformation.  Propaganda used to come in print form and be dropped from the skies.  Now it’s laterally spread through peer-to-peer networks, creating a bottom-up disinfosphere.

What happens then?  Info droplets get absorbed by more traditional news outlets. Cable news now functions as a mechanism that selects from a haze of unverifiable information and amplifies its choices. CNN seems to be the best example.  At least they’re upfront about it: an anchor previewed an upcoming story by saying they’d be bringing us reports “true or not.” Jack Cafferty noted that the information from Iraq was “Alive but Cloudy”. Even their original segment on Green martyr Neda opened with the disclaimer “the facts surrounding her life and death are difficult to confirm.” This didn’t stop them from replaying the garish spectacle so often that it begs comparison with the paltry coverage of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani victims of US aggression. Read more…

-The permanent anti-terror campaign launched after the 9/11 attacks in no way disturbs the terrorists in Miami. It seems that US ultra-right circles still believe those hirelings could help them in their fight against “alien” regimes in Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Nicaragua and Salvador.

-It was exactly in Miami where the cream of the CIA, the FBI, the State Department and the Cuban mafia plotted John Kennedy’s assassination. The incumbent US President Barack Obama has been more than once criticized by the Miami extremists for not implementing a hard-line policy towards Cuba. So, who could guarantee security to Mr. Obama then?

Miami, a coastal city in southeastern Florida, US, is known worldwide for its sandy beaches, high-class tourism and entertainment.

Well-off people from Latin America are striving to buy houses in Miami and join the clubs which are popular among American ‘high society’.

Miami is a kind of Latin American bridgehead in the US territories. There you may see diverse people from countries located to the south of the Rio Grande: retired businessmen, politicians who worked for the State Department (harmfully to the national interests of their countries), popular actors, singers and also drug dealers and other criminals.

In the western media, Miami is rarely mentioned as a stronghold of terror organizations. And it is clear why. There are terrorists whom FBI, CIA and other services have long cooperated with, so the authorities and the partisan media do not view them as a threat to US national security.

The permanent anti-terror campaign launched after the 9/11 attacks in no way disturbs the terrorists in Miami. It seems that US ultra-right circles still believe those hirelings could help them in their fight against “alien” regimes in Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Nicaragua and Salvador.

Secret camps for training terrorists in Miami appeared in the very first years of the CIA’s existence. Their major goal was to suppress Communist-like regimes in Latin America and the countries of the Caribbean. They successfully worked in Guatemala at the time of Jacobo Arbenz`s rule (1951-1954). In late 1940s there was a wave of attacks on Soviet diplomatic missions in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Cuba. Soviet diplomats were threatened also in Uruguay and Argentina. Those were the first years of the Cold War, and the demand was quite clear: “Soviets, get away from Latin America!” Thus Moscow had to close half of its embassies in the region. Read more…

With no recent cricketing activity of international level at home, no participation in the Indian Premier Profits League, on the back of criticism from their own chief selector and having being ruled out whatsoever to make it to the semis, Pakistan today showed the world what it is capable of. The very fact that Pakistan stamped its presence in two finals in a row in itself speaks volumes of the cricketing talent of the country. Winning one of them and losing the other by mere five runs just adds to it. The unearthing of a 17-year old rookie, who hardly had any flesh on his body, and his resounding success against the likes of Graeme Smith and Tilkaratne Dilshan in crunch games is again a feature to be found in Team Pakistan. At this time, it is also worthwhile to mention the coach Intikhab Alam who was also responsible for the team back in 1992 when the boys brought the trophy home!

Before the start of tournament, when everyone wrote off Pakistan, there was one man still claiming Pakistan to be the favourites – hats off to Wasim Akram!

To all those who think that Pakistan’s win is merely a fluke, then remember that flukes are just one-off. This is some serious progress! Beating the two favourites of the tournament in the semi final and the final can not be a fluke. Also, both wins are quite convincing!

It is a time to celebrate and thank Almighty Allah for giving the nation something to cheer about.

It is surprising to see how a nation stuck in a foreign war and isolation can come out so strong. Again, this shows the character of the people despite the junk given to us by the so-called leaders.

The Champions! – Incessant Gibbers.

“Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or mixed recreation… Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war than religion.”
Financial Times Editorial, June 15 2009

Introduction
There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.

The recently concluded, June 12, 2009 elections in Iran are a classic case: The incumbent nationalist-populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (MA) received 63.3% of the vote (or 24.5 million votes), while the leading Western-backed liberal opposition candidate Hossein Mousavi (HM) received 34.2% or (3.2 million votes).

Iran’s presidential election drew a record turnout of more than 80% of the electorate, including an unprecedented overseas vote of 234,812, in which HM won 111,792 to MA’s 78,300. The opposition led by HM did not accept their defeat and organized a series of mass demonstrations that turned violent, resulting in the burning and destruction of automobiles, banks, public building and armed confrontations with the police and other authorities. Almost the entire spectrum of Western opinion makers, including all the major electronic and print media, the major liberal, radical, libertarian and conservative web-sites, echoed the opposition’s claim of rampant election fraud. Neo-conservatives, libertarian conservatives and Trotskyites joined the Zionists in hailing the opposition protestors as the advance guard of a democratic revolution. Democrats and Republicans condemned the incumbent regime, refused to recognize the result of the vote and praised the demonstrators’ efforts to overturn the electoral outcome. The New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, the Israeli Foreign Office and the entire leadership of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations called for harsher sanctions against Iran and announced Obama’s proposed dialogue with Iran as ‘dead in the water’.

Iranian Elections: The ‘Stolen Elections’ Hoax.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter,(center) gestures as he speaks to the media at the ruins of the American International School, which was destroyed during Israel's offensive in Gaza earlier this year, in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip

GAZA CITY (AFP) – Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter on Tuesday met Hamas leader Ismail Haniya in the Gaza Strip, where he called for a lifting of Israel’s merciless blockade, saying Palestinians are being treated “like animals.”

Following the talks, Carter called for an end of “all violence” against the Palestinians.

tehran times : Carter: Palestinians treated ‘like animals’.