They said 'Its Mean'

Source: BBCUrdu.com

پاکستان کے بعض ریٹائرڈ جرنیلوں نے صدر پرویز مشرف کے اس بیان پر سخت رد عمل ظاہر کیا ہے جس میں انہوں نے کہا تھا کہ ریٹائرڈ فوجیوں کی تنظیم والے ’نو گُڈ مین‘ یعنی بیکار لوگ ہیں۔

ریٹائرڈ فوجیوں کی غیر سرکاری تنظیم کے سرکردہ رہنما اور سابق آرمی چیف مرزا اسلم بیگ نے بی بی سی سے بات چیت میں صدر پرویز مشرف کے بیان پر تبصرہ کرتے ہوئے کہا کہ

یہ صدر مشرف کی کم ظرفی ہے۔ جو اپنے خاندان اور اپنے ماں باپ کوگالیاں دے وہ اپنے آپ کو گالیاں دے رہا ہوتا ہے۔

مرزا اسلم بیگ نے کہا کہ

پرویز مشرف کو اپنے بڑوں اور بزرگوں کا ادب ہے اور نہ ہی قومی اداروں کے لیے کوئی احترام ہے۔ یہ دیکھیں کہ کس بہانے سے انہوں نے منتخب وزیراعظم کو ہٹایا، جمہوری اداروں کو تباہ کیا اور اپنے اقتدار کے لیے انہوں نے کیا کچھ نہیں کیا۔ پھر جب عدالتیں انصاف دینے کے لیے کھڑی ہوئیں تو جو عدالتوں کا حشر کیا ہے اس کی مثال پوری مہذب دنیا میں نہیں ملتی۔

ریٹائرڈ فوجیوں کی غیر سرکاری تنظیم کے صدر لیفٹیننٹ جنرل (ر) فیض علی چشتی نے بی بی سی سے بات کرتے ہوئے کہا کہ

پرویز مشرف نے اگر ہم سابق فوجیوں کو ’نو گڈ مین‘ کہا ہے تو وہ خود بھی اب ریٹائرڈ جنرل ہیں۔ جب وہ اچھے نہیں ہیں تو عہدہ چھوڑ دیں۔ صدر صاحب کچھ تو اپنی بات کا مان رکھیں۔

انہوں نے کہا کہ

ملکی حالات خراب ہیں، فوج اور عوام ایک دوسرے کو مار رہے ہیں، وزیرستان میں کیا ہورہا ہے، امن امان کی حالت کیا ہے، آٹا، چینی، گیس اور بجلی غائب ہے، کیا اس کا اثر ریٹائرڈ فوجیوں پر نہیں پڑتا۔ہم اس ملک اور قوم کے مفاد میں کہتے ہیں کہ پرویز مشرف کو اب مستعفی ہونا چاہیے، انہوں نے فوج سمیت ملک کے تمام ادارے تباہ کیے ہیں۔

انہوں نے صدر مشرف کی جانب سے فوائد نہ ملنے کی وجہ سے تنقید کرنے کی بات کو مسترد کرتے ہوئے کہا کہ

میں جب لیفٹیننٹ جنرل تھا تو پرویز مشرف میجر تھا وہ مجھے کیا فائدہ دے سکتا تھا۔ ہمارے سارے ساتھی پرویز مشرف سے سینئر ہیں۔ جہاں تک جمشید گلزار کیانی کا تعلق ہے تو وہ جب فیڈرل پبلک سروس کمیشن کا سربراہ تھا تو دو برس قبل صدر مشرف نے سابق فوجی افسران کو مشاورت کے لیے فوجی ہیڈ کوارٹر بلایا اور جب سوال جواب شروع ہوئے تو جنرل جمشید نے پرویز مشرف سے کہا کہ وہ وعدے کے مطابق فوجی وردی اتار دیں جس پر انہیں ملازمت سے برطرف کیا گیا۔

فیض علی چشتی نے کہا کہ صدر پرویز مشرف جھوٹ بول رہے ہیں اور وہ ان کے ساتھ براہ راست ٹی وی پر مذاکرہ کرنے کو تیار ہیں۔

واضح رہے کہ گزشتہ منگل کو ریٹائرڈ فوجیوں کی ایک غیر سرکاری تنظیم کا لیفٹیننٹ جنرل (ر) فیض علی چشتی کی صدارت میں اجلاس ہوا تھا جس میں صدر پرویز مشرف پر ملکی اداروں کو تباہ کرنے کا الزام لگاتے ہوئے ان سے فوری طور پر مستعفی ہونے کا مطالبہ کیا گیا تھا۔

