This week's news on Diaspora.
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In memory of Farzad Kamangar, Iranian Kurdish teacher
16 Maywww.guardian.co.uk
Kamangar, a teacher in Iran's Kudistan region, was hanged in May 2010 for being "an enemy of God"
This month marks the second anniversary of the execution of a primary school teacher, who paid with his life for refusing to make televised confession about a crime he didn't commit.
Farzad Kamangar was 31 when he was detained by the security forces in July 2006 for allegedly collaborating with the Kurdish opposition groups. The government accused him of being "an enemy of god". His mother believes that her son's only crime was his 'Kurdishness' and his lawyer Khalil Bahramian maintained that "there was not a shred of evidence" against him.
Interrogators in numerous prisons where Farzad was held for four years, put him through severe physical and mental torture to break his resistance. Farzad's letters and articles about the inhumane conditions inside prison helped to bring international condemnations from many organisations including UNICEF and the Education International which represents teachers across the globe.
When the authorities realised that they could not break Farzad under torture, they decided to silence him for ever. In the early hours of the 9th May 2010, Farzad and four other prisoners were lead to the gallows. Contrary to Iranian law his lawyer and his family were not informed. Within a few minutes, his lifeless body was hanging from a noose in Evin prison in Tehran.
His death was another reminder to the Iranian people that the Islamic Republic maintains its grip on power through creating a climate of fear and disregarding its own laws.
Even in death, Farzad managed to unite the people of Iran as the Kurdish region went on strike and many mourned his death across the country and in the diaspora. Fearing more unrest, the Islamic Republic, contrary to the basic tenets of Islam, refused to hand over his body and those of his co-defendants, depriving their families of a dignified burial for their loved ones.
In his last message smuggled out of prison, Farzad wrote: "Is it possible to be a teacher where there is a drought of justice and fairness and not teach the alphabet of hope and equality?"
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Abraham’s genetic threads | Gene Expression
16 MayDiscover Magazine
Every few days my Google Alerts have been dropping in my inbox reviews of Harry Osters’ Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. The latest, is in the The Tablet, A Case for Genetic Jewishness:
For a Jewish genetics researcher, being told in print that ‘Hitler would certainly have been very pleased’ by your work can’t be pleasant. But that’s what happened in 2010 to Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, when he and his colleagues published a study showing that Jews in three different geographical areas had certain collections of genes that made them more biologically similar to one another than they were to non-Jews in the same regions. The work also showed that Jews around the world could trace their ancestry to a group of people who lived in the Middle East 2,000 years ago; that meant, however, that certain genetic signatures could be used to identify Jews, indicating that Jews share a common biological identity beyond their religious affiliation—which is what inspired the Hitler crack.
I don’t plan on reading Legacy because I already read the paper which it is based on, Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora ...
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Time to expand dialogue and partnership with Israel
16 Mayjewishjournal.com
This week, I traveled from Israel to engage in discussions with Jewish community leaders and activists in Southern California. As a proud Israeli Zionist, I work to promote the flourishing ties between Israel and Diaspora Jewry. I came here as an Israeli who celebrates the link between our proud history and a present filled with unmatched innovation and growth, the Israel of the City of David, King Solomon’s Mines and the “Start-Up Nation.” A state of pioneers and the warriors. -
South Africa: SA ready to host African Diaspora Summit
15 May7thSpace Interactive
Compiled by the Government Communication and Information System
Date: 15 May 2012
Title: SA ready to host African Diaspora Summit
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Pretoria - With less than a week to the start of the Global African Diaspora ... -
Ireland tourism drive needs Lambegs as well as leprechauns
15 MayBelfasttelegraph.co.uk
Lambegs could join leprechauns in a bid to encourage the Irish diaspora to come back home, after the deputy First Minister said he wanted anyone with Ulster Scots roots to holiday here.
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Call to expand Irish tourism drive
14 MayBelfasttelegraph.co.uk
A tourism drive to attract the Irish Diaspora back home should be expanded to encourage those with Ulster Scots roots to make the trip, Martin McGuinness has told the Assembly.
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Irish tourism drive should be expanded to Ulster Scots – Martin McGuinness
14 MayIndependent.ie
A TOURISM drive to attract the Irish Diaspora back home should be expanded to encourage those with Ulster Scots roots to make the trip, Martin McGuinness has told the Assembly.
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PayPal Gets Its Own Share Of The Yahoo Diaspora, Hires JavaScript Icon Douglas Crockford
13 MayTechCrunch Europe
The reorganizing and downsizing at Yahoo — and possibly the executive scandal at the very top of the pyramid — are leading to a wave of talent departures at the company: the latest in that story is that Douglas Crockford, a trailblazing JavaScript guru most recently at Yahoo, is joining eBay’s payment giant PayPal.
The news was announced by Bill Scott, PayPal’s senior director of UI engineering, on his own blog, yesterday. Scott himself had also worked at Yahoo years ago and joined PayPal six months ago from Netflix.
“Welcome aboard Doug! Stoked to be working with you again ,” Scott yesterday. (It was a note I first saw via HackerNews.)
The news signifies the Yahoo story coming full circle in way: Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson, currently the subject of so much scrutiny over his past experience, himself comes from PayPal and has hired other executives away from his former employer in his strategy to rebuild the struggling internet giant. (Sam Schrauger coming on board in April to lead its new consumer commerce unit is one of the latest.)
The departure is also ironic, given how Yahoo’s recovery should rest on the talent that it has working there.
Looking ahead, the hiring raises some questions of what new products and services we might expect next from PayPal — with a focus potentially in three key areas where Java is used: featurephones, Android and web interfaces.
So far there is little information on what he will be doing. “Part of a lot of changes happening at PayPal. Working hard to get the inside changes out to our customers,” Scott wrote of Crockford’s hire on Twitter earlier.
Crockford, according to Wikipedia (he doesn’t do LinkedIn, didn’t like total strangers using it to reach out to him), was most recently a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo. He has played a significant role in the development in Java-based technologies. These have included the development of JavaScript and related tools and the JSON data format, as well as Yahoo’s User Interface Library. In the past he also worked at Atari, LucasFilm and Paramount.
Update: I’ve heard back from Bill Scott with some more detail on the appointment.
Crockford is reporting to chief architect Edwin Aoki and his mission, with Scott, will be to extend PayPal’s platform activities and “make PayPal the destination for web developers/JavaScript engineers.”
He continues: ”Doug will be working on very similar tasks that he worked on at Yahoo! Specifically looking at ways to make JavaScript more secure, evangelizing JS throughout the organization, continuing his work on the ECMA committee, being the face of JS for PayPal, continuing his speaking/teaching tours around the world, etc. In addition he will be partnering with me on more ways to utilize JS both in the server and on the browser for PayPal, working with me to sharpen the skills of our engineers around the globe on all things Javascript and help me attract the top talent in the industry.” He says that PayPal is “moving rapidly” from C++ to Java as a backend technology, but also says that he cannot comment on specifics about the mobile strategy or other product decisions.
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Plea made for Gathering support
11 MayBelfasttelegraph.co.uk
A call has been made to Ireland's diaspora to come home to where the heart is.
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Video: Facebook's Diaspora
11 MayNYT - Bits
Somini Sengupta and Peter Lattman discuss the diaspora of Internet and technology entrepreneurs that Facebook has created, and how that might end up being one of the company's lasting legacies.
