Mr. Brown, Mrs. Merkel, Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Berlusconi European leaders mounted a united front against the global financial crisis Sunday, proposing sweeping new market regulations, but it remained unclear whether economic giants like the United States and China would go along. Heads of government and finance ministers from Europe’s largest economies joined German Chancellor [...]
Archive for February, 2009
EU backs blanket financial regulation
Posted in Economy and business on February 22, 2009 | Comments Off
Kenya’s continuing tribal divide
Posted in Politics on February 22, 2009 | Comments Off
Next week marks a year since Kenya’s political rivals, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, signed a power-sharing agreement designed to end the violence between their tribal allies. Pascale Harter went back to the scene of some of the worst violence to see if there really has been an attempt at reconciliation. Houses were burned [...]
Bush declines hardware store job
Posted in Other on February 22, 2009 | Comments Off
A new look for the former president? George W Bush has paid a jokey visit to a hardware store in Dallas, Texas, which offered him a job as a greeter. The former US president entered the Elliott’s outlet with his security detail saying “I’m looking for a job”, store manager Andrea Bond said. The [...]
Spaceage and efficient, Aptera gears up for launch
Posted in Energy and Environment on February 22, 2009 | Comments Off
The Aptera 2e electric vehicle is driven down a road in Carlsbad, California February 13, 2009. Thousands of miles west of Detroit, a California start-up hopes to find a market for a three-wheeled, ultra-efficient, downright odd-looking car among consumers sick of spending their hard-earned cash at the gas pump. The Aptera is an egg-shaped two-seater [...]
The City of Angels readies Wagner’s mythic Ring Cycle for 2010 festival.
Posted in Arts and Entertainment, tagged Wagner on February 22, 2009 | Comments Off
Achim Freyer: The German director, designer, and painter is the creative force behind the latest rendition of Wagner’s ‘Das Rheingold,’ opening at the L.A. Opera. Standing in the darkened wings of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where the Los Angeles Opera is readying its upcoming production of “Das Rheingold,” it’s easy to feel the vastness of [...]
China, taking advantage of global recession, goes on a buying spree
Posted in Economy and business, tagged China on February 22, 2009 | Comments Off
General Motors is doing it. The world’s second-largest mining group is doing it. Russia, Brazil and Venezuela are doing it. And China is loving it. Squeezed between falling profits and the credit crunch, a growing number of troubled corporations and countries are turning to cash-rich China for a bailout. And with foreign assets cheaper than [...]
reCaptcha: How to turn blather into books
Posted in Computers on February 22, 2009 | Comments Off
Von Ahn: The professor invented reCaptcha in 2007. Since then, its users have translated 5 billion words. When you buy a concert ticket on Ticketmaster, post something for sale on Craigslist, or poke an old friend on Facebook, you may not know it, but you’re helping to put millions of books online in a vast [...]
Amid big bank turmoil, tiny First Green Bank opens
Posted in Economy and business on February 22, 2009 | Comments Off
In keeping with its environmental message, First Green Bank’s courier car is a hybrid Prius. The bank opened Feb. 17. In the same week that Citigroup pulled Wall Street to new lows, that talk of nationalizing banks reached new highs, and the Obama administration struggled with resolving their “toxic assets,” tiny First Green Bank opened its [...]
British safari park ranger gives a relaxing foot massage… to a LION
Posted in Strange but true on February 22, 2009 | Comments Off
Most people shy away from giving their partner a foot massage let alone dishing one out to a 40 stone killing machine. But British park ranger Alex Larenty is made of sterner stuff and has no qualms about gently rubbing the paws of a lion under his care. The 50-year-old regularly treats Jamu to a [...]
This Is Just to Say
Posted in Poetry on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold William Carlos Williams
A life-or-death flight
Posted in History, Popular culture on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
‘Wop’ May received his nickname from a young cousin who was unable to pronounce Wilfrid. With those valiant words, on New Year’s Day, 1929, Alberta bush pilot Wilfrid (Wop) May committed to an unprecedented medical rescue mission: To fly an open-cockpit airplane almost 1,000 kilometres in the dead of winter to a northern town threatened [...]
Detective attacks trial judge for his comments
Posted in Law on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
Officers were accused of not wearing protective suits at the bomb site. The detective who led the investigation into the Omagh bombing has made an extraordinary personal attack on the judge who tried the case, demanding that he retract his criticisms of two police witnesses in the failed murder prosecution. Norman Baxter, a former chief [...]
Cartoonists treading lightly when drawing Obama
Posted in Politics, tagged Cartoons, Obama on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
Cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz was in front of a classroom full of black and Latino kids, drawing presidents. He sketched Bush, then Clinton. Next came his favorite, the man he voted for: Obama.”Hey, those lips are big,” Alcaraz heard a black girl say from the back of the room. Alcaraz was disturbed. “I try to bend [...]
State Secrets? Let the Courts Weigh In.
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Politics, tagged State secrets on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
When most people think of “state secrets,” they no doubt envision military plans for troop movements in wartime or back-channel diplomatic maneuvering. But in fact, most claims of state secrets pertain not to the dramatic undercover actions of spy novels, but to civil matters. And thanks to a little-known, half-century-old case, the U.S. government has [...]
Peregrine falcons on a wing and a prayer
Posted in Natural sciences, Photo galleries on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
They’re the fastest creatures in the world, a symbol of wild, untamed nature, but the ability to fly at 180mph didn’t stop the merciless extermination of the peregrine falcon. For decades the birds suffered from illegal killing by gamekeepers and landowners, the depredations of egg collectors and lethal pesticides that poisoned them in their thousands. [...]
