Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
The Atlantic wire announces that the Fourth Estate, represented by Associated Press, is determined to undo the decision of the highest representative of the First Estate (which, in a manner of speech, is the President, since we are not a monarchy) not…
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Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad Mansion is now a scenario in Counter Strike The Abbottabad compound that was the scene of the recent killing of Osama bin Laden by a SEALS team has now been reproduced as a map (.bsp) for the the…
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani vigorously rejected accusations that Osama bin Laden was protected in his Abbottabad mansion by local army or security services. It is disingenuous for anyone to blame Pakistan or State institutions of Pakistan including the ISI and…
CBS interviewed President Obama as early as Wednesday, May 4 on how the mission to catch and kill Osama Bin Laden emerged and was completed: On Wednesday, May 4, 2011 – three days after he announced that American troops had killed Osama…
If Bin Laden ever hid in Chak Shah Muhammad, a small farming village in Pakistan, the residents said they would have known. http://nyti.ms/kvZyqi
According to Pakistani military sources, Osama Bin Laden lived in Pakistan for almost 8 years. One of his wives, who was captured in Abbottabad, told her Pakistani interrogators that Osama lived for many years in fairly large urban centers in Northern…
White House spokesman John Carney told the White House press corps at a regular briefing that Osama was not armed when killed. Other details, according to AP: Unexpectedly high temperatures caused a lumbering helicopter carrying elite commandos to make a hard…
Click the image to see our full coverage of Obama’s Abbottabad Compound The Department of Defense released this diagram of the Osama Bin Laden Compound. The map below overlays the Department of Defense diagram above onto the exact location of the Osama…
ABC News published footage from Osama bin Laden mansion and released dramatic pictures of the bedroom where the final stand took place. Blood covers the ground and the bed. The inside of the building is nicely furnished. Electronic devices and appliances are…
A special briefing at the White House detailed the manner in which Osama bin Laden was found and killed by US Special Forces. The investigation started in August 2010 and involved Guantanamo Bay interogations. The speakers requested not to be named for…
Following a tip received by CIA in August 2010, the US intelligence community determined that Osama Bin Laden is located in Abbottabad, in North-West Pakistan, about 100 km North of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. He was found, in a “mansion” and killed…
A sudden White House announcement Sunday night that President Obama will give an important address kept the nation in suspense for about an hour and a half until the president announced officially at 11:34 PM EST that Osama Bin Laden is dead.…
The media coverage of the greatest wedding of the 21st century (so far), compressed to 1.5 minutes by MSNBC. Great footage, especially the one inside the cathedral, shot from above the altar. The audience of the wedding was absolutely staggering, more than…
From The New York Times: Storms Rock the South and Midwest Severe weather in parts of the South has killed several people and left thousands more without power from East Texas to Memphis and up through Illinois. Slideshow: http://nyti.ms/mHBp1I
The level of radioactivity in the basin is about 1000 milisievert/hour, 330 times higher than the radiation dose that is normally absorbed in one year by an inhabitant of an industrialized country. TEPCO representatives said that they intended to stop ...
In the early days after the earthquake and tsunami, many Tokyo Electric workers had little time to speak out. An explosion had blown the roof off one of the reactor buildings in Fukushima, heightening fears of large-scale radiation exposure. ...See all...
It's already doing so. Japan's Nuclear Safety Agency confirmed radioactive iodine in the sea near Fukushima at 3355 times the normal level. Our correspondent Mark Willacy joins me now from Tokyo. When we spoke an hour or two ago, Mark, Reuters ...
Ali Wylam, one of the students enrolled in my Com 435 class (Emerging Communication Technologies) found that teen sensation Justin Bieber has a gigantic stature in cyberspace. He is right up there with the big corporations. He garnered over 30 million monthly…
Of the many billions of stars that surround us, only some are orbited by planets. Of those that have planets, only some can support life. Of those planets that can support life, only some are close enough to their star not to…
The latest news from Gaddafi’s compound Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Of the two dozen residences Muammar Gaddafi calls home, the most known and recognizable is the Bab el-Aziza compound, located right in the heart…
Defensive measures at the Fukushima Nuclear plant are called by Michio Kaku, a Japanese physicist teaching in the US, “like squirting a gun at a forest fire.” He would opt for the Russian solution, entomb the reactor in sand, boric acid and…
As dangerous levels of radiation leaked from four crippled nuclear reactors in Japan's earthquake-ravaged northeast Tuesday, Naoto Kan, the Prime Minister, stormed into an executive meeting of Tokyo Electric Power Co. and demanded to know, ...See a...
Radiation levels continue to fluctuate at the nuclear power complex at Fukushima. Workers struggling to control the damaged reactors there and the spent fuel were withdrawn earlier today. Throughout the most heavily damaged areas along the coast north ...
