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T.R. Hummer
Velveteria: The Velvet Painting Museum | Portland, United States | Atlas Obscura
When you think of black velvet paintings, you usually imagine scantily clad, overly-proportioned, exotic women hanging in the back rooms of smokey tiki lounges, or collecting dust in your grandfather's attic; a gift of cousin Larry's from Tahiti. But didn't Andrew Wyeth occasionally paint on velvet in his day? And with-in the post-modern doldrums certainly other artists must be exploring velvet as a medium as well.
Velveteria in Southeast Portland was created to display 170 velvet paintings in the owner's collection of more than 350. There are more permanent exhibits, like the black light room, and the wall of fame (classics like, dogs playing poker, and elvis are housed here.) There are also rotating exhibits like "the story of Jesus and Mary on Velvet" around easter, as well as the "Black is Beautiful" exhibit in honor of African American heros.
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Op-Ed Columnist - Let the Big Dog Run - NYTimes.comMaureen Dowd writes:
Kim Jong-il’s bright smiles were not returned by Bill Clinton. It was strange to see the reclusive Kim so eager and the raffish Clinton so disciplined. Yet the grinning North Korean and stony-faced American were no doubt both savoring their moment of mutual relevance.
The price set by Kim for releasing the two captured American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, was a few hours basking in the presence of the ex-president who most wanted to visit North Korea. Bill Clinton was willing to bow but not scrape.
Hillary sparked an international spat when she said that, as a mother, she understood that the North Koreans were simply unpopular and unruly children misbehaving to get attention.
Now, less than two weeks later, those bad-seed children had managed to command the full attention of her husband.
Maybe it was some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy. Just as Hillary muscled her way back into the spotlight, moving past her broken elbow and grabbing the focus from her bevy of peacock envoys, she was blown off the radar screen again by an even more powerful envoy: the one she lives with.
It was a moment unique in the annals of diplomacy. Bill was being hailed as a dazzling statesman who might have changed the stormy weather between the U.S. and North Korea, just as Hillary was beginning an 11-day trip to Africa designed to highlight the subjects she most cares about: do-gooder development and women’s issues.
The one in charge of world affairs disappeared from the news all day on Tuesday. The one out of office dominated the news. His plane is rolling down the runway in Pyongyang with the two pardoned women on board? Zowie!
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Council for Secular HumanismJames A. Haught writes:
Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”
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Could the Global Meltdown Spark a Great Revolution? | | AlterNetFor the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order -- the system that dominates the globe today -- is the destiny of all nations. The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.
As a result, we live at an important historical juncture -- one where alternatives to the world's neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus, it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power structures over the past 500 years.
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t r u t h o u t | President Carter: Many Children Were Tortured Under Bush President Jimmy Carter wrote that the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon "have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse." In "Our Endangered Values" Carter said that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons "107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old." And reporter Hersh, (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported 800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.
Journalist Seymour Hersh's (who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal) bombshell before the ACLU some years ago has been in a temporary slumber, as there is question as to whether the videotapes in possession of the Pentagon were among those claimed to be destroyed. Destroyed or not, there is still the conscience of soldiers and agents who bore witness to contend with, as the reign of political terror against whistleblowers which characterized the Bush administration subsides. Hersh said:
" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said at the time:
"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."
History is just beginning to sort out the Bush era, with stubborn facts showing a resilience that Fox News talking points cannot, and more emerging.
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BBC NEWS | Americas | Three shot dead by US gym gunmanA man has killed at least three people at a gymnasium in the US state of Pennsylvania.
Another 10 people were injured by gunfire in the town of Bridgeville near Pittsburgh, and there are reports that five are in a critical condition.
An eyewitness told a local TV station that a man entered an all-female dance class, turned off the lights, took a gun out of a bag and began firing.
"People everywhere were screaming. It was horrible," said the witness.
The gunman is also reported to be dead.
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Al Jazeera English - Americas - Haiti protesters clash with policeHaitian police have clashed with protesters calling for an increase in the minimum wage outside the country's parliament.
As politicians prepared to vote on the issue in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, some of the 2,000 protesters threw stones at police officers, who responded by firing tear gas to disperse the crowd.
