23 pirates captured by Indian Navy

By Eliana Maakaroun

The Indian Navy has announced that 23 pirates were captured, as they were attempting to board on an Ethiopian vessel in the Gulf region of Aden.

The pirates, who were separated in two boats, cornered the Ethiopian vessel, and fired on it. Later that day, the pirates released a Greek chemical tanker, which was in their possession since last October.

It was also announced that the detainees were of Somalian and Yemenite origin, and that they had ordered the vessel to stop. The Ethiopian MV Gibe was thanked for giving a thumbs up to the Indians, who were able to catch the pirates before any damaged was caused.

Greece in calm (Background Riots in Greece)

After a whole week of demonstrations and conflict by the death of Alexis Grigoropulos, 15, who was shot by a police, the Greek capital lived a Sunday in calm. However, schools students and universities met in their schools and faculties to decide their next actions, according to AP.

In the eve hundreds of inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Exarchia met around the place where were shot Grigoropoulos, carrying flowers and candles to yield homage to the adolescent.  Also, in Tesalónica, the second city of Greece, a hundred young people distributed pamphlets in which they question the actions of the police.

The calm on Sunday contrasted with the clashes that lived  themselves on Saturday and that they culminated in the early morning, after young masked men launched molotov cocktails against a commissioner of the neighbourhood of Exarchia

The police responded with tear gas to scatter the demonstrators that remained in the streets close to the precinct. 

Greece repeated these scenes almost every day since December 6, the youths launched Molotov cocktails, they set on fire tenants of trash and they raised small barricades, disarmed quickly by the police.  Also they were attacked with Molotov cocktails two branch offices of the National Bank of Greece (BNG), an agency of Eurobank and an office of the department of Environment and of Public Works, in the neighborhood of Patission.   

The police delivered a balance of 86 persons under arrest during the incidents on Saturday.  According to a poll published this Sunday by the Greek newspaper Kathimérini, a 60% of them consulted believe that Greece is living “a popular lifting” and a 69% esteem that the government of the conservative Coasts Caramanlis has not known to handle the crisis

Shut up! (Background:Venezuelan President renews election ambition)

“Why don’t you shut up!” those were the words that Spain´s King Juan Carlos  told to Venezuela president Hugo Chavez during Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile.

 More than 20 Spanish speaking countries  from Latinamerica and Europe have a meeting every year to analyze economic, political and social issues among their nations.

During last day of Ibero-American summit 2008, the Spanish King asked in an inappropriate way to Chávez to shut up to permit that the president of the Spanish government, José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, finished it a participation in which he requested respect for his predecessor, José María Aznar, to whom Chavez qualified as fascist.

According to El País, spanish newspaper, President Chavez assured that the King practices “five hundred years of high-arrogance” and also he said in a press conference in Venezuela that, “the king will be a king, but me he cannot make me shut up”. Nevertheless, he reiterated that does not want that the incident “become a crisis” with Spain.

 What does Fidel Castro have to say over it?

The ex Cuban president Fidel Castro who has presented serious problems of health qualified the incident on Chile as “Waterloo ideological” and nodded that the impasse among of the two leaders “will pass to the history of our America day of the truth”, according to Granma, Cuban official newspaper.

Since Chavez was elected, Fidel Castro has support him and both have demonstrated a personal “communist revolution” commitment with.

According to the BBC, Castro referring to his ally Chavez said that he fear for Chavez life after Summit incident not ordered by any member of Spanish government but from American empire.

 Shut up hit

 Why don´t you shut up? It is the most common phrase on radio and TV programmes across Spain and Venezuela after the dispute.  Nearly 500,000 people just in Spain have downloaded on Internet the insult generating a reported of 1.5m euros. Ringtone, t-shirt and branded mugs with the phrase are profitable.

 Some Reactions

Venezuela´s opposition gleefully portrayed the encounter as a humillation. Whereas others think the King crossed the line and lost his temper.

 On the other hand, Spanish newspaper celebrated the insult. “The king fulfilled his role, given that the Venezuelan president crossed the line,” said El Pais.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WEBSITE CRITIQUE: ELPAÍS.COM

El País on-line frontpage

El Pais is the most successful print newspaper in Spain. With almost half million daily readers, is one of the most important newspapers in Spanish language.

Surprisingly its website is not as well recognized as the newspaper, and despite they have evolved positively during the last years, they still got a big job to do.

El Pais has been in Internet since middle 90’s, being the second newspaper in Spain on being in the net. In these early years writing for the web still didn’t exist. So the technique was uploading to Internet the same texts of the print version.

