Hassan Rouhani brands Paris attacks 'crimes against humanity'

TEHRAN: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani strongly condemned the deadly attacks in Paris, branding them "crimes against humanity" in a message to his French counterpart Francois Hollande, the official media said. "In the name of the Iranian people, who have themselves been victims of terrorism, I strongly condemn these crimes against humanity and offer my condolences to the grieving French people and government," Rouhani wrote, according Irna news agency.

Customer Service:How brands are tapping Facebook Messenger

A growing number of brands are teaming up with Facebook Messenger after realizing its potential as a communication channel for offering customer service and building personal relationships with mobile users. The Businesses on Messenger platform enables marketers to bring service conversations to social media, a facet of mobile with which many consumers are familiar. Brands including Hyatt have joined forces with customer service solution Conversocial to roll out these initiatives on Messenger, which may include real-time chat and transaction receipts. “We have launched this service today with Hyatt, which is the first of our customers to go live with Facebook Messenger for customer care,” said Paul Johns, chief marketing officer of Conversocial, New York. “Now that our Facebook Messenger service is available we fully anticipate most of our customers will begin to adopt.“Social is moving – from being about public displays of dissatisfaction to being a convenient mobile channel with a focus on service resolution.” Promoting social care Conversocial has recently integrated a real-time chat experience into the Messenger app, a service that allows brands and their customers to have two-way talks regarding issues or inquiries. As the popularity of Facebook’s standalone app enjoyed a 40 percent growth spurt from 2014 to 2015, brands can certainly find a large portion of their audience on this channel. More than 700 million people currently use Messenger each month. Businesses must now consider Facebook as a primary customer service channel, due to the staggering amount of users it boasts. It can also help streamline requests for employees, especially if most of the customer traffic gets directed to social media. However, marketers must commit to using social media, and consequently train all associates to be ready to respond to any requests that come in. There are also several best practices to leveraging the Businesses on Messenger platform of which brands should be aware. “Make sure you are publicizing that social customer care is available,” Mr. Johns said. “Make it clear on your Web site, Facebook page, etc. “Have a focus on near-immediate acknowledgment of the inbound message,” he said. “Focus on resolving whatever issues you can in the channel – do not divert customers to another channel. “Do not be tempted to script or auto-bot the dialogue. Keep the conversations as human as possible. This is an opportunity for brands to have real conversations.” Hyatt’s customer-first approach Hospitality marketer Hyatt implemented the Conversocial solution into its global control room efforts this past summer. This enables several customer contact centers to respond to guests’ inquiries and maximize their positive travel experiences via Facebook. As more hotel brands roll out mobile concierge platforms, consumers increasingly expect to interact with them for all requests via their smartphones, making this an ideal move for Hyatt. Facebook has recently updated its Pages feature to aid businesses in bolstering their mobile presence and sales via more prominent call-to-action buttons, improved layout and new sections for showcasing relevant information to users (see story). If the Businesses in Messenger platform integrates with this layout, the social network may see an influx of brand-consumer interaction in the near future. “What I can say is that ‘in the moment’ service is a critical component of the Hyatt guest experience,” Mr. Johns said. “It allows guests to have a positive experience as they are engaging with Hyatt on mobile and throughout their customer journey. “Hyatt is leading the way here, offering service and embracing channels such as Facebook Messenger as well as other social channels such as Instagram with geotagging. My sense is that Hyatt sees the value in their guests very much being an extension of its brand and a clear way to differentiate from other hotel businesses.”

Pinterest And Facebook announced a new visual search feature

Pinterest is taking big data to another level. The social network has just announced a new visual search feature: a search tool that will allow users to select just a portion of an image, and then look for other similar images within the site. In collaboration with members of the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center, Pinterest uses deep machine learning to learn image features based on their richly annotated dataset of billions of Pins. Those features are then used to create a similarity score between any two images. The result is that if you see a lamp you love in a pin of a living room, you can select the lamp, and search for other similar lamps — as well as where to buy them. Facebook is doing more with photos, too. In a separate announcement, Facebook has added a new feature to its Messenger app that will look at your phone’s camera roll for any photos you may have snapped of your Facebook friends, and then prompt you to share them with those friends. Facebook says it is solving a problem of the digital age: that you may have dozens of photos of friends on your phone that you never get around to sharing. Facebook’s powerful facial recognition algorithm hopes to make that a problem of the past by recognizing your friends and prompting you to share the photos. Users can opt out of facial recognition, and users must opt in to the new Photo Magic feature to get notifications about images they may want to share. But Facebook isn’t the only one putting the new algorithms to work. A recent update to the Photos app included with the Mac OS offers a smart album called “selfies” that — you guessed it — picks out all the photos it believes you’ve taken of yourself. In both cases, the technology represents yet another step forward in treating photos as quantifiable data. Algorithms are becoming increasingly intelligent and able to help us understand what or who (in Facebook’s case) is in a photo or video. Until now. Now, photos can be analyzed by ‘robot algorithms’ to give them structure — what’s in it, what color is it, where was it taken, who is in it, are the people pulling a happy or sad face, etc. This opens up an entirely new realm of data to mine for insights. And social media is at the very forefront of applying the technology.