اجلاس میں ریٹائرڈ ایئر مارشل اصغر خان، نور خان، سابق آرمی چیف مرزا اسلم بیگ، لیفٹیننٹ جنرل (ر) حمید گل، لیفٹیننٹ جنرل (ر) جمشید گلزار کیانی سمیت تینوں مسلح افواج کے متعدد سرکردہ سابق افسران شریک ہوئے تھے۔

سابق فوجیوں نے صدر مشرف کی نامزد کردہ نگران حکومت کو قبضہ گروپ قرار دیتے ہوئے کہا تھا کہ جنرل پرویز مشرف نے ملکی اداروں کو تباہ کردیا ہے۔ انہوں نے کارگل جنگ میں شکست پر پرویز مشرف کا کورٹ مارشل کرنے کا بھی مطالبہ کیا تھا۔

سابق فوجیوں کے اس بیان کو مغربی میڈیا نے کافی نمایاں طور پر شائع کیا اور یہ سوال اٹھایا کہ صدر مشرف کو اب سینئر فوجی افسران کا اعتماد حاصل نہیں رہا جس پر صدر مشرف نے اپنے یورپ کے دورے کے دوران ہی تنقید کرنے والے ریٹائر فوجیوں کو فضول اور بیکار قرار دیتے ہوئے کہا تھا کہ ان کی بات فوجی سنتے ہیں اور نہ ہی سول سوسائٹی۔

صدر پرویز مشرف نے یہ بھی کہا تھا کہ ان پر تنقید کرنے والے کچھ ایسےلوگ ہیں جنہیں انہوں نے فوائد نہیں دیے اور بعض ایسے ہیں جنہیں انہوں نے باہر نکال پھینکا تھا۔

Crunchies Winners Announced

While the Crunchies award ceremony is in full swing at the historic Herbst Theater in downtown San Francisco, we've got the winners for you right here. Over 100,000 votes were cast, and many of the races were very tight, but in the end there can be only one winner (per category). So without further ado, the winners of the first annual Crunchies Awards are...

Best technology innovation / achievement

Best bootstrapped start-up

Best new gadget / device

Best business model

Best design

Best enterprise start-up

Best consumer start-up

Best mobile start-up

Best international start-up

Best user-generated content

Best video site

Best clean tech start-up

Best use of viral marketing

Best time sink site

Most likely to make the world a better place

Most likely to succeed

Best start-up founder

Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook

Image via the Guardian

Best start-up CEO

Toni Schneider - Auttomatic

Image via True Ventures

Best new start-up of 2007

Best overall

Be sure to watch the event streaming live via Mogulus. The Crunchies is a joint venture between TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, and ReadWriteWeb.

Flock 1.1 Arrives in Two Weeks

Flock, the Social Web Browser, has announced that the Flock 1.1 beta will launch in just two weeks. The browser, built on Firefox code, is designed for social interaction on the web, with features built into the browser just for this purpose. Flock chose last week's Macworld conference to show off the new version. With the upcoming release, several new features will be added, including Yahoo and Gmail support, Picassa integration, and a friend activity feed.

The integration of the popular webmail services from Yahoo and Gmail will allow users to share web pages, images, articles, and links with their friends using a click-to-compose function built right into the browser. By just clicking the email icon in the URL bar, Flock users can instantly share these items with their friends. When new mail arrives, the Flock Mail icon will light up to let users know to check their inbox. This is especially handy since webmail doesn't alert users of incoming mail the way that Outlook or other desktop clients do, forcing them to either keep checking it in a browser tab, using an add-on, or some sort of 3rd party notification software.

Image Credit: CNet Networks

As to why email was the next bigfeature to be included, Flock's CEO, Shawn Hardin, states that "Email is the single most frequently used communication application on the web, and is often overlooked as social activity."The new Picasa feature will let users of the popular photo-sharing service quickly upload pictures to Picasa from Flock. To share these photos, users can email them via web mail or just drag and drop them onto the Flock People sidebar, the same way that YouTube videos, flickr photos, Photobucket photos, and others are shared in version 1.0.

The Friend Activity feed is like Facebook's News Feed, expect that it tracks your friends recent activities across all of Flock’s supported services. The feed will inform users when their friends update their Flock profile or online status, upload new photos, and it even displays their Twitter updates.

The new version will be available for as a free download for Mac, PC and Linux in two weeks at www.Flock.com.

Live Blogging 2.0

If you're a blogger who is into covering live events, like keynotes, press conferences, meetings, or sports events, you may be interested in the new, free service from CoveritLive. In development since 2006 and emerging from beta in November of 2007, the CoveritLive platform gives you an easy way to blog events as they happen and it also provides tools to interact with your readers during the event you're covering.

As you use CoveritLive's software, your commentary streams live to your web page or blog. Readers viewing the commentary can ask questions and participate in polls you create, giving them a reason to stay online on your website for the duration of the event, instead of checking in every now and then. Readers viewing the live blog stream don't have to create user accounts to participate or download any software.

