Maiello: As If The Homeless Don't Have It Hard Enough
Cleveland: Keeping Christmas at Home
Ramona: The War on Happy Holidays
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Hits of the Day
Bill Gates Begins "Nefarious World Domination Plot, Phase One", BBC Buries Lede
by DF 2/5/2009 - 6:12 pm
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From the Eccentric_Billionaire++ department:
The 2009 TED talks are going on this week. Apparently, during his talk on fighting malaria, Bill Gates unleashed a jar full of mosquitoes genetically engineered to implant nano-bots in their victims. Gates laughed maniacally and revealed the details of his plot, phase one of which involves the nano-bots infecting their hosts with a fanatical devotion to Windows Vista.
J/K! As the BBC reports, Gates told his audience that there's no reason only poor people should have to get malaria. Thankfully, Gates' mosquitoes were pre-screened for malaria. TED curator Chris Anderson handed news agencies the lede on a silver platter:
TED curator Chris Anderson quipped that when a video of the talk is posted on its website it would be headlined "Gates releases more bugs into the world."
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In the News
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One in three children do not officially exist, UNICEF...
United Nations News Centre, Dec. 11, 2013
Nearly 230 million children under the age of five have not had their births officially recorded, excluding them from education, health care and social security, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) today reported.
That is approximately one in three of all children under five who are unregistered or lack proof of registration, the agency said in a report released to coincide with its 67th birthday.
“Birth registration is more than just a right. It’s how societies first recognize and acknowledge a child’s identity and existence,” said Geeta Rao Gupta, UNICEF Deputy...
Read the article at http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=46713&Cr=UNICEF&Cr1=#.UqkxrycQeig -
Can Science Fiction Survive in Saudi Arabia?
"There is almost no science fiction in the region -- it does not exist as a genre," Bahjatt told Foreign Policy. After seeing the immense popularity of Hawjan, he stressed that the dearth can't be attributed to a lack of demand and instead blamed it on the restrictions of conservative Islamic society. "In the past two decades in the region, imagination has been systematically shut down ... I think part of it might be religious. Rather than go ahead and try to [understand] religion on their own, people started relying on scholars to tell them."
It was this "shutdown" of imagination -- and its implications for progress and innovation -- that...
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Ukraine Forces Retreat, Ceding Square to Protests
By By David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, Dec. 11, 2013
KIEV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian authorities’ surprise decision to storm the central square occupied by antigovernment protesters here early Wednesday sharply escalated tensions with Western leaders, while an equally abrupt pullout by the police after a nine-hour siege created a growing sense of unpredictability about President Viktor F. Yanukovich’s handling of the crisis.
The strange enforcement action, which antagonized and energized demonstrators but did not clear them from the square, added to the problems of Ukraine’s economy. The country was already facing a severe cash shortage but in recent days has seen its borrowing costs rise to record...
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From weight loss to fundraising, 'ironic effects...
Growing body of research shows how efforts backfire in sneaky ways: we fail in our best efforts because of our best efforts
By Oliver Burkman, theguardian.com, 11 Dec., 2013
- Stigmatising obesity makes overweight people eat more, not less
- Supporting a good cause on Facebook makes people less likely to give money or time
- Awareness campaigns get forgotten by the people who need them most
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Industry Privately Skeptical of Shale GasOver the past six months, The New York Times reviewed thousands of pages of documents related to shale gas, including hundreds of industry e-mails, internal agency documents and reports by analysts. A selection of these documents is included here; names and identifying information have been redacted to protect the confidentiality of sources, many of whom were not authorized by their employers to communicate with The Times. ...There are 487 documents in PDF format. Here is the overview for number 8:Below are two e-mails from a Texas-based oil and gas company [employee] who previously was a senior official at Enron. He says that the economics of the Haynesville shale in Louisiana and Texas do...
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