As the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant becomes darker by the day (see Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant Update) and the risk of a major meltdown increases, people all over the world ask themselves how great is the danger of a major…
As the reactor failure at the Fukushima Plant in the aftermath of the Sendai earthquake increases public apprehension of nuclear technology, the future of this type of energy production might not be as bleak as it looks. There is one design that…
Live feed of main Japanese Television Network (NHK) in English Online TV Shows by Ustream Update: Fukushima powerplant releases radiation in the atmosphere. Spent fuel rods could be exposed to air and catch on fire. MSNBC reports that the situation in Tokyo…
Update: see the latest shocking images from the Fukushima powerplant and Sendai earthquake The radiation that emanates from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant can now affect human life. Three explosions in as many days has probably damaged one of the reactor containment…
Update: Images filmed the very moment the tsunami hit Sendai [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vWzkfUwJlg[/youtube] READ AND WATCH MORE NEWS ABOUT THE FUKUSHIMA POWER PLANT RADIOACTIVE LEAK Images shot right when the tsunami hit the cities of Northeastern Japan. Terrifying… [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3AdFjklR50[/youtube] Incredible slideshow of devastation provoked…
What you say if you got a $1.5 BILLION grant? Samuel Ting (Nobel Prize laureate, 1974, MIT professor) got precisely this amount over 10 years to put a new experimental device in space. The device was meant to detect anti-matter. Although intriguing,…
“I want to be an individual, like anybody else” seems to be the new American vocation. With an uncanny ability to detect trends that most commentators ignore David Brooks spots in his artful Modesty Manifesto editorial the rise of expressive individualism. Considering his Bobos in Paradise, the book that…
The recent and worrying news of violent incidents between the Muslim majority and Copts, a largely unknown Christian minority of Egypt, made many ask “since when are there Christians in Egypt?” The answer is simple: since the first or second century AD.…
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New York Times ponders on the merging of journalism and search engine optimization Search Engine Optimization to Lure Readers – NYTimes.com The Huffington Post has hired veteran journalists to beef up its news coverage. But a significant chunk of its readers come…
New York Times ponders on the merging of journalism and search engine optimization Search Engine Optimization to Lure Readers – NYTimes.com The Huffington Post has hired veteran journalists to beef up its news coverage. But a significant chunk of its readers come…
New York Times ponders on the merging of journalism and search engine optimization Search Engine Optimization to Lure Readers – NYTimes.com The Huffington Post has hired veteran journalists to beef up its news coverage. But a significant chunk of its readers come…
Businessweek.com identified the 50 most expensive small towns (populations less than 10,000) nationwide where median home values are the highest. We evaluated data on 4,624 cities and census-designated places from November 2010, the most recent available. Some expensive communities, such as Bel…
Chevrolet Volt Image via Wikipedia Despite the enthusiasm the surrounds the newly arrived electric vehicles (EV), such as the Volt or Leaf, on the US market and president Obama’s call for putting 1 million electric cars on the roads in the US…
Since none of the sites discussing this piece of news provided a map, here is one… (Marker indicates location of proposed store location) MSNBC: RICHMOND, Va. — Nearly 150 years after Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant fought in northern Virginia,…
A book that promises to be a great introduction to the “why” of philosophy… EXAMINED LIVES From Socrates to Nietzsche By James Miller Illustrated. 422 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28. Excerpt If the proof of a pudding is in the eating,…
Have you thought about digital estate planning? Suppose that just after you finish reading this article, you keel over, dead. Perhaps you’re ready for such an eventuality, in that you have prepared a will or made some sort of arrangement for the…
Body Mass index by state. > 25% overweight, >30 obese. Image via Wikipedia It is not just that humans have become heavier in the last decades, but also some species of animals, including completely wild species. The problem of obesity isn’t confined…
Image via Wikipedia And make money in the process. The Atlantic Monthly has succeeded in this arduous task by injecting itself with a good dose of start-up mentality. The Atlantic, the intellectual’s monthly that always seemed more comfortable as an academic exercise…
Image via Wikipedia Spot on. Leveraging the power of social media resides in our ability to check and funnel its output, not in hosing out content indiscriminately. In this respect Assange, who has decided to throttle the release of his stash of…
Image via Wikipedia Worrying news, via Die Welt, from Venezuela. Copying a page from the book of his mentor, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez closes ranks with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards by allowing an Iranian manned missile base in South America. It is…
The day was replete with stories about North Korean sudden bombardment of a South Korean island. To my surprise, no new sites had maps, interactive or otherwise, indicating where the event took place. A quick search and here it is. Enjoy.
Vanity Fair’s decision to feature Cher on its November 2010 cover shows how difficult is for traditional media to shed its old habits. Repackaging Cher (64) as a glamor girl, complete with fishnet hosiery is at least bizarre, if not sadly predictable…
The syfy channel blastr site reports “Morgan Freeman has been trying to get an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s first-contact classic Rendezvous With Rama made for almost 20 years—with David Fincher on board to direct—and the Oscar-winner says he’s closer than ever.…
Smitten with its rival magazines app success the Economist muses aloud: Even before the device had a name, media executives knew what they wanted from the iPad. Like the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, it could be used to sell digital issues of newspapers…
Image via Wikipedia Search Takes a Social Turn By JENNA WORTHAM Sites are trying to make search more helpful by showing what your friends – or other people like you – like. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/technology/13search.html?th&emc=th ……………… F.C.C. Likely to Open Airwaves to Wireless By…
Image via CrunchBase The first historiography of a Wikipedia entry…. James Bridle founded a Web site called Booktwo in September 2006 to “investigate, analyze, catalog and debate the future of literature and the publishing industry.” Over the years the site has been…
Congo River Image by mpondu via Flickr Great NPR story on the only reasonable and cheap means of transportation in Congo: a river barge that resembles Noah’s Ark. The nearly 3,000-mile Congo River is the backbone of one of Africa’s poorest and…
Image via Wikipedia Excellent NY TIMES coverage of the recent incident in the Gulf. We need more reporting like this, careful with nuances and not eager to hype a situation already bade. Environmental groups quickly issued news releases, arguing that the fire…