Interesting: UK newspaper, The Guardian, is running a special report on the future of the monarchy (original link is dead - link to internet archive) and argues that in the new millennium Britain should be given the choice whether to keep the royal family or become a republic. It will also be backing a legal challenge to the Act of Settlement, which excludes Catholics and others from succession to the throne, on the grounds that it is incompatible with the European convention on human rights which recently became part of UK law.
A new TV ad aired in the Bay Area claims that HIV-positive gay and bi men can stop the AIDS epidemic. What's behind these ads?
Forget about litter. Forget about recycling. Get political.
More preposterous ideas from the Euro-buffoons: taxing email and text messages.
Dear Mr Barroso, have you ever heard of practicing what you preach? Obviously not.
Brand new Saturday morning cartoon entertainment for the whole family: Saddam and Osama.
The world has gone insane on a nuclear level.
Those World-Killing Chinese
William Gibson on the current war: Hammer, meet wasp’s nest.
Cross-border beach volleyball... neat.
In other news, armageddon is upon us…
A retired senior energy expert from the National Iranian Oil Co. says no more business as usual, peak oil is here now but politicians ignore bad news and the media ignore it for reasons of income.
Straight out of a James Bond story: Mount Weather could be Bush’s secret bunker.
This guy tells it exactly how it is: Honey, We Killed the Planet
An interesting animated map showing who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history.
Political instability threatens rainforests more than industry does.
An interesting study of Anti-Americanism around the world.
Michael Crichton, the world’s most popular technophobe.
Belgian minister for Energy Marc Verwilghen has just [got himself a giant gas-guzzling Audi Q7][1] (pdf) that emits between 282 to 326 grammes of CO2 per km. Meanwhile, Europe is trying to get emissions down to 120g/km, nice example from above. Oh yeah, and Al Gore has [the electricity bill][2] of a small village.
[1]: http://www.4x4info.be/pdf/20070228_CP_4x4info_Verwilghen_FR.pdf (Le Ministre de l'Energie s'offre un 4x4 energivore (PDF) [site language: French]) [2]: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2311302.ece (Gore faces up to inconvenient truth over his electricity bill [site language: English])
Pirates of the Mediterranean, a fascinating op-ed piece from the New York Times recounting the attack by a loosely connected group of people on the Roman port at Ostia, followed by a massive deployment of forces, a near-draining of Roman coffers, a loss of personal freedoms and accusations of traitorship for those who didn’t toe the party line. Sounds familiar?
More evidence that we’ll only end up closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
Three Swedish men have established a line of jeans made in North Korea and sold in Stockholm. But they weren’t prepared for the criticism their pants have produced.
A surprising threat to democracy: our brains.
I didn’t know this. Live Aid’s real effect on the ground was far from positive.
Christian Heilmann on the net neutrality ruling and the importance of free access to read and publish information.
How outrage culture, dogmatism and lack of context are killing discourse.
Trump got a better deal because his team went for click-bait and the facebook algorithms love that.
Nice rundown on the multiple advantages of discouraging city car use.
Reversing the smart city paradigm. Barcelona is moving from the surveillance capitalism model, where data is opaque and owned by subcontractors and third parties, to a model where citizens own their data.
A quick puzzle to tell whether you know what people are thinking. I seriously overthought this one before getting it wrong.
Photos of these modernist monuments are frequently shared without context or wrongly attributed to commissioning by Tito. Theirs is a story of historical erasure and lessons from the past we seem to be ignoring yet again.
As the amazon burns, don't count on our leaders to prevent our self-destruction. They're locked in to the system and the transnational corporations that govern it. They will not be the source of the radical changes needed.
Jeremy Lent argues the window for new ideas is opening now. We can still go both ways.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant.
They've pulled off the best trick ever: making it all about personal responsibility while they happily destroy the planet in the background. We need to attack the issue from all sides: personal change but, more importantly, system change.
Interesting story about the partially successful attempt to deport political dissidents from the USA one hundred years ago. Nothing really changes.
Take some time out to read this fascinating piece on the corrosive effect of management consultancies on how businesses are now run at the expense of the people working there.
I was completely out of the loop with TikTok and the various allegations concerning it. This substantial take from Stratechery gave me a much clearer picture.
Not the Onion:
Israeli officials denied that Netanyahu overuses his American hosts’ laundry services, calling the allegations “absurd,” but they acknowledged that he has been the target of laundry-related accusations in the past.
One of the clearest explanations I've seen for Brexit.
AI is definitely being overhyped these days, but there are still some impressive machine learning examples popping up. This real-time parody debate between Trump and Biden is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.
I just got round to reading this exhaustive investigation of the Nord Stream pipelines sabotage. It's quite a story and also a political powder keg.
Behind the scenes, though, you get clearer statements. Investigators from the BKA, the Federal Police and the Office of the Federal Prosecutor have few remaining doubts that a Ukrainian commando was responsible for blowing up the pipelines. A striking number of clues point to Ukraine, they say.
This is quite a story. I'm not surprised Hollywood wants to turn it into a film. Fugees founder Pras Michel faces up to 20 years in prison after being convicted of conducting an illegal foreign influence campaign with Malaysian financier Jho Low.
I didn't know the U.S. Capitol had its own mini underground rail network to shuttle people between buildings. I'm always fascinated by these independent networks.