First baby meerkats in nine years born in zoo
Posted in Natural sciences on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
Brother and sister Zanzibar and Nairobi are already a huge hit with visitors to Taronga Zoo, in Sydney. At just 28 days old the tiny creatures can fit easily into the hand of keeper Bobby-Jo Vial who is hoping the offspring will signal the start of a breeding frenzy. “I’m extremely thrilled, I’m over the [...]
Shortlist of six of the nation’s strangest book titles revealed
Posted in Other on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
In fact with names such as Curbside Consultation of the Colon and Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring, it is a wonder they will sell at all. But they have been picked by The Bookseller Magazine for a shortlist of the strangest book titles published this year. Previous winners of the accolade, run by The Bookseller magazine, [...]
An intemperate judge
Posted in Law, Weird cases on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
A Nevada judge is deposed from the bench after a tribunal finds her ‘boorish’ and ‘disrespectful’ Elizabeth Halverson, a district judge in Nevada, recently appeared before a disciplinary tribunal charged with 14 counts of misconduct. Her lawyer noted that “she is not perfect” but, after considering the evidence, the commission went a bit further, finding [...]
The Wild Old Wicked Man
Posted in Poetry on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
‘Because I am mad about women I am mad about the hills,’ Said that wild old wicked man Who travels where God wills. ‘Not to die on the straw at home. Those hands to close these eyes, That is all I ask, my dear, From the old man in the skies.’ Day-break and [...]
The Gamble: How Sean MacFarland’s tactics turned Iraq’s tide of violence
Posted in Conflicts and wars, tagged Iraq on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
In this exclusive extract from The Gamble: General Petraeus and the untold story of the American surge in Iraq 2006-2008, author Thomas E. Ricks reveals how a young American colonel assigned to the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi in 2006 developed the tactics that changed the course of the war in Iraq. A LIGHT IN RAMADI [...]
UCLA class project: Find Bin Laden
Posted in Other on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
Parachinar, 12 miles from Tora Bora, Afghanistan, is Osama bin Laden’s last confirmed location. ______ UCLA geographers think they have a good idea where Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been hiding. Using standard geographical tools routinely employed to locate endangered species and fugitive criminals, the group said there is a high probability [...]
Mice in the courtroom
Posted in Law, Strange but true on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
There are so many mice in one Florida county courthouse that they’ve been seen falling from ceiling tiles. One judge at the Palm Beach County Courthouse calls it an infestation. Some staffers say they check their handbags for stowaways before leaving the building each day. Court employees and lawyers say the rodents scuttle down corridors, [...]
Alan Keyes stokes Obama birth certificate controversy
Posted in Law, Politics, tagged Birth certificate, Obama on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
The controversy over the validity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate is back on a burner with firebrand conservative Alan Keyes making serious new charges. In a video released Friday, Keyes, who lost to Obama in the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois that launched the new president’s national political career, calls Obama a communist and [...]
Fix-It Nation: In Tough Times, Tailors and Cobblers Thrive
Posted in Economy and business, Living on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
Joe Lynch, owner of Glenn’s Shoe Repair, replaces a band of rubber on a snowcat boot at his shop in Kalispell, Mont. Where’s the trendiest place to shop these days? Try your closet. To wit: Kelly Thorsen, a school secretary from Lakeland, Fla., needed a nice pair of boots for the holiday season. A new [...]
U.S. agrees to release British detainee
Posted in Law on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
The British government announced Friday afternoon that it had reached an agreement with the United States for the release of Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian-born British citizen, from Guantánamo Bay. Mohammed, who has been detained for seven years, has been at the center of a diplomatic standoff between the Bush administration since the Britain government first requested [...]
Is anything made in the U.S.A. anymore? You’d be surprised
Posted in Economy and business on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
An Intel microprocessor lab in Hillsboro, Oregon. Much U.S. manufacturing is of high-end products like computer chips. Low-end goods can be made more cheaply elsewhere. It seems as if the country that used to make everything is on the brink of making nothing. In January, 207,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs vanished in the largest one-month drop [...]
Orchestrating the comeback of the whooping crane
Posted in Energy and Environment, Natural sciences on February 21, 2009 | Comments Off
An Operation Migration pilot guiding whooping cranes to their winter nesting grounds. The group is one of several trying to bring the birds back to eastern North America. People started gathering at the Lighthouse Missionary Baptist Church in southwestern Kentucky before sunrise. It was the first Friday in December, 23 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 5 Celsius) [...]
2,500 languages under threat worldwide as migrants head for city
Posted in Language on February 20, 2009 | Comments Off
On the way out … Khomani men visit ancestral burial grounds in South Africa. From the tumultuous middle ages to the mid-20th century, Livonian flourished as the mother tongue of thousands in a province on the eastern Baltic coast. Invaders came and went; rulers were appointed and overthrown; but the odd-sounding linguistic hybrid that a [...]
To walk abroad is, not with eyes, But thoughts, the fields to see and prize; Else may the silent feet, Like logs of wood, Move up and down, and see no good Nor joy nor glory meet. Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change, But cannot see, though very strange The glory [...]
How Obama Plays, or Gets Played, Abroad
Posted in Politics on February 20, 2009 | Comments Off
ASIAN TREMORS China’s cooperation to limit North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, on display in a Pyongyang stadium, is one item for President Obama to bargain for with America’s biggest creditor. We’re about to find out what the Obama Factor is worth around the world. The Factor is all the good will, popular support and considerable charm [...]
