SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – The leader of a Kurdish armed group imprisoned by Turkey is set to call for a long-sought ceasefire next month as part of a renewed push for peace with the Turkish government, according to officials.

Abdullah Ocalan, head of the PKK, is currently serving a life sentence on an island prison off Istanbul where visitors are seldom allowed and only under the surveillance of Turkish agents.

"[The PKK] will declare at the very least a ceasefire by Newroz [March 21, the Kurdish New Year] and lay down arms by July-August, after which departure from the country will be discussed," Bulent Arinc, Turkey's deputy prime minister, said in an interview on Turkish TV on Monday.

Arinc was quoting a 20-page letter written by Ocalan, which outlined his views on a possible solution for the nearly three-decade-long conflict between the PKK and Turkish security forces that has cost 45,000 lives, mostly Kurdish.

Turkey's secret services resumed negotiations with Ocalan in December with the ultimate aim of ending the PKK's fight for autonomy.

Ocalan's letter was addressed to PKK members and the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), according to Nazmi Gur, a BDP legislator.

'Draft solution'

Gur told AFP news agency that Ocalan was proposing a "draft solution" in the letter and there would be more discussion and feedback before reaching a final decision.

"We, all components of the Kurdish movement, will be standing behind that final decision Ocalan will give on that day," Gur said referring to March 21.

Both sides in the conflict have set out conditions they say would signal good faith and commitment to long-lasting peace.

PKK is asking for the release of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Kurdish activists and politicians kept in detention on charges of links to the group.

Turkey in return insists "terrorists" need to withdraw from Turkish territory before the peace process can effectively begin, and has promised not to attack rebels wishing to leave the country.-www.shfaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – A startup from Germany called ubitricity is attempting to make electric car charging ubiquitous with a mobile electric meter that drivers can carry around in their trunk. The company is making its first thousand plugs available this year.

The expansion of electric cars has been anything but spectacular, and a major constraint has been a lack of charging infrastructure and “range anxiety” getting the better of consumers. Late last year luxury electric sports car manufacturer Tesla began tackling at least that perception with solar powered charging stations where Tesla drivers can charge for free.

Berlin-based ubitricity is trying to tackle the problem of increasing charging options for electric cars in a different way altogether. The company wants to do away with what it says are bulky and expensive charging stations, and replace them with a mobile electricity meter that will stay in the trunk of your electric car, and allow you to charge at ubitricity sockets, whether they be at your home, your office or at the mall.

The advantage that ubitricity claims is that the sockets themselves can be provided at a fraction of the cost of a conventional charging station and its business model is to subsidize the price of a socket, making it competitive with the price of a standard power plug installed in a garage or at a parking place. The company says that it will be able to do this because the intelligence will be in the meter that stays with the car.

If you plug in at home and at work, that’s two sites,” ubitricity CEO and co-founder Knut Hechtfischer, told us during an interview recently. “So why should you install the full intelligence on two sites instead of bringing it with you?” He explained the benefits as: “It saves half of the intelligence, half of the respective costs and half of the operation costs.”

Charging like cell phone billing

To charge a car using the ubitricity system, a standard charging plug is plugged into a white ubitricity socket, which is about the size of a large brick. The mobile meter, which is attached to the charging cable, tells the plug to close the circuit and allow charging, and the meter keeps track of how much electricity is used. Once charging is complete, it sends the total back to ubitricity, via a cellular connection. Ubitricity then passes the info onto the relevant utility.

The system works very much like cell phone infrastructure and billing. The customer has a billing account with an electric utility and ubitricity simply keeps track of the data regarding electricity usage between the grid operator and the utility. Ubitricity then charges a surcharge for each transaction of about €0.10 for the service.

The density of the network will be key to the success of ubitricity’s model and CEO Hechtfischer says that the cost advantage over charging stations will be crucial in attracting organizations and businesses to install ubitricity plugs, rather than more expensive electric car charging stations.

