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Khazen Blog
Khazen Blog
Written by Malek
Saturday, 31 August 2013 02:12
By JAY CHESHES NYTimes traveler - I was finishing an aperitif on the porch at Villa Clara while other guests tossed pétanque balls in the nearby yard. The hotel’s 4-year-old namesake cozied up to her papa, showing off her latest crayon creation. “Oh, c’est magnifique,” said Olivier Gougeon, a French chef and an owner of the property with his wife, Marie-Hélène, an editor of a French-language home décor magazine. The tiny boutique hotel, its restaurant and guest rooms stocked with Parisian antiques, opened last year around the corner from an Asterix chicken shack and across the street from its neighborhood boucherie. But this was not Marseille or Lyon, it was the eastern edge of Beirut.
“A Frenchman can easily live in Beirut without feeling displaced,” said Mr. Gougeon, who moved to the Lebanese capital from Paris in 1999, as he sipped local wine in Villa Clara’s leafy backyard after cooking a dinner of crispy-skinned duck confit and old-fashioned île flottante. For more than a century, through all manner of turmoil, including a 15-year civil war and, more recently, ongoing conflict in neighboring Syria, a distinctly French character has pervaded the city. Much of it is the legacy of the French colonial period — the mandate that lasted from 1920 to 1943 — but a cultural kinship goes back much further than that.
Written by Malek
Friday, 30 August 2013 22:45
The Internet is a decentralized global network, designed to be resilient and hard to take down. But it's still possible to black out a certain area, or even an entire country, disconnecting it from the rest of the world. That's what happened in Egypt in 2011 and three times in Syria in just the last year. Were these waves of blackouts the result of technical failures? Or does Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime have stronghold over the country's Internet access? Most likely yes, according to experts. "This is only possible if the government has complete control over the telecommunications infrastructure," said John Shier, of the security firm Sophos. Even if Syria doesn't have complete control, it has a stranglehold over the network's single point of failure: the state-controlled Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE), which maintains "the primary flow of Internet traffic in and out of the country," according to David Belson, the editor of network security firm Akamai's State of the Internet quarterly report.
Written by Malek
Saturday, 17 August 2013 14:09
In Lebanon there is one gunshot a year that isn’t part of a scene of routine violence: The opening sound of the Beirut International Marathon. In a moving talk, marathon founder May El-Khalil explains why she believed a 26.2-mile running event could bring together a country divided for decades by politics and religion, even if for one day a year.
Why you should listen to her:The beautiful city of Beirut, Lebanon, has seen its share of tragedy, as a seat of Lebanon's long-running civil war (1975-1990) and the Israeli-Lebanese conflict that came to a head in 2006. But in 2003, May El-Khalil, a local sports official, decided: It's time to start a marathon, open to all, as an antidote to sectarianism. And despite ongoing political and security pressure, the Beirut Marathon, now entering its 11th year, has become not only the largest running event in the Middle East but a powerful force for peace. El-Khalil was inspired to start the marathon after a personal tragedy: a near-fatal running accident. Doctors told her she would never run again. She was hospitalized for two years and had to undergo a long series of surgeries. But the resolve from this personal struggle created an event that, each year, draws runners and fans from opposing political and religious communities in a symbolic act of peace. Case in point: In 2012, on a rainy and windy November day, more than 33,000 runners turned out. Other countries around the region are now thinking of replicating this model.
Written by Malek
Friday, 16 August 2013 21:02
The concept of Big Data applies to nearly every business sector, from retail and healthcare to sports and politicsThe solution use Business analytics! http://cxounplugged.com/2013/07/big-data-analytics-sap-hana/
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