Tag: syria

Posted on

Endgame/Syria: The game

Games-for-Change facilitates the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts.imgres

Unlike the commercial gaming industry, Games-for-Change aims to leverage entertainment and engagement for social good.  What follows is an item on what they’ve been up to recently

“At GameTheNews.net we have been working on creating news-games for the past three months. We’ve covered a wide range of topics from solar power to the US election. However it was Endgame:Syria that got people talking and reopened the questions about games and reality Continue reading “Endgame/Syria: The game”

Posted on

The state department’s merry pranksters

At first the story was that the Syrian government has dropped hallucinogens on insurgents.

But now it seems that U.S. State Department official might have been the ones tripping, or at least imagining things.  Countering a story appearing earlier this week in Foreign Policy about the

imgres-2

mysterious properties of a substance called “Agent 15,” American officials now say the whole thing was a bit of an exaggeration. Or put in more official language, the report ”did not accurately convey the anecdotal information that we had received from a third party regarding an alleged incident in Syria.” As DangerRoom quoted the State Department, Continue reading “The state department’s merry pranksters”

Posted on

Syrian deaths more than reported

imgres-2“The world already believed Syria’s civil war to be monstrous, with nearly 45,000 slain,” reports todays Wired DangerRoom. “But when the United Nations plunged into the disparate databases cataloging the victims, it discovered there had been an awful oversight. The true death toll was more like 60,000 people, the data-mining operation revealed. And even that elevated total is likely to be low.

“The brutal truth is that no one really knows how many Syrians have died in dictator Bashar Assad’s brutal crackdown: Warzone death estimates are notoriously imprecise. By its own admission, the death toll compiled by the human rights tech group Benetech, on behalf of the UN, is inaccurate. But its assessment has the virtue of specificity, a factor that preempts some of the doubts raised about mortality estimates in other warzones. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called the study “a work in progress, not a final product.” Continue reading “Syrian deaths more than reported”