In 2002 they chose the payment system as the only way to get through the web. But it didn’t work. Meanwhile, El Mundo –first El Pais competitor- worked hard on its on-line version and achieved the leadership of the on-line market.

Since 2005, El Pais.com became free again. During this almost four years, they have tried to conquer the net market, but still haven’t beat El Mundo.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The first thought that comes to the mind of the surfer when entering on El Pais website is that you are visiting an Internet version of a newspaper. And, in fact, that’s what it is.

Therefore, the front-page is like the newspaper one, but it’s being updated constantly.

The big mistake of it is that they don’t follow Jakob Nielsen rules. They use a three-column formula with videos and pictures on some of the news stories.

The news in the front-page doesn’t follow a particular rule, but it can be deduced that it’s a mixture of importance, immediateness, and catchy-stories.

It seems a serious and professional website but still too trapped to the print style. For example; to find the “Current affairs in videos” section, you need to scroll down until the end of the site. And videos are probably the most important part of a Internet news website.

Another good characteristic is that there’s not too many publicity, and normaly it doesn’t distract from the news text or multimedia story.

SUB-SECTIONS

The sub-sections in the site are clear but still with a very print media style. Sections are divided in two different menus: one for different aspects of the news –international, national, economics, sports…- and the other is for web navigation: photos, videos, audios, most popular news, in-depth stories, archive…

It has good sub-section menus, and you can find everything at one click.

WRITING

Boring story

The texts are obviously professional, but they don’t follow Jakob Nielsen writing rules. Some of the texts are the same of the print ones, and it doesn’t work on-line. Sometimes are too long, or they aren’t web-friendly.

Despite they have a newsroom exclusively for the website, they upload some of the print version stories, because there must be a connexion between both editions. But the big mistake is that the reporters don’t transform these texts into web-friendly style.

Sometimes the screen is full of text and it’s very tiring to keep reading. The truth is that the most successful stories are those that have multimedia options on them and the text is short –no too more than the whole screen.

CONTENT

El Pais cares about international and national (Spain) affairs rather than other topics. However, they are very well considered for their culture and technology section. In general is one of the best newspapers in the Spanish language, if not the best.

But, again, on-line their weak point is the multimedia options. Sometimes will be much better with more audio or video clips.

NAVIGATION

Surfering through the site is pretty easy as everything is well linked and clear. The navigation would be better with bigger menus and with a more dynamic design.

Links & Blogs

CONCLUSION

Elpais.com needs to improve very seriously their multimedia options, increase the web-friendly appearance of their texts, and make the front page less saturate.

Having such a good reputation, sales and professionals with them, it’s a shame that the website version of El Pais, haven’t worked harder to achieve the leadership.

They still need to progress and increase the Jakob Nielsen rules.

The Truth About Nanjing(Background piece)

The film, named The Truth About Nanjing, insists that the Nanjing massacre has never took place.

Tokyo’s rightwing governor, Shintaro Ishihara has come out in support of the film, directed by Satoru Mizushima, who heads a nationalist satellite TV channel, according to the Timesonline.

“If we remain silent, anti-Japanese propaganda will spread across the world,” Mr Mizushima told Times. “What is important is to correct the historical record and send the right message.”

Who tell lies

The truth is most people have accepted the view of most Western and many Japanese historians that the Imperial forces killed tens of thousands of civilians in the city of Nanjing in 1937.

But now Japanese nationalists are uniting to insist the fact — that the massacre was a vicious lie fabricated by Chinese government.

Japan began its invasion of eastern China in the summer of 1937, and on December 13 the city Nanjing fell.

The Encyclopaedia of Japan by the Japanese publisher Kodansha said after the fall of Nanjing “The Japanese Army began a wholesale murder of Chinese men on the pretext that they were Chinese soldiers trying to escape in civilian clothes.”

State of denial (Source:Timesonline)

• Between seven and ten million died in the 1932-33 Holodomor (hunger and plague) in Ukraine. Russia denies the claims that the tragedy was a result of Stalin’s policies.
• From 1941 to 1945, because of the Fascist Croatian Government persecution, between 300,000 and 500,000 died, mainly Serbs. Many in Croatia, including the late Franjo Tudjman, the former President, questioned the numbers
• In the Srebrenica massacre 8,000 Bosnian Muslims are believed to have died at the hands of Bosnian Serb troops. But some Serbs have disputed that.

Click here to see the news story

Web Critique- The Statesman- Sunil Kumar

The Statesman Screenshot

By Sunil Kumar

The Statesman is one of the oldest newspapers in India. It is published simultaneously in Calcutta, New Delhi, Siliguri and Bhubaneshwar.

