A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: news

Nov 14 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Arab League votes to suspend Syria if it doesn’t end violence against protesters

Arab League votes to suspend Syria if it doesn’t end violence against protesters

Jack Shenker and Peter Beaumont, The Observer:

Syria has been told it will be suspended from the Arab League – and faces the threat of sanctions in the Arab world – if it does not agree to end its bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters. The vote in Cairo took place after Syria had failed to abide by an agreement negotiated by the Arab League to end violence against its people, instead continuing with assaults on opposition centres.

…

Qatar’s prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabr al Thani, said 18 countries had agreed to the suspension, which will take effect on Wednesday. Syria, Lebanon and Yemen voted against it, and Iraq abstained. The Arab League will also introduce political and economic sanctions against Syria.

For reference, there have only been two suspensions in the sixty-five year history of the Arab League: Egypt during the ’70s and ’80s and Libya earlier this year.

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Nov 13 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Venezuelan TV: Kidnapped MLB catcher ‘found alive’

Venezuelan TV: Kidnapped MLB catcher ‘found alive’

Unbelievable story by Mariano Castillo for CNN:

Major league catcher Wilson Ramos has been “found alive,” two days after he was reported kidnapped by gunmen, Venezuelan state TV reported Friday.

Ramos was found by security forces in Montalban, a mountainous region about 60 miles from the north central Venezuelan town where he was last seen, according to a tweet posted late Friday by Communications Minister Andres Izarra.

…

“It has all the earmarks as a targeted kidnapping: selected victim, selected location, selected time,” said Chris Voss, a kidnapping specialist for Insite Security who has handled six cases involving Venezuela and who worked for the FBI for 26 years. “There’s an outside possibility that they thought they were grabbing another member of the family, but that’s extremely unlikely.”

The article actually goes pretty deep into kidnappings and sports players in Latin America. It’s pretty good.

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Nov 12 2011
Mark Twain, probably

FDA clears novel heart valve that is implanted through arteries instead of open-heart surgery

FDA clears novel heart valve that is implanted through arteries instead of open-heart surgery

The AP:

Federal health officials have approved a first-of-a-kind artificial heart valve that can be implanted without major surgery, offering a new treatment option for patients who are too old or frail for the chest-cracking procedure currently used.

The Food and Drug Administration said late Wednesday it approved Edwards Lifesciences’ Sapien heart valve, which can be threaded into place through a major artery that runs from the leg up to the heart. Cardiologists say the highly anticipated new approach will help old, sickly patients who cannot undergo the more invasive open heart surgery, which has been used to replace valves for decades.

If you’re not familiar with the details of open heart surgery, the word “open” refers to the chest cavity being opened. I added the emphasis to “chest-cracking procedure” in the quote because that’s literally what happens: the rib cage is cracked open to provide access to the heart. We’ve been doing better in recent years with the development of robotic surgery and such, but this is still great news.

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Nov 11 2011
Mark Twain, probably

How man who helped snare ‘Merchant of Death’ arms dealer was highest paid informant in history

How man who helped snare ‘Merchant of Death’ arms dealer was highest paid informant in history

Crazy story from the Associated Press:

Carlos Sagastume, 40, earned more than $9 million over 15 years by risking his life to convince drug dealers and a weapons merchant that he was a criminal.

Collecting evidence against Viktor Bout was another major achievement in a remarkable career for Mr Sagastume. 

He posed as a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, also known as FARC, to coax Bout to travel from Russia to Thailand in 2008 to arrange to send weapons to Colombian rebels to fight Americans.

…

Guatemalan-born Mr Sagastume began transporting drugs after he finished a five-year stint in Guatemala’s Army, where he specialised in gathering intelligence.

Speaking through an interpreter at Bout’s trial he said that after he was kidnapped by federal police in Mexico and a $60,000 ransom was paid to free him, he contacted the DEA in Guatemala, looking for a new line of work.

Fiction is great, but it doesn’t have anything on real life.

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Nov 09 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Cleaner removes ‘stain’ from acclaimed artwork

Cleaner removes ‘stain’ from acclaimed artwork

Matthew Day, the Telegraph:

A determined German cleaner destroyed a piece of art valued at £690,000 by cleaning away what she thought was an unsightly stain from the artwork.

The cleaner got to work on an installation by the late and famed artist Martin Kippenberger at a museum in Dortmund.

Entitled “When It Starts Dripping From The Ceilings” the piece comprised a tower of wooden slats with a plastic bowl at the bottom painted brown to give the impression of discolouration caused by water. The cleaner took the paint to be an actual stain and scrubbed the bowl till it looked new.