“We think that it is very unlikely that municipalities, which means the taxpayer, will invest in that type of equipment,” said Hechtfischer. He says that there’s not a clear business case for how electric vehicle charging stations can make a profit at this point, and points to European utility RWE which has reported that the utilization rates of the few charging stations they have installed in Germany are very low — especially when compared to the high cost of installation and maintenance.

Designing an electric car mobile meter

The ubitricity hardware itself is nothing out of the ordinary and the startup has been cognizant of keeping to existing standards when working with naturally conservative utilities and the automotive industry. The startup has worked with the German equivalent of the U.S. National Institute for Standardization in Technology to ensure this and has received a German federal government grant to do so.

The socket itself is standard, with power, voltage, a fuse, RCD, with the add-on being access management, to communicate with the meter to authorize charging. The meter itself is a fairly standard smart meter, with a mobile communication gateway, to allow access to the utility backend system. If the mobile network is temporarily unavailable at the end of the charge, then the data is stored for later transmission.

One patent for the technology has been granted and there are others pending. In terms of European competitors, there is activity in mobile metering in Sweden. An ongoing research project at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg is working on this technology and Ericsson has collaborated with both a local utility and Volvo on its Elviis project. The Elviis project also places the communications and meter in the car and not the charging station.

Shifting electricity use

The smart grid was actually the original starting point for ubitricity, back in 2007. Founders Hechtfischer and Frank Pawlitschek were interesting in exploring what role electric cars could play in the smart grid with renewable energy. One consequence of the billing model that has emerged is that consumers are able to remain with utilities that they trust, and favor those that sell electricity from renewable sources if they chose to do so.

For households with rooftop solar panels, they can even access the electrons converted on their roof at remote locations, so virtually. “You will be able to get your PV electricity out of the socket at your employer’s site,” said Hechtfischer.

Startup status

Ubitricity closed a series A round of VC financing in 2010 and hopes to close a B round in the first six months of 2013. It has evaluation pilot projects with a number of European utilities and it’s exploring data implications with an unnamed U.S. Internet player. It hopes to have 1,000 sockets installed by the end of the year.

At present ubitricity has the hardware manufactured locally, but in October 2012 announced a partnership with TE Connectivity to mass-produce the components.

Fabienne Herlaut, the Managing Partner of the French corporate VC Ecomobilité Ventures learned about ubitricity at a recent Cleantech event in Düsseldorf. She told GigaOM that she thinks it is likely investors will be interested in the technology-based solution. “When you see a solution like ubitricity, which is technology driven, then I think it is very attractive for an investor because it is not only based on the number of users you will have,” said Herlaut.

Whether ubitricity can succeed in getting the density of sockets needed to spell out the utility of its service to consumers will be demonstrated this year.-www.shfaqna.com/English

Source: Gigaom

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – An Iranian lawmaker has warned that Saudi Arabia’s plan to demolish Masjid al-Nabawi [the Prophet Mohammad’s (PBUH) Mosque] is part of a US and Israeli scenario.

In a Monday interview, Seyyed Nasser Mousavi Largani pointed to the plans by the Wahhabis and Al Saud regime to bulldoze three of the world’s oldest mosques around Masjid al-Nabawi in Medina under the pretext of expanding the holy site.

“The measure by the government of Saudi Arabia merely substantiates the idea that the rulers of the country are subservient and submissive to the Zionist regime [of Israel] and obey the orders dictated by Israel and the US,” he said.

The Iranian lawmaker pointed out that destruction of the Muslims’ religious sites which are used for the promotion of Islam is a Western hegemonic agenda.

The main change in Masjid al-Nabawi will occur in the Western wing of the mosque, which holds the tomb of the founder of Islam, Prophet Mohammad (PBUH).

The three mosques, scheduled to be demolished, including Ghamama mosque, where Prophet Mohammad is said to have given his first prayers for an Eid ceremony, are located outside the western walls of Masjid al-Nabawi.