The website aims to provide news for people in Eastern and North-East India. A target demographic would largely be people from East India and the Indian diaspora.

Analysis of the site is going to be on the following four aspects:
• First Impressions
• Writing
• Content
• Navigation

First Impressions:
According to Jessett.com, in terms of web usability, colour should not be used as the only visual clue. Underlining and links should be visible on the website.

The Statesman site is sans any engaging colour scheme. There are no links and underlining in any of the articles.

Jakob Nielsen’s rules add that the banner masthead should be in the extreme left hand corner. On the Statesman website, this is centred.

The Statesman website has a search engine directly below the masthead which gives an option to search within the site and advanced search within the World Wide Web. This is a useful feature.

Some Web 2.0 essentials like video and multimedia are absent in the site.

The left hand portion of the website has eight sub-sections under the “News” head which in my opinion are not an adequate mix.

SUB-SECTIONS:

16 sections under magazine are a wee bit too many. There are no sub-sections and no sub-navigation visible. Also, the font is too small and not easily accessible. Three banners under World Focus, “8th Day”, “Subscription” and “Asia News Network” are not aesthetically appealing. The purpose of these banners is unclear.

There are no columns and efficient sub-division visible on the website.

According to my colleagues, there is too much whitespace visible on the site, wasted space and the font is too small.

WRITING:

Comparing this to the BBC as a benchmark, there is no introduction to the website, headlines are consistent but devoid of colour, and there is no lead and introduction to any article, content is not consistent and visually poor. There are no descriptive subheads.

A majority of my colleagues in the class mentioned that the columns should be narrow, font should be web-friendly and added that there is no paragraph spacing.

Positives in Writing:
• Some of the written pieces are informative and critical.

According to Jakob Nielsen’s rules, the writing does not follow the F-Plan.There was a consensus among colleagues/classmates that there was a lot of wasted space and indigestible reading i.e extremely dense.

A standard Web 2.0 mantra is social bookmarking visible on ‘Guardian’ and the ‘BBC’ and several other websites. Also there is space for feedback i.e comments on most sites.

Most popular stories are usually listed in many websites as a measure of gauging public interest. There is nothing of this sort on the website.

Grammatical glitches are evident as there is no consistent punctuation anywhere on the site.
Adequate statistics are not visible in many of the stories. There are no hyperlinks visible anywhere and many articles begin with value judgements instead of the standard “inverted pyramid” route.

CONTENT:

The Webby Award for best copywriting goes to www.wired.com, a leading technology website. In content, each article has adequate links and probably loads of tags on the backend.

There are no links visible in any article to any site and there are no RSS feeds highlighted prominently such as in the top left hand corner.

Also websites like

www.howstuffworks.com

, Webby winner have adequate navigation and drop-downs with a lot of video.

In comparison, the content in this site is staid and static with no regular updates.

The unique selling points of the website can be enumerated as follows:
• An old establishment newspaper in Eastern India
• Banner ads on website( three jarring ones)
• A few photographs

Compared to the best sites on the web however, this pales in comparison.
Most websites listed in the Webbies have navigation and content management light-years ahead of www.thestatesman.net.

Jakob Nielsen also makes a point that consistent use of English (American or British) is necessary for any website to succeed. This is not visible in the ‘Statesman’ website.

NAVIGATION:

The navigation is not easy to use and is partially consistent. There is no sub-navigation.

The Webby Award for best navigation goes to www.ted.com (Technology, Entertainment & Design). Themes and interface and navigation change in www.ted.com according to specific topic for instance, technology, entertainment or design.

Now if this is considered as a benchmark, then the navigation in the ‘Statesman’ falls short as it is not interactive, the navigation is just a single-click taking you to the required subsection which is bland and has no text and multimedia/video.

Sports Section - Opening Screenshot

A better comparison would be to compare it with NDTV.com, a major Indian news organization which is far better in terms of layout and navigation and usability. It is visually more appealing and rich.

It has a RSS feed so that newsbots and global RSS feedreaders can pick the requisite news up for their inboxes.

The Statesman site is not web-savvy in that respect, it does not have any video or RSS feeds. Also the NDTV.com site is well laid out.

In the Statesman site, there is an emphasis on ads, but they are not aligned properly in the right places.
One can understand an emphasis on economics, but it should be properly positioned.

UNPLUGGED SECTION :

Unplugged section is also short on any visuals and video, probably lacking in any visuals. There are no RSS feeds. Formatting is inconsistent. Fonts used are not aesthetically attractive. Jakob Nielsen adds that in terms of web design, interaction design i.e. navigation support, homepage layout, templates, search etc. are important.

