« April 2009 | Main | June 2009 »
Maybe it's just me, but our friend in fantasy land seems immeasurably more creepy than he was when I was a kid, but maybe I'm tainted by the cynicism of approaching middle age. Still, the man can rock it Herbie Hancock style.
From DeZeen:
"Designer Eduardo McIntosh has proposed a way of putting all the functions of a home into a single chair. Called Autonomous Living Unit, the project envisages furniture that could be installed in derelict buildings and deserted housing projects to “provide for the basic needs of the 21st century human being."
This home looks familiar. Talk about low environmental impact. I wonder where they put the fifty inch plasma?
From the Telegraph UK:
"I've just been talking to a very clever man. He's called Thompson Ayodele, he's from Nigeria and he thinks that overseas aid is making African countries poorer. The statistics he produces are jaw-dropping. They suggest a direct correlation between the receipt of development assistance and low growth. This is true whether you compare neighbouring countries, or whether you look at different periods within the same country. Foreign aid, he suggests, isn't useless; it's actively harmful. It discourages enterprise, fosters dependency and bolsters corrupt regimes. A similar correlation exists between debt remission and insolvency: countries which have their bills periodically written off become re-indebted more quickly than countries which don't."Somewhat amusing a journalist would a.) treat this particularly revelation as new and B.) at no point think to himself that maybe, just maybe, creating debt-crippled nations is something "developed" nations do intentionally.
From UTV:
"Rodrigo Rosenberg, a middle-aged Guatemalan lawyer, has become an unlikely YouTube star in macabre circumstances. In a video recorded last Friday at the offices of a friend, he sits behind a desk and talks at the camera for 15 minutes."If you are hearing this message," Rosenberg begins, "unfortunately, it is because I have been murdered by the president's private secretary, Gustavo Alejos, and his partner, Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom [Guatemala's president and first lady]."
Two days later, on Sunday, Rosenberg was shot while riding his bicycle in Guatemala City. He died on the street.
"I do not want to be a hero," Rosenberg says at one point during the sensational video that was distributed at his funeral on Monday, but he has now become a martyr in a nation weary of drug running, money laundering and corruption, and with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Rosenberg explains that he was a lawyer who would have preferred to continue quietly practising his profession, but it was the murder of two clients in April that led directly to his own death.
According to Rosenberg, one client, Khalil Musa, was a successful businessman who had been invited to join the board of the agricultural bank, known as Banrural, where he discovered that drugs money - Guatemala is a key transit point for drugs traffic to the US - was being channelled into "non-existent" social programmes run by the first lady."
From CNN:
"The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.Yet atheists are accused of having lost their moral center?More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did."
