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Saudi rape case dropped in Spain

29 March 2012 Last updated at 10:26 ET

A court in Spain has dropped a rape case against a Saudi prince over "contradictions and vagueness" in evidence from the alleged victim.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world's richest men, was accused of raping the woman, a model, aboard a yacht moored off Ibiza in August 2008.

He denied the charge, saying he was not even in Spain at the time.

A judge ordered the case to be closed for lack of evidence in 2010 but it was re-opened on appeal from the plaintiff.

In its ruling released on Thursday, the provincial court on Palma de Majorca, capital of the Balearic Islands, ordered a stay of proceedings.

"In light of recent statements by the complainant, we cannot firmly establish with evidence what happened overnight August 11-12, 2008, on the yacht," it added.

The prince, 57, is pursuing criminal actions against the accuser, her mother and their lawyer, and professional sanctions against the lawyer for unethical behaviour.

He said in a statement that he had not even heard of the case against him until it was resurrected last September.

"No-one's character should be subject to such dishonest attacks," the statement added.

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Saudi rape case dropped in Spain

Spain Drops Rape Probe of Saudi Prince

A Spanish court has dropped a rape probe against a Saudi prince who is one of the world's richest people, saying his accuser's allegations are inconsistent and do not stand up.

The ruling clearing Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, 57, was dated March 26 and released Thursday by a court in Palma in Spain's Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean.

The drugging and sexual assault of a young Spanish model was alleged to have occurred aboard a yacht moored at the island of Ibiza in the wee hours of Aug. 12, 2008. A judge on the popular resort island quietly closed the probe in 2010, citing a lack of evidence.

However, a higher provincial court in the Balearic Islands, which include Ibiza, accepted an appeal by the plaintiff and issued an order in September 2011 instructing the same magistrate to resume the probe and question the prince as a suspect.

The prince was listed 29th on the latest Forbes list of the world's richest people ,with a net worth of $18 billion. He is a leading investor in both Citigroup and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media empire.

The prince said the court's final decision dismissing the allegations vindicates his argument that he was not even in Ibiza that day but rather in France with his wife, children, grandchildren and other witnesses.

The court in Palma said the accuser's version of events was riddled with inconsistencies in her several appearances to give testimony.

It said the woman did not initially accuse the prince by name as being her rapist. Rather, her lawyer did so much later. The court called this is a "procedural anomaly that since then has tainted the entire investigation."

The ruling also said she presented a photo of a group of people purporting to identify the prince as the man who allegedly raped her. There is an arrow pointing to a man in the background, and the word "rapist" written there. But the prince is standing in the foreground, front of that man.

The ruling says when asked about this, the accuser said it was her mother who drew the arrow on that and several other photos.

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Spain Drops Rape Probe of Saudi Prince

Social Marketing Strategies from Nonprofit Charity: Water – Video

27-03-2012 17:21 By Charlie Treadwell March 22nd is World Water Day, and water focused nonprofits around the world will bring to your attention that nearly one billion people on our planet still live without access to life's most basic need: clean, safe drinking water. These organizations need to capture your attention, access your network, and earn your dollars. Cisco supports many nonprofits with the shared mission of clean water (learn more here), but one specific organization caught my eye today, charity: water. charity: water has been transforming the world of nonprofit marketing through their dedicated focus to digital and social media marketing. Whether that's through MyCharityWater.org where you create a profile, start and manage a fundraising campaign and activate your network through Facebook, Twitter, and email. Or through WaterForward.org where individuals activate their social networks by paying it forward. WaterForward takes the individual's control and puts it in the hands of their friends and their network, incentivizing the social sharing many marketers dream of. Watch this video to learn more about WaterForward, and check out Cisco CTO, Padmasree Warrior's book. As you can see by these two examples, charity: water's unique strategies focus on the activating individuals and asking them to engage their network, because they know, like many marketers do, that the whole of a person's network is greater than the sum of it's parts. More digital and social marketers should take ...

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Social Marketing Strategies from Nonprofit Charity: Water - Video

How to Unleash the Power of Social Media Marketing

Unleash the Power of Social Media Marketing: Explosive Proven Strategies to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Campaign by Joe Praveen Sequeira is the definitive guide to taking the social media marketing bull by the horns and driving your business to success with a dynamic, multi-faceted strategy.

