1 India in panic as strife radiates (Jim Yardley and Hari Kumar in The New York Times) Like a fever, fear has spread across India this week, from big cities like Bangalore to smaller places like Mysore, a contagion fueling a message: Run. Head home. Flee. And that is what thousands of migrants from the country’s distant northeastern states are doing, jamming into train stations in an exodus challenging the Indian ideals of tolerance and diversity
What began as an isolated communal conflict here in the remote state of Assam, a vicious if obscure fight over land and power between Muslims and the indigenous Bodo tribe, has unexpectedly set off widespread panic among northeastern migrants who had moved to more prosperous cities for a piece of India’s rising affluence. A swirl of unfounded rumors, spread by text messages and social media, had warned of attacks by Muslims against northeastern migrants, prompting the panic and the exodus.
The hysteria in several of the country’s most advanced urban centers has underscored the deep roots of ethnic tensions in India, where communal conflict is usually simplified as Hindu versus Muslim, yet is often far more complex. For decades, Indian leaders have mostly managed to isolate and triangulate regional ethnic conflicts, if not always resolve them, but the public panic this week is a testament to how the old strategies may be less effective in an information age.
2 Social networks can decline fast, too (The New York Times) With battered Facebook shares closing Friday at just over half their offering price in May, no one’s talking anymore about a social media "bubble." Just a year ago, social media seemed the next big thing. With dizzying user growth at Twitter, Zynga and especially Facebook, investors were euphoric about Internet sites that connected people with shared interests and experiences, seemingly the perfect media for targeted advertising.
What went wrong? Every company has its own story, but the euphoria over social media companies as a group was rooted in what economists call the network effect. The more users a site attracts, the more others will want to use it, which creates a natural monopoly and a magnet for advertisers. The network effect is a double-edged sword, Ken Sena, a consumer Internet analyst at Evercore, said this week.
"The network effect allowed these companies to grow so fast, but the decline can be just as ferocious," Mr. Sena said. "If any of them misstep with users, they can leave, and the network effect goes into reverse." The textbook case is Myspace, once the most visited social networking site, that is now a shadow of its former self.
3 Why sex could be history (Kira Cochrane in The Guardian) Over tea at her north London home, Aarathi Prasad is talking calmly, coolly, about reproduction. But not sex. Specifically not sex. Her subject is technologies that would take intercourse out of the reproductive equation, advances that could challenge everything we know about family and the relationship between men and women. Their potential is summed up in the final paragraphs of her new book, Like a Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex.
Here she describes the "ultimate solo parent" of the future. This woman can use her own stem cells and an artificial Y chromosome to produce healthy new eggs and sperm at any age, is capable of reproducing entirely alone by making one of her eggs behave like a pseudo-sperm that can be used to fertilise herself, and has no need to carry the embryo in her own body. Instead it gestates in an artificial womb, which acts as a highly evolved incubator.
The same field of technology would enable gay couples to have children created from both their DNA, and make it just as easy for a man to become a single parent as a woman. Prasad writes that this would be "the great biological and social equaliser" before adding that the question isn't if it will happen, but when.
4 The disinformation age (Khaleej Times) We are being barraged by information from all sides; our phones, twitter accounts, mailboxes and Facebook pages constantly feed snippets of new details every second into our brains. But is being so information savvy necessarily a good thing? Late American author Michael Crichton said that we don’t live in the information age, but rather the disinformation age. And this criticism is valid — we don’t quite have a mechanism to ascertain the veracity of "facts" that come our way on the Internet.
In fact hackers are now more likely to take advantage of the flood of unfiltered information to psychologically manipulate their enemies and the public. For example, as the gory ground battle continues between Assad’s regime and Syria’s tenacious rebels, another kind of offensive has flared up in the cyber domain. During this month the Reuters blogging platform has been hacked twice by a pro-Syrian regime group. On Wednesday, there was a false blogpost on the website saying that Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Prince Saud Al Faisal had passed away. It isn’t much of a surprise that supporters of Bashar Al Assad would be involved in spreading malicious rumours about the Saudi regime, since the latter has vehemently opposed the Ba’athist government in recent months.
The developments negate the widely prevalent belief that a free flow of information would actually limit a government or a group’s ability to spread propaganda and lies. In fact, (dis)information spreads on social networking sites like a raging forest. Even remotely exciting news triggers a feverish flurry of Twitter updates and a sea of blog posts. So before hastily shooting out a tweet about some news you just read, take a moment to judge its truthfulness. And remember: Seeing is believing, as the age-old saying goes, but googling definitely is not.
5 Shooting deaths stun South Africa (San Francisco Chronicle) President Jacob Zuma announced an official inquiry into a police shooting of striking miners that left 34 dead and 78 wounded, an incident that police claimed was self-defense despite video recordings suggesting the protesters were not attacking them but running from clouds of tear gas.Wives of miners at the Lonmin platinum mine northwest of Johannesburg searched for loved ones missing from Thursday's shooting and staged a protest, demanding to know why officers fired automatic rifles, pistols and shotguns at the strikers, many of whom had been armed with spears, machetes and clubs.
"Police stop shooting our husbands and sons," read a banner carried by the women on Friday. They kneeled before shotgun-toting police and sang a protest song, saying "What have we done?" in the Xhosa language. At least 10 other people have been killed during the week-old strike, including two police officers battered to death by strikers and two mine security guards burned alive when strikers set their vehicle ablaze. Tensions remained high Friday among strikers, who are demanding monthly salary raises from $625 to $1,563.
6 Four most annoying India Inc phrases (The Wall Street Journal) a. Negative profit: Seriously? Seriously. Clearly, some business chiefs just cannot bring themselves to use the word "loss" to describe their company’s results. b. 200 years of experience: You have 20 people at your investment bank who each have 10 years of experience. That does Not mean that your team has 200 years of experience, as executives often like to tell us in interviews. That would be accurate only if someone in the team was around in 1812. c. Investment hygiene: We have no clue what that means, but it sure sounds sophisticated, raising the specter of some sort of contamination. Money managers or human-resources managers often use the phrase "those are just hygiene issues" in circumstances when they are clearly not referring to cleanliness. d. Right-sizing: Talk about euphemisms. When was the last time a company "right-sized" their staff by adding to it? When you’re letting go of people just acknowledge that’s what you’re doing.
Get the picture?
1 Stories from different Pakistan cities in today's Dawn: Woman killed over land dispute (Islamabad), Young man killed in sectarian attack (Karachi), HRCP raps shia killings, seeks arrest of culprits (Lahore) and, Eight militants killed in Orakzai gunfight (Peshawar).
2 Stories from The Wall Street Journal on India: Coal scandal, airport scandal, growth forecast cut, Bangalore exodus.
Get the general picture about the two countries, both celebrating their birthdays this week?
Wish you a safe weekend.
Joe
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