It works but slowly.

Definitely alpha level of development.

Mike Shepard |Washington Post Staff Writer |November 20
Wapo - Paulo Roberto Vieira stumbled into the Brazilian consulate on L Street NW bedraggled, nearly broke and at the end of his rope.

Dressed in a battered black leather jacket and scuffed black jeans, he told consular officials an almost unbelievable story -- that he had just ridden his motorcycle from his home town in southern Brazil to Washington, a monumental, 18,000-mile quest for official recognition of his life's proudest work, a vehicle accessory he says he invented.

- Hey Preacher, Leave those kids alone.
This week, the final phase of the atheist bus campaign will appear in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast – not on buses, but on billboards.

"Nobody would seriously describe a tiny child as a 'Marxist child' or an 'Anarchist child' or a 'Post-modernist child'. Yet children are routinely labelled with the religion of their parents. Guardian

Extraordinary microscope images

CNN - The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 26 journalists have been killed since 2005 in Mexico -- most of them while covering the crime or corruption beats. By comparison, 10 journalists were killed in the same time period while covering the war in Afghanistan.

For the second day in a row, the new bushfire warning system has been implemented down under.

The map shows all areas affected by the top three warning levels for Nov 20th - the first time I can recall seeing nearly 50% of Australia under immediate threat of bushfire, with almost 60% of the Aussie population living in that area. Night time temperature in Canberra today, Nov 19 is ~22C - the normal maximum November daytime temp. We are experiencing Jan/Feb daytime temps. It's going to be a long summer, and record high temps are likely to continue.

A familiar anthem to many. And an anthem that has permeated the armed forces possibly.
_______________________________________________________
ABC.net.au - The Pentagon has responded to the massacre at an army base in Texas by deciding to screen all United States defence services for staff who are unstable and potentially violent.

News of the urgent review broke as the Pentagon revealed that soldier suicides this year would set another record.

Last week, 13 people were killed at Fort Hood in Texas when an army psychiatrist allegedly opened fire.

I have been reading The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor written over half a century ago, and have been continually struck by Flannery's use of the word nigger in a matter of fact way with no apparent underlying hint of racial bigotry.

I grew up in Australia in the late '60's and '70's and was educated to understand that nigger was a racist term used by 'rednecks'.

Can any agonistas comment on my perception that nigger was a common term in the USA, and became increasingly understood as dis-respectful only in the past fifty years?

The confused lifestyle of Carrie considered by Rebecca Hagelin, in the Washington Times who ponders the posting of explicit material on line

Young women, in particular, think that the sexier their sites, the better. Why on earth are they eager to post X-rated images? Three reasons: 1) They are simply copying the explicit media they see all around them, 2) They have no sense of personal modesty or decency, 3) They mistakenly view their sites and communications as personal diaries, of sorts.

abc.net.au - The New Oxford American Dictionary has named "unfriend" - as in deleting someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook - its word of the year. Oxford University Press USA, in a blog post, said "unfriend," a verb, had bested netbook, sexting, paywall, birther and death panel for the honour.

"Unfriend has real lex-appeal," said Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. "It has both currency and potential longevity. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for word of the year."

NYT - The first complete Hebrew-language edition of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” was published in Israel last month, and instantly became one of the 10 best-selling books in the country.
Five scholars ponder it's ongoing significance.

ChinaDaily - Growing up as a farmer's son, Lin Zuojun used to play hide-and-seek with his friends in the bamboo forest of Fujian province. Little did he know back then that he would one day make millions of yuan by selling those most common plants of the region.

Harvesting more than 1.6 million bamboo trees and 25,000 tons of bamboo shoots every year, his company, Asian Bamboo, is China's biggest bamboo producer today.

It is also one of the only three Chinese companies listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in Germany - the third-largest stock exchange in the world.

Johann Hari writes:

Independent.co.uk - Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".

WAPO"a cyclical return to old-fashioned cocktails and chandelier lighting and waistcoats -- that is nurturing a new brand of masculinity (rugged but elegant and old-world American)"

BBC Children's author Enid Blyton was banned from the BBC for nearly 30 years because her work was considered "small beer", archive documents have revealed.

The best-selling writer unsuccessfully approached the corporation several times to get her material on the radio.

Executives considered the Famous Five and Noddy creator "second-rate" and lacking literary value, according to 18 newly released letters and memos.