With everyone from multinational brands to teenagers with lots of free time blogging and posting on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, it can seem deceptively easy to use social media to your advantage. But, simply having a presence on the big interactive websites does nothing to ensure success. Business owners and marketing professionals who are serious about getting paying customers need the sort of detailed, solid advice that Joe Praveen Sequeira dishes up in Unleash the Power of Social Media Marketing.

Unleash the Power of Social Media Marketing provides tactics that will expose you to explosive, top tier strategies employed by the pros and transform your social media campaign into a systematic money engine! You will find some of the most powerful social marketing advice inside these pages that will help you catapult your business ahead of your competition.

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How to Unleash the Power of Social Media Marketing

Syncapse Launches SocialSYNC(TM) to Power Consumer Social CRM and Big Data Management for Global Brands

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire -03/29/12)- Syncapse Corp., the leading enterprise-grade social marketing solutions provider for the world's top marketers, today introduced SocialSYNC, a powerful data solution that enables big data management and moves brands forward into the world of social customer relationship management (CRM).

"Research in Motion is using Syncapse SocialSYNC technology to aggregate data across all our social channels to understand the impact of marketing efforts in the social space," said Phil Barrett, senior director digital marketing at Research in Motion. "We are utilizing these tools to understand the relative performance of global and regional activities, establish benchmarks, as well as start to understand the impact of our marketing efforts at the individual customer level."

SocialSYNC provides a powerful framework that pulls brands' unstructured social marketing data and content from third-party platforms and social media sites, and stores it in one managed, hosted and secure datacenter. This addition to the Syncapse Platform is designed to eliminate the data fragmentation that currently exists for brands as they ingest massive amounts of big data and content driven by disparate social applications. SocialSYNC allows global brands to compare campaign results from multiple channels side-by-side, and more accurately and effectively build a social data strategy linked to internal and external IT systems.

"Syncapse gives marketers a broad understanding of the social landscape," said Patricia Gottesman, CEO at Crimson Hexagon. "Crimson Hexagon's patented technology enhances that understanding using a library of global social media data from Twitter, Facebook and more to clarify the relationship between owned and earned social media."

SocialSYNC Becomes The Next Weapon For CMOs To Scale Technology Solutions Across The Enterprise

The world's largest corporations have many different brands that work with multiple technologies, social media sites, agencies and vendors to manage and maintain all of their social media accounts. This makes it extremely difficult for chief marketing officers to achieve marketing optimization and insights from a single global data center. The problem is further complicated by rapid change in the industry, new tools that manage different marketing functions, and new social media sites emerging in real-time. Each of the brands related services and agencies share data with them in a silo, making it virtually impossible for them to see the larger picture.

The SocialSYNC engines pull marketing and customer data from across the social marketing landscape -- including social media sites, paid and owned media analytics from third party vendors, web analytics, survey data and more. The engine standardizes and normalizes the data, which allows brands to more effectively compare campaigns across channels. The process, driven by Syncapse Global Services, opens the door for marketers to create powerful measurement visualizations, integrate social data across the enterprise and bridge social and traditional CRM into a powerful databank of customer preferences.

"The abundance of social media data available for brands creates a huge opportunity for them," said Michael Scissons, founder and CEO of Syncapse. "However, we're finding that our customers are inundated with it, and what's worse is that they were analyzing each data segment in separate silos. With SocialSYNC brand marketers are now able to visually analyze all of their social media data to compare campaigns and extract valuable metrics and insights that will drive the success of future campaigns. This new data management store technology will transform social media marketing for our customers."

Additional Key Features of SocialSYNC:

About Syncapse Corp.Founded in 2007, Syncapse is the global leader in enterprise social marketing solutions for the world's leading marketers. A SaaS-based solution, the Syncapse Platform provides the global social marketing infrastructure, data management, and measurement products that are transforming how companies build, manage, measure and analyze customer relationships. Backed by a powerful global services team and key partnerships with companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, Syncapse helps marketers better harness their social media and marketing programs. For more information, please visit, http://www.syncapse.com.

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Syncapse Launches SocialSYNC(TM) to Power Consumer Social CRM and Big Data Management for Global Brands