Saudi officials have not declared any plans with respect to preserving the historical mosques that are covered by the Ottoman-era structures.

The Washington-based (Persian) Gulf Institute says Riyadh has bulldozed 95 percent of 1,000-year-old buildings in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the past 20 years with the aim of expanding shopping centers, skyscrapers and luxury hotels.

During the construction of the Jabal Omar complex in Mecca, which overshadowed Masjid al-Haram, Saudi officials destroyed many archeological sites, particularly Prophet Mohammad’s birth place and the house of Prophet’s wife, Khadijah (PBUH), turning the holy locations into library and public toilet respectively.

Two of the seven key historic mosques built to mark the Battle of the Trench and a mosque belonging to the Prophet’s grandson were also dynamited ten years ago.

Surprisingly, pictures of demolition of the ancient mosque which were taken secretly and then smuggled out of the kingdom reveal the Saudi religious police hailing and celebrating the collapse of the Islamic monuments.

The report attributes Saudi Arabia’s disdain for historic sites of Islam to the kingdom’s association with Wahhabism, which is an extreme and inflexible interpretation of Islam.

The spot that marks the Prophet’s tomb is covered by a famous green dome and forms the centerpiece of the current mosque. The new redevelopment plans of Masjid al-Nabawi will move Prophet’s dome from the center to the east wing of the new site and destroy the praying niche at the center of the mosque.

The area forms part of the Riyadh al-Jannah (Gardens of Paradise), which was regarded as a holy place by Prophet Mohammad (PBUH).-www.shfaqna.com/English

Source: Taghribnew

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –North Korea's plans for a new nuclear test, like most things that happen inside the reclusive state, are shrouded in mystery. But that's not stopping analysts and officials from making some informed guesses about what's going on.

Why is North Korea planning to conduct a nuclear test?

The North says the "higher level" test is part of its military deterrent in its confrontation with the United States, which it describes as "the sworn enemy of the Korean people."

Its declaration that it would carry out the test came just two days after the United Nations Security Council voted in favor of imposing broader sanctions on the regime in response to Pyongyang's long-range rocket launch in December that was widely viewed as a test of ballistic missile technology.in 'defiance' of U.N.?

The pattern of events is similar to the lead-up to the previous nuclear tests North Korea carried out in 2006 and 2009.

Kim Jong Un appears likely to shrug off pressure from most of the international community, including North Korea's main ally, China, and go ahead with a third test.

"Neither the prospect of stronger sanctions, nor the growing discontent of Russia and China with his behavior, appears to deter North Korea's young leader," George Lopez, professor of peace studies at the Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame, wrote in an opinion article this week for CNN.

Under the North's power-driven ideology of songun, or "military first," the punishment meted out last month by the U.N. Security Council requires a strong response, according to Daniel Pinkston, senior analyst for the International Crisis Group covering Northeast Asia.

North Korea "sees international law, international institutions, collective security, arms control and any other cooperative arrangement as undesirable and as schemes to undermine their national security," Pinkston said in a recent blog post.

A new test will also give North Korea a chance to underscore advances in its nuclear program, potentially moving it closer to a nuclear weapon that it can mount on a long-range missile.

"To make its nuclear arsenal more menacing and provide the deterrent power Pyongyang's vitriolic pronouncements are aimed to achieve, North Korea must demonstrate that it can deliver the weapons on missiles at a distance," Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford University professor who has visited North Korean nuclear facilities,wrote in an article for Foreign Policy this week.

When is it likely to happen?

Given that North Korea is one of the most isolated, secretive regimes on the planet, one that views much of the rest of the world with suspicion, getting a clear idea of what exactly it plans to do when is often far from straightforward.

Its announcement last month that it would go ahead with a nuclear test didn't provide a time-frame, so analysts and government officials around the globe are interpreting satellite images of the test zone and parsing the language in state media reports for clues.