She first pitched ideas in 1936 but did not appear on Woman's Hour until 1963.

A memo about a short story stated: "Not strong enough. It really is odd to think that this woman is a best-seller. It is all such very small beer."

Guardian - One of the best kept literary secrets of the decade was revealed last night when 34-year-old scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti announced she was the writer masquerading as call girl Belle de Jour.

The author behind the bestselling books detailing her secret life as a prostitute decided to come out to one of her fiercest critics, Sunday Times columnist India Knight, after claiming anonymity had become "no fun". "I couldn't even go to my own book launch party", she said.

Until last week, even her agent was unaware of her name. But now Magnanti, a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol, has spoken of the time six years ago she worked as a £300 an hour prostitute working through a London escort agency. Magnanti turned to the agency in the final stages of her PhD thesis when she ran out of money. She was already an experienced science blogger and began writing about her experiences in a web diary later adapted into books and a television drama starring Billie Piper.

Zenit - FACEBOOK, WIKIPEDIA AND YOUTUBE IN THE VATICAN

Nov 13 | Rome | Jesús Colina
There are not a few voices in the Church calling for the message of the Gospel to make better use of the Internet -- Benedict XVI's is among them.

And yet, when representatives of some of the most successful Internet initiatives met in Rome today with the European bishops' Commission for the Media, a great difference in mentality became obvious, even if there was also evidence of a genuine desire for mutual understanding.

The chamber of the former hall of the synod of bishops -- which the producers of "Angels and Demons" rented for millions of euros -- witnessed two views of reality: On one hand, an institution, the Church, founded for 2,000 years on the proclamation of Truth; and on the other, exponents of successful business initiatives, which arose a few years ago, based on giving everyone the chance to express "his own truth."

newscom.auAn Australian has joined a group of world-class surfers in riding the freezing waves of the Arctic Circle.

Resembling a ninja in his hi-tech heated full-body wetsuit, Matt Whitehead, from Byron Bay, took on the Norwegian waves in near-freezing conditions as part of a documentary on the increasingly adventurous fringe of the sport,

Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, who is curating a new exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, talks to SPIEGEL about the place lists hold in the history of culture, the ways we try to avoid thinking about death and why Google is dangerous for young people.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Eco, you are considered one of the world's great scholars, and now you are opening an exhibition at the Louvre, one of the world's most important museums. The subjects of your exhibition sound a little commonplace, though: the essential nature of lists, poets who list things in their works and painters who accumulate things in their paintings. Why did you choose these subjects?

hopes

hope sits dolloped on hori-
zon. hope is found bleeding from
elbows. hope waits for sun on
the eyelids. hope is one let-
ter from open. hope glinting
through opaque stained glass. hope is
satin, is gloss finished. hope
flys above, ahead, beyond.

hope winks at you from shoppe win-
dow. hope beds with cocoons and
compasses. hope is one let-
ter from poem. hope orders
many, pecks at few. hope, and
I have this vision of doves

Kevin Gillam is a Western Australian writer with work published in numerous Australian and overseas journals. His two published books of poetry are Other Gravities (2003) and Permitted To Fall (2007), both by SunLine Press.

Breaking The Great Australian Silence |John Pilger | November 5

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It's an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and "uttering unlawful oaths". In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a "courting day" - a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

A warts and all look at a young man over several years, to Iraq and back.

fascinating

The Beatles Store

Following the 9.9.09 debut of the digitally re-mastered catalogue on CD, Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music have announced the worldwide release of a limited edition of 30,000 Beatles Stereo USB apples on December 8th.

This unique, apple-shaped USB drive is loaded with the re-mastered audio for The Beatles' 14 stereo titles, as well as all of the re-mastered CDs' visual elements, including 13 mini-documentary films about the studio albums, replicated original UK art, rare photos and expanded liner notes.

Philanthropy is not a life style choice for most of Australia's rich and famous.
But Australian science, especially the federal Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO )got a major financial boost due to a 10 year struggle fighting with HP, Apple, Dell et al. over the invention of WiFi; that was settled back in April.

However, Australian politics and science remain closely related, and casting aspersions on the ruling parties attitude to global emissions is not kosher.

The Observer Debate.uk has some columnists pondering the middle east, racism, Pakistan , the environment and reality.