LIBERATION has proved dangerous for the residents of Tullaban, a farming hamlet on the outskirts of Mosul. Last autumn, as the push began to wrest the city from Islamic State (IS), villagers returned home to find no sign of the jihadists who had seized it back in 2014. Nor, though, could they spot the booby traps and mines the IS fighters had laid as they fled.
Hidden in the doorways of houses and buried in nearby fields, the villagers only learned of their presence the hard way. “When the IS first came this way, we fled because we knew how they were beheading people,” says Ali Jassem, 80, standing among houses flattened by air strikes and pockmarked with machine gunfire. “Then we came back, and four people were killed while going inside their homes.”
Tullaban, which used to be on IS’s front line, is now being cleared of landmines and booby traps by the Mines Advisory Group, a British charity dedicated to making post-conflict zones safe again. But for all that it still resembles a battlefield, both the hinterland of Mosul and eastern parts of the city itself are seeing life to return to normal in areas freed from IS. It is...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2kMxVfp
DESPITE its having been available for 18 months, three out of four PC owners have not bothered to upgrade their computers to the latest version of Microsoft's operating system, Windows 10. More than 700m of the world's 1.5bn or so computers continue to run on Windows 7, a piece of software three generations old. A further 300m users have stuck with other versions—half of them stubbornly (and rashly) clinging to 16-year-old Windows XP that Microsoft pensioned off three years ago. The business world has been even more recalcitrant. In a recent study by Softchoice, an info-tech consultancy, corporate computers were found to be running a whole gamut of legacy versions of Windows. Fewer than 1% of them had been upgraded to Windows 10.
That said, some 400m or so copies of Windows 10 are now thought to be in circulation. Normally, such a market penetration, after only 18 months, would be considered a huge success. It is what the warmly welcomed Windows 7 achieved during its first 18 months, and three times that chalked up by Windows XP. However, though XP started slowly in 2001, it went on to become Microsoft's most successful operating system of all...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/2jR1xK3