Most of them agree that North Korea is technically ready and could carry out a test at any time. The question is when the top leaders in Pyongyang will give the political green light to go ahead with a move that is likely to further sour relations with the country's Asian neighbors and the United States.

"I think by their political calculations, this is where they're going to have, so to say, the most bang for the buck and make it most effective for what they want to try to accomplish," said Philip Yun, executive director of the Ploughshares Fund, a U.S.-based foundation that seeks to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

Yun said this week that North Korea's recent statements suggest a test is "imminent."

North Korea on Google Maps: Monuments, nuclear complex, gulags

How will other countries know if it has happened?

The test is expected to take place underground at the North's Punggye-ri nuclear facility, and the first indications that a test has taken place are likely to show up on earthquake-monitoring equipment.

The area around Punggye-ri has little or no history of earthquakes or natural seismic hazards, according to U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) maps. But the previous test, in 2009, registered as a seismic event with a magnitude between 4 and 5.

Besides earthquake-monitoring organizations like the USGS, the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna, has a network of seismic, sonar and radiation instruments designed to pick up nuclear tests. It also has sensors that can detect gases that may leak into the atmosphere from the explosion.

But determining the sophistication of the nuclear device, and what kind of material -- plutonium or uranium -- was used, will be considerably more difficult, experts say.

At some point, North Korea is likely to announce that the explosion has taken place.

"Pyongyang will almost certainly claim that the test was successful and will tout its sophistication. It will be difficult to distinguish truth from propaganda, but experience shows there is often a nugget of truth in North Korea's claims," Stanford's Hecker says.

South Koreans cast wary eyes to the North

What stage will North Korea's nuclear weapons program be at following a new test?

With hard facts about the test so scarce, analysts are busy theorizing what exactly North Korea means when it says the test will be of a "higher level."

There is a widespread expectation that it will involve the use of highly enriched uranium, whereas the country's two previous tests are understood to have involved plutonium-based devices.

"A successful uranium test indicates that Pyongyang has advanced centrifuge technologies and related support systems," Notre Dame's Lopez said. "It means that North Korea, if left unchecked, can both produce and export such material."

In an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last year, Hecker and another analyst, Frank Pabian, speculated that North Korea could test two devices at the same time, one using plutonium and the other uranium.

"Two detonations will yield much more technical information than one, and they will be no more damaging politically than if North Korea conducted a single test," they wrote.

Some observers have even suggested that Pyongyang could make an early attempt at testing a thermonuclear device, which uses nuclear fusion to create a more powerful explosion. But others say they don't believe the North has that ability within its grasp yet.

In any case, the test is expected to take North Korea closer to having a nuclear weapon it can direct at its enemies. But actually achieving that goal still remains a longer-term effort, according to Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund.

"I still think we're years away from North Korea having a capability to deliver a nuclear warhead on a missile even to a country as close as Japan or South Korea," Cirincione said recently. "And they're even further away from having a long-range missile that could hit the United States."

What are the consequences likely to be?

The region is already braced for the test to take place, and countries like the United States, South Korea and Japan are already preparing their response.

John Kerry, the new U.S. Secretary of State, spoke to his counterparts in Tokyo and Seoul by phone on Sunday, and all of three of them agreed that the North must understand "that it will face significant consequences from the international community if it continues its provocative behavior," according to a summary of the calls from the U.S. State Department

A push for fresh condemnation and sanctions from the U.N. Security Council is likely, but whether or not the new measures have much bite depends on China.

In the event of a new nuclear test, Beijing is likely "reduce its assistance to North Korea," the the state-run Chinese newspaper Global Times said in an editorial last month.

But it added that "if the U.S., Japan and South Korea promote extreme U.N. sanctions on North Korea, China will resolutely stop them and force them to amend these draft resolutions."

Fundamentally, analysts say, a new test won't upend the geopolitical situation in Northeast Asia. But it will seriously harm the chances of any meaningful dialog between Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington in the near future.

"It will signal that the new regime, like its predecessors, has chosen bombs over electricity" for its impoverished population, Hecker wrote.