Americans among the injured in the Paris attacks

"The‎ United States Embassy in Paris is working round the clock to assist American citizens affected by this tragedy," Toner said in a statement. "‎The U.S. government is working closely with French authorities to identify American victims. We are aware there are Americans among the injured, and are offering them the full range of consular assistance." In Paris, a Syrian passport was found near the body of an attacker outside the Stade de France, according to a police source, CNN affiliate France 2 said. Multiple local media are reporting the same. Also on Saturday, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the state of emergency in France could mean restrictions on people's movements, among other measures. Border controls were tightened as of Friday, and the gendarmerie paramilitary police are on heightened alert, he said.

ISIS Claims Responsibility for Paris Attack

SINONE, Iraq — The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Saturday for the catastrophic attacks in the French capital, calling them “the first of the storm” and mocking France as a “capital of prostitution and obscenity,” according to statements released in multiple languages on one of the terror group’s encrypted messaging accounts. The remarks came in a communiqué published in Arabic, English and French on the Islamic State’s Telegram account and then distributed via their supporters on Twitter, according to a transcript provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist propaganda. An earlier statement was released but was deemed unlikely to be authentic because of anomalies in the language used, as well as an error in a date provided, according to experts on jihadist propaganda. The statement was released on the same Telegram channel that was used to claim responsibility for the crash of a Russian jet over the Sinai Peninsula two weeks ago, killing 224 people. As in that case, it made the announcement in multiple languages and audio recordings.

Paris rocked by explosions and deadly shootings

More than 120 people were killed in attacks across Paris on Friday night. President François Hollande called the attacks an “act of war” and blamed the Islamic State. The authorities continued to look for possible accomplices of the eight attackers known so far. In the past, Francis has described global violence in the 21st century as a “third word war.” Asked whether he saw the attacks in Paris as an another element of that war, he said, “This is a piece of it.”

