“Sri Lanka’s Srebrenica”
One hundred thousand ethnic Tamils are trapped between Tamil Tiger forces and the advancing Sri Lankan army. The world is on the brink of a brutal massacre and nobody cares…

Defending Milton Friedman
…isn’t easy when his most enthusiastic supporters ended up ruining the global economy. And yet, “by making a principled case for free markets, international trade, and individual rights, Friedman actually helped create the opposite of global misery. Millions of people continue to be lifted out of poverty worldwide based on these principles. If more politicians had listened to Friedman’s warnings about loose money and ill-conceived interventions in the economy, we might have avoided the latest round of economic misery as well…”

Can we save the world by polluting more?
Until the 1980s, lead was a standard ingredient in gasoline, and its presence in air pollution may actually have caused global cooling during the mid part of the twentieth century. Ironically, when we were a more polluting society, we were doing more about global warming than we are now…

What it takes to be a cop
“A Federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by a man who was barred from the New London police force because he scored too high on an intelligence test…”

One big prison
Eritrea “is widely using military conscription without end, as well as arbitrary detention of its citizens, says Human Rights Watch. Hundreds of Eritrean refugees forcibly repatriated from countries like Libya, Egypt and Malta face arrest and torture upon their return…”

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009
“Ballard was a poet of the occult fear, the subliminal horror. His work explored the unexpressed, anarchic ­euphoria lurking in the interstices of modern, rational civilization, the longing to smash things up…”

Google buys books…all books
“The Authors Guild — which represents a measly eight thousand writers — brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of “orphan works” whose rightsholders can’t be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won’t ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results…”

The Hugo Chavez Book Club
“A thirty-six-year-old historical tract attacking the imperialist exploitation of Latin America has become an improbable overnight bestseller after the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez abruptly presented a copy to Barack Obama…”

Against his wishes
Vladimir Nabokov had wanted his final book, The Original of Laura, to be tossed in the garbage bin. But then, Nabokov said the same thing about Lolita, and now The Original of Laura is hitting the shevles…

The resilience of life
Two million years ago, a community of microbes was trapped underneath an ice sheet in minus-ten-degree weather in Antarctica. They’re still there today, eking out a living by breathing iron… More…

A sister’s secrets
“Sister Jesme says when she became a nun she discovered priests were forcing novices to have sex with them. There were also secret homosexual relationships among the nuns and at one point she was forced into such a relationship by another nun who told her she preferred this kind of arrangement as it ruled out the possibility of pregnancy…”

The evolution of Hezbollah
“Political engagement has seen Hezbollah change from a revolutionary party that once believed in establishing an Islamic state in Lebanon, into a political group involved in daily governmental politics, unions, and concerned with its supporters’ demands…”

Hope no more
“A growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard. This is a good thing. If the superfan culture that brought Obama to power is going to transform itself into an independent political movement, one fierce enough to produce programmes capable of meeting the current crises, we are all going to have to stop hoping and start demanding…”

At long last
The Obama administration has announced the US’s first plans for a nationawide network of high-speed rail… But can it work? “The bullet trains of Japan and the TGV superfast trains of France are impressive. But they serve smaller areas that are far more densely populated…”

Are the death penalty and war on drugs just too expensive for hard times?
“Trenchant ethical matters such as the death penalty, the legalization of drugs and global warming have all shifted to the side as the economic crisis dominates the centre of our attention. Moments of economic catastrophe have a way of sharpening priorities, separating necessities from frills. As the long, slow slide into recession gets deeper and more pronounced, an uncomfortable reality seems to be emerging: that moral debate is a luxury for more prosperous times…”

The “socialist” tag backfires
“A new Rasmussen poll finds that while fifty-three percent of Americans think ‘capitalism’ is better than ’socialism,’ twenty percent think socialism is better … All the conservative shouting about how Obama is a socialist has had the unexpected effect of educating a sizable portion of the public to think of socialism as synonymous with ‘European socialism’ (i.e., democracy plus private industry plus nice, soft, 400-thread safety nets) instead of Soviet-style ’socialism’…”

Israel gets ready
“The Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government … Two nationwide civil defence drills will help to prepare the public for the retaliation that Israel could face…”

Prison role reversal
The number of black people in American prisons on drug crimes is declining, while the number of imprisoned white people is on the rise. Could the switch from crack to meth be behind the trend?

And finally: Amazing images of the Aurora Borealis…

And finally finally: A public health ad in Botswana offers advice on safe sex: Just pleasure yourself…

And finally finally finally: Garry Trudeau goes gonzo, and covers the G-20 summit–as Roland Hedley…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Newsburger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.