flickering pictures

This summer, the Iranian government brutally suppressed citizen unrest following an election that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won in a landslide. The consensus — on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between — is that the election was rigged.
Five months later, the anti-Ahmedinejad protests have become more muted — probably due in […]

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From CNN:

PHOENIX, Arizona (CNN) — A man toting an assault rifle was among a dozen protesters carrying weapons while demonstrating outside President Obama’s speech to veterans on Monday, but no laws were broken.

I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous about that sentence — the fact that a guy thought it was okay to bring an assault […]

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Go on, find Palau on a map without Googling it — I double dog dare you.
Its 21,000 citizens have only had a country for 15 years, but the Pacific mini-state of Palau is already distinguishing itself by welcoming 17 Chinese Guantanamo inmates with open arms, and inviting them to settle wherever they like on its […]

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Islamic literature is full of references to “jinn” — spirit beings, both good and evil, that can move objects, cause misfortune or even possess people. Tom A. Peter at the fledgling Global Post has put together an interesting (if slightly fluffy) piece on a Jordanian exorcist who runs a hopping business casting Regan MacNeil-type […]

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The New Scientist has put together a neat-o graphic detailing how many years we can sustain our current consumption of lead, zinc, aluminum and other metals. If they’re right, we’ll run out of chromium, copper, antimony, zinc, uranium, tin, tantalum, silver, platinum, lead, indium and gold within the next 42 years, with huge implications […]

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The constant hijackings off the Somali coast aren’t really news — or rather, they’re news that everyone else is already reporting, and I don’t usually go into that sort of thing here.
But every time I hear about one of these hijackings, I wonder why people keep sailing their tankers and transport ships into the most […]

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James Murray, an emeritus professor at both Oxford and the University of Washington, claims that his new “Murray marriage equation” can predict the success or failure of any romantic relationship 94 per cent of the time. He breaks people into three categories — respectful Validators, brooding Conflict Avoiders and less-than-pleasant Volatiles — and after […]

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FlowingData seems to have gotten itself up and running again, and contrary to my previous post, it features 27 neat-o infographics that explain the worldwide financial meltdown, not 16. Very much worth a look.

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To voice its displeasure about joint South Korean-U.S. military exercises, North Korea is threatening to shoot down civilian airplanes that venture near its airspace — even if they don’t actually enter it. Russia, China, South Korea and Japan may have something to say about that.
From the BBC:

In the latest of a series of bellicose […]

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This would be hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying.
The BBC reports:

HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas earlier this month.
[…] The submarines are equipped with sonar to detect other vessels nearby but our correspondent said it be might the case that the anti-sonar devices, meant to hide […]

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