Another test also increases concerns about where North Korea's nuclear material will end up in the long term, either because it decides to sell it or in the event of a collapse of the regime, according to Yun of the Ploughshares Fund.

"That's something that we really have to be concerned about," he said.-www.shfaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- Get ready for some fireworks. President Obama is expected to unveil sweeping immigration reform in Las Vegas on Tuesday—and key Republican lawmakers John McCain and Marco Rubio had already attempted to steal the spotlight by announcing their bipartisan plan on Monday. White House officials insisted on Monday that Obama’s plan would focus more on details rather than the set of principals announced on Monday by the bipartisan group of senators that included Rubio and McCain. One key difference already noted in the two plans is the senators have linked border security to granting citizenship status to the 11 million undocumented immigrants, a connection the president does not support.  www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) --  A visit to North Korea by former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and Google chairman Eric Schmidt could harm U.S. efforts to sanction the dictatorship for refusing to curb its nuclear program and missile production, Korea experts say.

The U.S. State Department complained Monday that the visit by Richardson and Schmidt was poorly timed given that the United States is trying to persuade the United Nations to further sanction North Korea.

"We think the timing is ill-advised," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

The reason for State's objection is that North Korea and its allies in China will use the visit to convey "an image of openness and receptivity to the outside," said Evans Revere, the State Department's deputy chief negotiator with North Korea during the Clinton administration.

The visit helps the regime "convey a sense of legitimacy and international recognition and acceptance to its own people" at the very moment that the State Department is preparing to respond with sanctions in the U.N. Security Council, Revere said.

Richardson described the visit as "a private humanitarian mission." He said he hoped to meet with U.S. citizen Kenneth Bae, who was born in South Korea and arrested in North Korea during a tourist visit in November.

Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has traveled to North Korea at least twice before to seek the release of American detainees.

Schmidt heads one of the world's richest companies, and Google ranks 73rd on Forbes' list of 500 top companies. He is part of a delegation that will spend four days in the nation but has yet to say what he is doing there and whom he will meet.

He is due to arrive in China on Thursday, and Richardson says he expects to hold a news conference then.

Schmidt characterizes himself as an advocate for the freedom of information worldwide. He is traveling with Jared Cohen, head of Google Ideas, the company's think tank, with whom Schmidt is writing a book about how the Internet is changing the world.

The Internet is banned in North Korea. The country has no independent media, popular elections do not exist and the government is among the most repressive in the world. By contrast, South Korea has among the highest rates of Internet access in the world and a market economy that is fully integrated into the global economy.

A private visit to North Korea is not illegal, though goods, services and technology from North Korea may not be imported into the USA without a license from the Treasury Department.

The visit comes in the wake of a series of hostile North Korean actions and threats toward the United States and its allies, among them an attack in 2010 on a South Korean warship and an artillery bombardment on the South's Yeonpyeong Island that killed four people that same year.

In December, the North defied warnings from the United States and other nations and launched an alleged weather satellite that the United States suspects was a test for an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching U.S. shores. The North has refused to abide by its obligations under international treaties to open up its nuclear facilities to inspection.

The North Koreans have launched a campaign of more friendly signals over the past few weeks toward South Korea, Japan and the United States, countries that have given assistance to North Korea when it agreed to negotiate with them.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's New Year's Day speech included statements on improving the North's economy and called for reunification with South Korea.

Revere says Richardson and Schmidt's visit "is smartly used by the North Koreans to communicate an atmosphere of openness and willingness to re-engage with the United States and others."

Bruce Klingner, a former chief of the CIA's Korea branch who is at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, says China is likely to seize on the visit as an argument against new U.N. Security Council sanctions.

"China would say North Korea is showing it's more open, so it would be counterproductive to put penalties on them when they're showing they're turning over a new leaf," Klingner said.

The problem, he and Revere said, is that no real evidence exists that North Korea is reforming.