Whoops. :[

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Nov 03 2011
Mark Twain, probably

U.S. cuts funding for UNESCO with Palestinans aboard

U.S. cuts funding for UNESCO with Palestinans aboard

The Associated Press:

The Obama administration cut off funding for the UN cultural agency on Monday, after its member countries defied an American warning and approved a Palestinian bid for full membership.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the vote triggered a long-standing congressional restriction on funding to UN bodies that recognize Palestine as a state before an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is reached. She said the U.S. as a result would refrain from making a $60 million payment it planned to deliver in November.

…

The UNESCO vote represented a fallback plan for the Palestinian leadership that presented its plan for UN recognition as a state and full membership in the global body in September. Israel has fiercely opposed the bid, and it has no chance of passing because the Obama administration has promised to veto any resolution in the Security Council.

Really a nasty, strained situation for everybody.

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Oct 31 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Girls given equal rights to British throne under law changes

Girls given equal rights to British throne under law changes

Laura Smith-Spark, CNN:

Sons and daughters of British monarchs will have an equal right to the throne under changes to the United Kingdom’s succession laws agreed to Friday, British Prime Minister David Cameron said.

…

The constitutional changes would mean a first-born girl has precedence over a younger brother. They also mean that a future British monarch would be allowed to marry a Catholic.

…

“The idea that a younger son should become monarch instead of an elder daughter simply because he is a man, or that a future monarch can marry someone of any faith except a Catholic — this way of thinking is at odds with the modern countries that we have become,” [Cameron] said.

I’m enjoying this trend of treating people like people.

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Oct 25 2011
Mark Twain, probably

285 Indian Girls Change Name from “Unwanted”

285 Indian Girls Change Name from “Unwanted”

Chaya Babu of the AP with a story that’s great but then also terrible in that it happened at all:

Hundreds of Indian girls whose names mean “unwanted” in Hindi chose new names Saturday for a fresh start in life.

A central Indian district held a renaming ceremony it hopes will give the girls new dignity and help fight widespread gender discrimination that gives India a skewed gender ratio, with far more boys than girls.

And then there’s this, which is just frightening:

Such ratios are the result of abortions of female fetuses, or just sheer neglect leading to a higher death rate among girls. The problem is so serious in India that hospitals are legally banned from revealing the gender of an unborn fetus in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, though evidence suggests the information gets out.

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Oct 23 2011
Mark Twain, probably

I’ve been pretty burnt out on politics lately, but I’ve been following the Republican caucus scheduling fiasco pretty closely. (I admit the thing keeping me interested is probably schadenfreude.) This cartoon by Brian Duffy is a fantastic summary, although it unfortunately leaves out the situation in Nevada.

Here’s Michael A. Memoli for the Los Angeles Times:

Nevada Republicans on Saturday voted to move the date of their nominating caucuses to February, a decision that likely ends uncertainty over the 2012 election calendar and avoids having the first votes for president cast this year.

The state party’s executive committee shifted the GOP caucuses to Feb. 4, after New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner said he was prepared to call the  first-in-the-nation primary in December if Nevada’s caucuses remained on Jan. 14.

…

The Republican National Committee had initially adopted rules calling for presidential nominating contests to begin in February in four states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. But Florida leaders announced last month that they would hold the state’s primary on Jan. 31. South Carolina Republicans then called for a Jan. 21 primary, followed by Nevada’s initial decision to move to the 14th.

But then Gardner, citing state law that requires seven days between the New Hampshire primary and any “similar election,” said he would be forced in that scenario to call his state’s vote in December. Most Republican presidential candidates then said they would boycott Nevada’s caucuses if the state did not move to allow New Hampshire to remain in January.

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Oct 21 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Gadhafi Put on Display in Shopping Center Freezer

Gadhafi Put on Display in Shopping Center Freezer

Kim Gamel and Rami al-Shaheibi for the AP:

Moammar Gadhafi’s blood-streaked body was on display in a commercial freezer at a shopping center Friday as Libyan authorities argued about what to do with his remains and questions deepened over official accounts of the longtime dictator’s death.

…

In Misrata, residents crowded into long lines to get a chance to view the body of Gadhafi, which was laid out on a mattress on the floor of an emptied-out vegetable and onions freezer at a local shopping center. The body had apparently been stowed in the freezer in an attempt to keep it out of the public eye, but once the location was known, that intention was swept away in the overwhelming desire of residents to see the man they so deeply despised.

No.

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