U.S. Steps Up Its Attacks on ISIS

ERBIL, Iraq — The United States and its allies have sharply increased their airstrikes against the sprawling oil fields that the Islamic State controls in eastern Syria in an effort to disrupt one of the terrorist group’s main sources of revenue, American officials said this week. For months, the United States has been frustrated by the Islamic State’s ability to keep producing and exporting oil — what Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter recently called “a critical pillar of the financial infrastructure” of the group — which generates about $40 million a month, or nearly $500 million a year, according to Treasury Department estimates. While the American-led air campaign has conducted periodicLt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the head of that campaign, headquartered in Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, said in an interview last week that allied warplanes are intensifying attacks on a series of fixed sites such as oil-production facilities, bomb-making factories and other so-called critical nodes that support the Islamic State’s war effort. The revamped plan for attacking the oil-production sites comes after weeks of intense study of eight major fields — Omar, Tanak, El Isbah, Sijan, Jafra, Azraq, Barghooth and Abu Hardan — to determine how to inflict more financial pain on the Islamic State, American officials said. Instead of putting the group’s oil-production capability out of action for days, the new goal is to knock out specific installations for six months to a year, the officials said. This involves targeting fuel oil separators and elements of pumping stations at sites in Islamic State-controlled areas of Deir el-Zour, a city on the Euphrates River near the eastern border with Iraq. At the same time, the United States shifted some of its surveillance and reconnaissance planes from bases in the Persian Gulf to Incirlik air base in Turkey, a much shorter flight to Syria to allow planes to spend more time lingering over their targets. The new operation is called Tidal Wave II, named after Operation Tidal Wave, the World War II campaign to hit Romania’s oil industry and thus hurt Nazi Germany. Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, who in September became the commander of the international coalition’s effort in Iraq and Syria, came up with the name. Much of the initial targeting was done in South Carolina at Shaw Air Force Base, which has become a leading symbol of the military’s ability to carry out global operations from afar. One of the main objectives for the scores of analysts and planners at the air base has been to attack its ability to produce and sell oil. In the air campaign’s first three months, for instance, allied warplanes damaged or destroyed more than two dozen smaller mobile refineries and about twice as many collection points where drivers dump their crude oil to be hauled to refineries. airstrikes against oil refineries and other production facilities in eastern Syria that the group controls, the organization’s engineers have been able to quickly repair damage, and keep the oil flowing, American officials said. The Obama administration has also balked at attacking the Islamic State’s fleet of tanker trucks — its main distribution network — fearing civilian casualties. But now the administration has decided to increase the attacks and focus on inflicting damage that takes longer to fix or requires specially ordered parts, American officials said.The first evidence of the new strategy came on Oct. 21, when B-1 bombers and other allied warplanes hit 26 targets in the Omar oil field, one of the two largest oil-production sites in all of Syria. American military analysts estimate the Omar field generates $1.7 million to $5.1 million per month for the Islamic State. French warplanes struck another oil field nearby earlier this week.The goal of the operation over the next several weeks is to cripple eight major oil fields, about two-thirds of the refineries and other oil-production sites controlled by the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL. “We intend to shut it all down,” Col. Steven H. Warren, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said in an email on Thursday. More broadly, the intensified targeting of one of the militant group’s major financing sources is part of the Obama administration’s effort to accelerate the pace of the anti-Islamic State campaign. The campaign against the militant group also includes helping Kurdish fighters retake the Iraqi border town of Sinjar, and sending some 50 Special Operations troops to assist opposition fighters in eastern Syria as well as the air campaign. Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the head of that campaign, headquartered in Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, said in an interview last week that allied warplanes are intensifying attacks on a series of fixed sites such as oil-production facilities, bomb-making factories and other so-called critical nodes that support the Islamic State’s war effort. The revamped plan for attacking the oil-production sites comes after weeks of intense study of eight major fields — Omar, Tanak, El Isbah, Sijan, Jafra, Azraq, Barghooth and Abu Hardan — to determine how to inflict more financial pain on the Islamic State, American officials said. Instead of putting the group’s oil-production capability out of action for days, the new goal is to knock out specific installations for six months to a year, the officials said. This involves targeting fuel oil separators and elements of pumping stations at sites in Islamic State-controlled areas of Deir el-Zour, a city on the Euphrates River near the eastern border with Iraq. At the same time, the United States shifted some of its surveillance and reconnaissance planes from bases in the Persian Gulf to Incirlik air base in Turkey, a much shorter flight to Syria to allow planes to spend more time lingering over their targets. The new operation is called Tidal Wave II, named after Operation Tidal Wave, the World War II campaign to hit Romania’s oil industry and thus hurt Nazi Germany. Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, who in September became the commander of the international coalition’s effort in Iraq and Syria, came up with the name. Much of the initial targeting was done in South Carolina at Shaw Air Force Base, which has become a leading symbol of the military’s ability to carry out global operations from afar. One of the main objectives for the scores of analysts and planners at the air base has been to attack its ability to produce and sell oil. In the air campaign’s first three months, for instance, allied warplanes damaged or destroyed more than two dozen smaller mobile refineries and about twice as many collection points where drivers dump their crude oil to be hauled to refineries. Now that targeting is being intensified. “The art we had of building target sets and doing deep studies on adversaries, in some cases was a lost art,” General Brown said. “What targets are we not striking that we could go strike? How do we bring all the intelligence together?” On the Oct. 21 mission, American aircraft struck Islamic State-controlled oil refineries, command and control centers, and transportation infrastructure in the Omar oil field, which produced about 30,000 barrels a day when it was fully functioning. More recently, the field produced about a third of that or less, analysts said. “It was very specific targets that would result in long-term incapacitation of their ability to sell oil, to get it out of the ground and transport it,” Maj. Michael Filanowski, a military operations officer, told reporters in Baghdad after the strike. The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said on Tuesday that his nation’s warplanes had attacked more oil targets in the same region. It was France’s fourth wave of strikes in Syria since President François Hollande decided in September to join the campaign there against the Islamic State, and the second in as many days. American commanders cautioned that it may take some time to gauge the impact of the new targeting, given the financial reserves the militant group has built up. Unlike measuring the immediate impact of bombing tanks or soldiers, “it might be longer to feel the effect of oil fields,” General Brown said.