For the world's most reclusive regime to open up to Google "would go against 60 years of history in North Korea," Klingner said.

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- Diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis in Syria have been slow-moving and largely ineffective but events appear to be gathering pace and politicians are talking of a possible endgame.

On the ground, rebel forces are trying to gain control of the capital, Damascus.

More than 100 Arab and Western countries have now acknowledged the Syrian National Coalition as the legitimate and sole representative of Syrians. But while it has received world recognition it still does not have the stamp of approval from all Syrians.

The leader of the opposition is urging Syria's minority Alawite community to turn against President Bashar al-Assad - an Alawite himself, facing a mainly Sunni uprising.

The deputy foreign minister of Russia - a strong ally of Syria - has been quoted as saying rebel forces may win the fight.

Mikhail Bogdanov said: "There is a trend for the government to progressively lose control over an increasing part of the territory." 

He added that "an opposition victory cannot be excluded".

But Russia's foreign ministry backtracked on Friday, issuing a denial some 22 hours after the statement.

And the US is starting to plan for an opposition victory. The White House has branded one group of fighters, said to be linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq, as 'terrorists' - effectively excluding them from any future discussions.

The opposition is already planning for the post-Assad phase and, for most, that will not involve any form of Western intervention.

Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from the Idlib province, says: "Not long ago, when anti-government demonstrators took to the streets they would appeal to the international community for help. They asked for a no fly zone. They asked the world to supply them with weapons. But they are no longer asking for that. These people are demanding the international community doesn't interfere in their affairs."

Is Assad heading for a last stand as the conflict spills into its 22nd month?

Inside Syria, with presenter Ghida Fakhry, discusses with guests: Ammar Waqqaf, a member of the Syrian Social Club, a group advocating reform in Syria; Scott Lucas, a professor of American Studies at the University of Birmingham; and Pavel Felgenhauer, a political analyst and columnist at the newspaperNovaya Gazeta.

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- Senior executives face two main jobs. The first is to keep their organization running in tricky times, making money. The second is to anticipate the future, innovating as the pace of change continually accelerates.

But they have just one corporate operating system, or organized hierarchy of people, to accomplish those two different, increasingly separate tasks. And change expert John Kotter says it’s not enough: We’re going to have to learn a new approach, with dual operating systems, one being the traditional hierarchy, more tightly focused on today’s productivity, and alongside it the other, separate operating system, a fluid network rather than hierarchy, staffed with volunteers from the organization willing to put in extra effort to fuel new initiatives.

It’s a provocative – if somewhat hazy – idea that has evolved out of his work with organizations over the years, and which he recently unveiled in a Harvard Business Reviewarticle and elaborated on in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

In spring 1995, Mr. Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, published an articletitled “Leading Change” in the school’s magazine that, a year later, was turned into a best-selling book that made him the world’s leading authority on change in organizations. It outlined a practical, eight-step process that attacked the glaring deficiencies in change efforts, notably by building a guiding coalition for the change; fully communicating the change vision (he argued that most organizations undercommunicated by a factor of at least 10); and generating short-term wins.

Recently, he has been preoccupied with the increasing speed of change due to global integration and technological progress, and how companies are failing to keep up. “Something different is needed. Incremental adjustment isn’t working,” he says.

Struggling with what’s needed and inspired by some of the initiatives being tried by a colleague in his consulting group, Mr. Kotter, in response to a question at a meeting, turned to the nearby whiteboard and spontaneously started sketching out this dual operating network concept. Although it was a new revelation even to him, in reality he stresses, it was simply a reflection of what he was seeing emerging in organizations that were being more successful with change. “It is invented out in the field from the constant need to push the envelope,” he says.

Most companies have an operating network, which responds to everything the company faces. It starts with the CEO and filters down through the various layers of the hierarchy, to the salespeople and proverbial plant floor. That doesn’t change in this new change model. Everyone continues with what they are doing, albeit with a narrower focus: They simply concentrate on day-to-day operations, without having also to attend meetings on strategy for the future.