While blogging, you can also add pictures and videos in real-time, keeping the stream updated with interesting content. The text, images, and videos can be drag-and-dropped into the application's interface and linked with ease.

The CoveritLive Console

CoveritLive also provides a way for multiple editors to work together in real-time. One writer could be focused on uploading content and writing while the other answers questions and responds to comments.

How it Works

When you use the CoveritLive service, a resizable AJAX Viewer Window of your live blog is embedded into your website or blog, similar to the way you would embed a widget. However, the CoveritLive team is quick to point out that the service is really "anything but a widget or lightweight tool." Don't be fooled by its ease of use, they say: CoveritLive is a scalable application designed for anyone to use whether they have just a handful of reader or hundreds of thousands.

CoveritLive on a blog

The one-click publishing feature lets you use Google image or video search and then, with one click, post the image or video to the live blog window. There is also an online Media Library and Showprep tool where you can load up your media in preparation for the event. This lets you build up a collection of items beforehand so they are ready when you need them during the live event. 

The one-click Quick Polls can be created on the fly or in advance and stored in the Media Library. You can create as many polls as you would like and can turn the different polls on and off in the "Now Playing" section of the app.

Readers can comment on the live blog, but it's not like a chat window or forum. The comments, or "Audience Messages," as they're called, stream into a window in the Console that only the author can see. By clicking the comment, the author can post the question or comment directly into the live blog for everyone to see and then respond to it. The Audience Messages feature can be turned on or off as desired during the event.

Another nice feature the Console provides is a Viewer Window built right into it. With this, you can see exactly what your readers see, making formatting problems no
longer an issue.

At the event's end, the Viewer Windows becomes what they call an "Instant Replay." This new window has the entire live blog for site visitors to read if they missed viewing it live. The latecomers can still view the poll results, which are automatically linked to by the app when the event is over. The live blog you created is stored on CoveritLive's servers where you can access it at any time or delete it if you decide you no longer need it.

Why Do We Need Liveblogging Tools?

Today's standard publishing and blogging platforms are not really created for live blogging. You have to write, save, and publish and then refresh your blog's page to make sure that it looks right. If you don't know how to set your blog's page to automatically refresh, your site visitors have to automatically refresh the page on their own to see the new content. Even if your page is automatically refreshing, it is still not the equivalent of real-time blogging as your posts are not being displayed as you write them. With CoveritLive, you can instantly blog the event without having to worry with those sort of technical details.

Unfortunately, when put to the test during this year's Macworld conference, a minor technical glitch, the equivalent of "one loose screw" (so they said), managed to crash the service. However, CoveritLive responded that this was not due to being overloaded by traffic, rather an issue in their Quality Assurance process, and hopes that everyone will give them another shot in the future. Yikes!

As web-based reporting relies more and more on live coverage of major events, it will be critical for CoveritLive to make sure that outages like this past one never occur or no one will bother to use the service again. Many may have already decided that one crash is one too many and have already sworn it off.

Still, if they get the kinks worked out to deliver a more stable platform, a liveblogging service with the feature set and ease-of-use of CoveritLive is worth keeping an eye on.

Worried Pakistan board insures home series

Source: Reuters

KARACHI - The Pakistan cricket board has insured all its future tour program (FTP) series amidst the prospect of touring teams, particularly Australia, backing out due to security concerns and political unrest.

A senior board official told Reuters on Monday the insured series included the Australian tour in March-April.

“We have got all our FTP series insured because we don’t know what situation we might face from touring teams,” Shafqat Naghmi, chief operating officer of the board, said on Monday.

“So all this talk of us putting the Australian players at risk by insisting on their tour because of financial gains is baseless,” he said.

“It is not meant to send out negative signal to any team but to safeguard our finances.”

According to sources, the Australia series has been insured for around $7.4 million.

The PCB had made arrangements to cover its financial losses regardless of whether Australia toured Pakistan or not, he said.

The Australia tour has been in doubt since the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto in December and following a wave of suicide bomb attacks in the country.

Some Australia players have also expressed concerns over touring Pakistan but Cricket Australia has said it had yet to take any decision.

Naghmi was confident the tour would go ahead as scheduled.

“We know that the Australian high commission has given a positive report to their government and the statement of (incoming) International Cricket Council president David Morgan is also very positive for us,” he said.

Morgan, who will take over as ICC chief from South Africa’s Ray Mali in June, recently urged Australia to tour Pakistan.

Naghmi said the board was very keen on Australia coming because they had not toured Pakistan since 1998.

“Our people want to see good cricket and the Australians can bring in the crowds,” he said. “Their tour will have a good impact on Pakistan cricket.”

Naghmi was hopeful Australia will come if the current tour by Zimbabwe went off smoothly.