Francesca Borri – författare

August 21, 2013: a chemical weapons attack on the suburbs of Damascus reminds the world of the existence of the Syrian war. Hundreds of journalists from every corner of the world rush to the frontier only to leave disappointed when Obama decides not to bomb. They leave behind 200,000 estimated victims, and more than half of a population of 22 million people dispersed or refugeed in nearby countries: the worst humanitarian crisis since WWII according to the UN.Francesca Borri is one of them. But she does not leave. She is thirty years old. For months she covers the battle of Aleppo as a freelance reporter. And she quickly realizes that to report a war is to hide with dozens of women and children, even a baby, born there, in a grave, ''a piece of soil under the ground that is as expensive as three houses'' or to scavenge for anything to burn for some warmth, ''a broken slipper, the plastic hand of a toy'' or to mistake bloody figments of skull for rubble. To report a war is also to meet with officials more worried about the stain of snow on their Clarks than the people they are supposed to help. It is to explain what is happening in Aleppo to journalists who have only been there once, on vacation, and bought a carpet. It is risking one''s life because of the jealousy of a fellow reporter. And it is also about dreaming of driving at night with the windows open, about remembering impossible little things, the particular light on that day in that café at the beach when you were a kid, the eyes of people you love, all the minuscule simple joys that can be lost in a moment.  Syrian Dust is a raw and powerful account of the Syrian war that throws the reader right in the middle of it, without any shelter.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A breathtaking work of political reportage steeped in a deep understanding of the roots of Islamic terrorism.Western tourists are not always aware that the Maldives, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean, is a Muslim country, or that the Republic of Maldives is the non-Arab country with the world''s highest number of foreign fighters per capita. Despite being considered a luxury tourist destination, the Maldives is in fact one of the most over-populated countries, devastated by poverty, social segregation, heroin, and criminality. Tourists living in one tiny bright enclave, the people in the vast darkness. All the wealth coming from tourism is concentrated in the hands of a few businessmen who collude with the despotic government. The Maldives is a fertile breeding ground for ISIS, which enlists more of its foreign fighters per capita from there than anywhere else. Francesca Borri spent time with them, and with their families and friends, all of whom are drivers, waiters, cleaners in tourist resorts. And she let them speak. As she writes, "While the rest of the world watched the Olympics, everyone here was watching the battle of Aleppo. And rooting for al-Qaeda."

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Conference on Digital Libraries, DELOS 2007, held in Pisa, Italy, in February 2007. The 33 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on similarity search, architectures, personalization, interoperability, evaluation, miscellaneous, preservation, video data management, 3D objects, and peer to peer.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2011 - formerly known as ECDL (European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries) - held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2011. The 27 full papers, 13 short papers, 9 posters and 9 demos presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 162 initial submissions. In addition the book contains the abstract of 2 keynote speeches and an appendix stating information on the doctoral consortium, as well as the panel, which were held at the conference. The papers are grouped in topical sections on networked information, semantics and interoperability, systems and architectures, text and multimedia retrieval, collaborative information spaces, DL applications and legal aspects, user interaction and information visualization, user studies, archives and repositories, europeana, and preservation.