Instead, another network forms to anticipate and deal with the future. Its members volunteer for the assignments. And they don’t give up their day job. They still must fulfill their operational work, but they add to it this new role of preparing the organization for innovative change. This applies, by the way, to universities, non-profits and governments as well as corporations.

It’s a management-driven hierarchy working in concert with a strategy network. At the heart, he writes in the article, are five principles:

Many change agents, not just a few appointees:

To move faster and further, you need to pull more people than ever before into the strategic change game. In the interview, he talked of perhaps 10 per cent of the organization in the network, including a number of executive team members (but not all, since regular operations remain critical).

A “want-to,” not just a “have-to,” mindset:

People in the network want to grapple with the future, rather than feel they are being forced to by their bosses.

Head and heart, not just head:

“People won’t want to do a day job on the hierarchy and a night job in the network – which is essentially how a dual operating system works – if you appeal only to logic, with numbers and a business case,” he writes.

Much more leadership, not just more managers:

At the core of a successful hierarchy is competent management. But the strategy network needs lots of leadership initiatives to succeed, thus involving different processes, language, and expectations.

Two systems, one organization:

The network and the hierarchy must be inseparable, with a constant flow of information and activity between them. That’s not inconceivable since, remember, the volunteers in the network also work in the hierarchy.

The network applies the eight principles he first enunciated in 1995, but amended to the new framework. So far he has helped develop the concept in 10 organizations, and says he’s batting 10 for 10.

“So we know we’re onto something. It’s not just theoretical. And we know this ever-increasing speed will hit everybody over time, so something fundamentally different is needed,” he says.

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) - Russian space scientists are devising a plan to bring the Yamal-402 communications satellite back into its correct orbit after it lost its trajectory and ended up in an orbit near to, but not exactly, where it was meant to be.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced that the satellite did not reach its desired orbit due to an early separation of the rocket's upper stage.

It appears that the upper stage of the Proton-M rocket failed to perform its final boost-burn for the proper duration, leaving a Gazprom Space System (GSS) satellite in a lower-than-planned orbit at the end of a nine-hour flight from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Now, scientists are looking into the possibility of using the satellite’s own fuel reserves and engines to bring it to where it's supposed to be.

“The Yamal-402 has been deployed into an orbit close to the calculated one, and unless it was damaged by the early separation, it is likely that the satellite may be used as designated with some restrictions,” an unnamed expert told RIA.

The French Thales Alenia Space company built the satellite with 46 Ku-band transponders – enough to provide coverage over most of Eurasia, the Middle East and Africa.

It's the second satellite in its class to be sent out to space this year. The last one, the Yamal-300K, ascended on November 3 and currently is able to cover 95 per cent of the Russian territory.

The GSS plans to have the Yamal network fully operational by 2020.-www.shfaqna.com/English

Source: RT

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expresses serious concern about Israel’s plan to build thousands more settler units on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Ban’s spokesperson said on Sunday that the UN chief had expressed "grave concern and disappointment" over the new settlement plan, AFP reported.

Approved on Friday, the plan involves the construction of 3,000 more of the units in Tel Aviv-occupied East al-Quds (Jerusalem) and West Bank, including in the controversial E1 area. The E1 project aims at connecting the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim to East al-Quds, about six kilometers away. The plan will cut off the northern part of the West Bank from the south.

The Israeli regime authorized the construction after the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on Thursday in favor of upgrading Palestine’s status at the UN to non-member observer state.

"Settlements are illegal under international law… ," Ban's office said in a statement on Thursday. The UN considers the settlements to be illegal due to their construction on occupied territory.

"The secretary-general repeats his call on all concerned to resume negotiations…and urges the parties to refrain from provocative actions," the statement added.

In 2010, Israel caused the negotiations between the two sides to break down by refusing to extend a moratorium on its settlement activities on the occupied territories.

More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East al-Quds.- www.shfaqna.com/English