Also in terms of search, indexing information, listing and sorting and retrieving information by keywords/tags/attributes is essential.

In plain SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) basic terms, this is not present on the Statesman website.

In a BBC article, Nielsen adds that most users want instant salvation on the web i.e they want to get in and get out. So they want pages that are useful and provide instant information.

As the navigation in this site is not very user-friendly and easily accessible compared to the best on the web and as per Nielsen’s rules, the site falls short on both counts.

Links open in a mini-window, with two ads at the bottom.

Web pages do not have adequate text with links in every window.

Opening Screenshot- Statesman-Career&Campus

The extreme right hand corner of the website has the login and password details with three banner ads below that are not easily accessible.

Conclusions

The Statesman site needs a drastic upheaval in order to become more Web 2.0 compliant.

More tags and links in text

More web-friendly interface and navigation

Proper alignment on the website

More scannable text

The Japanese flag in the Nanjing Massacre collected

A Japanese flag that was used when their troops marched into Nanjing in 1937 has been exhibited for the first time in the Nanjing Massacre victim monument.

This is the first flag collected from the troop of Iwane Matsui who was the general of the Japanese Imperial Army and the commander of the expeditionary forces.

He was sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for

Japanese flag (public domain under jurisdiction of the Government of Japan)

being responsible for the Nanjing Massacre.

His troop committed numerous atrocities in Nanjing. The flag was donated by a Japanese friend.

Evidence of atrocities

According to the record on the flag, it was used on 17th of December, 1937 when the motorcade of Matsui troop whirred by after the fall of Nanjing.

The flag belonged to the corporal in the No.58 vehicle according to the record on the flag.

The information on the flag is consistent with the particular person -Iwane Matsui, the particular time- the day Nanjing fell and particular event- Nanjing massacre, the researcher Sun zaiwei in the history institution in the Academy of Social Sciences told the Xin Hua news agency.

He said this flag is the important evidence of Japanese atrocities and has much value as historical records.

Besides the flag, there are other valuable exhibitions, such as refugee card issued by world red cross in 1938 and fugitive diary written by a citizen.

Mourners pray for peace

Besides the exhibition, monks and Buddhists from China and Japan held a religious ceremony to lament the massacre victims at the square in front of the monument.

More than 5,000 mourners, including students, massacre survivors, local people and Japanese friends stand in silent tribute at the same square.

A peace statement named “building a peaceful and harmonious world” is read out at the gathering.

She Ziqing, a 76-year-old massacre survivor said to the Xin Hua news agency, “I miss my mother who was killed by the Japanese 71 years ago I wish my mother and all the victims peace and rest”.

Click here to learn the background

Jennifer Aniston: Playing by heart

After her much publicized break up with Hollywood heart throb Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston is finally in control of her life and her acting career.

The Southern California girl is finally “ at peace in my mind and with my body.”, she tells the GQ magazine.  

City Love

Usually tight lipped about her personal life, actress Jennifer Aniston is full of praise for her new man,John Mayer.

The couple were first spotted in May 2008 by the pool at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Miami, Florida.

While they tried to keep their secret rendezvous private, it was hard for them to dodge the intrusive paparazzi’s. 

The couple then split up in August 2008 because of lack of chemistry.

American musician and notorious ladies man, John Mayer stated,”I ended a relationship to be alone, because I didn’t want to waste someone’s time.” reported the LA times.

However, it seems that Jennifer Aniston’s ‘wow’ factor has not been completely lost on John.

The couple rekindled their romance on the eve of his 31st birthday in October.

According to OK magazine, the ‘gravity’ singer begged Aniston for a second chance but this time, she is keeping him on his toes.

Girl, Uninterrupted

Jennifer Aniston’s new found confidence has made her a lot more comfortable with her life.

She was recently quoted by the Vogue magazine saying, “What Angelina did was very uncool.”

This comment was made in retaliation to Angelina Jolie’s confession that she fell in love with Brad on the sets of Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

At that time, Brad Pitt was still married to Jennifer Aniston.

Therefore, Jolie’s comment in the New York Times made it obvious that they fell in love while he was still attached.

A mighty heart

The post- Brad Aniston is the world’s most hyped tabloid celebrity at the moment.

One reason for this is the fact that millions of fans who read about her divorce were moved by her loss and her state of self pity.

 Another reason is that she took two years off work to find love.

Since her divorce came through in 2005, her every ‘fling’ has been described in detail by tabloids all over the world.

After years of keeping quiet and maintain resilience in public, the Derailed star is finally learning to let go of her old grudges.

Jennifer Aniston has finally wizened up and is ready to further her film career as well as her love life.