One person was reported to have been injured in the clashes but no arrests were made.
The demonstrators said the minimum wage was insufficient and that they could not provide adequate food and shelter for their families on less than $2 a day.
"Seventy gourdes, that doesn't do anything for me," said Banel Jeune, a clothing factory worker taking part in the protest, referring to his current minimum-wage salary.
"I can't feed my kids, and I can't send them to school."
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Senate Postpones Budget-Balancing Vote - Politics News Story - KPHO PhoenixFor the second time in a week, the Arizona Senate postponed a vote on a budget-balancing plan Tuesday because Republican leaders hadn't gathered enough support.
Leaders say the sticking point is a sales-tax increase proposed by GOP Gov. Jan Brewer. Another problem on Tuesday was that one-third of the 30-member Senate was absent from the Capitol. The Senate will reconvene on Friday.
Senate President Bob Burns, a Republican from Peoria, said he was trying to round up enough votes to pass the plan and noted that leaders may have to make unspecified changes to win approval.
The plan to close the state budget deficit, estimated at $3.2 billion to $3.4 billion, had cleared the House Friday morning.
It includes holding a Nov. 3 special election on a spending cap, new authority for lawmakers to ease voter-approved spending mandates and Brewer's proposal for a sales-tax increase.
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AZ Senate Majority Whip Quits - Politics News Story - KPHO PhoenixArizona State Senate Majority Whip Pamela Gorman, R-Anthem, is stepping down from her position, citing differences in opinion on taxes and spending, she announced in an e-mail to CBS 5 News on Tuesday.
"I simply cannot support Senate leadership's position on the sales tax and the budget when I continue to believe that raising taxes in a recession is the wrong thing to do," she wrote in an e-mail sent to Senate president Bob Burns.
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New plastic beehive designed to encourage honey-making in the city - Times OnlineHoneybees are suffering from an undiagnosed disease causing colony collapse disorder. The varroa mite and various viruses have also destroyed thousands of apiaries. The number of honeybees has fallen by 10-15 per cent over the past two years. More than half of Britain’s 250 species of bee are in decline.
To appeal to city dwellers’ tastes, a new beehive has been created and was unveiled by Tom Tew, the chief scientist for Natural England. The Beehaus is like a giant coolbox standing at waist height and has an easily removed lid that allows the whole hive to be exposed for inspection and maintenance. It is twice the size of a traditional hive, meaning that there is plenty of space for the colony to grow and therefore less risk of swarming. The plastic structure is easily cleaned and impervious to woodpeckers, which frequently damage wooden hives. Three layers of plastic, separated by air pockets, help the bees to maintain the stable 35C (95F) they need to multiply.
The Beehaus was designed by the same company that created the Eglu, a plastic chicken house that encouraged a new fashion for urban chicken keeping and has been installed in 30,000 homes since 2004.
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Perceiving touch and your self outside of your bodyWhen you feel you are being touched, usually someone or something is physically touching you and you perceive that your "self" is located in the same place as your body. In new research published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, neuroscientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, investigated the relationship between bodily self-consciousness and the way touch stimuli are spatially represented in humans. They found that sensations of touch can be felt and mislocalised towards where a "virtual" body is seen. These findings will provide new avenues for the animation of virtual worlds and machines.
In their previous research, Professor Olaf Blanke's lab at the EPFL found that the consciousness of one's own body (the sense of self-identification and self-location) can be altered in healthy people under certain experimental conditions, yielding similar sensations to those felt in out-of-body experiences. In this new study, Aspell and colleagues in Blanke's lab used a crossmodal congruency task to determine whether there is a change in touch perception during this illusion.
A number of earlier studies showed that if a rubber hand is positioned such that it extends from a person's arm while her actual hand is hidden from view, and both her real hand and the rubber hand are stroked at the same time, she seems to feel the touch in the location where she sees the rubber hand being touched. This effect and the experienced 'ownership' of the rubber hand is the "rubber hand illusion."
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Daily Kos: President Clinton en route to LA with freed journalistsScout Finch reports:
Statement (via email) from President Clinton's office:
"President Clinton has safely left North Korea with Laura Ling and Euna Lee. They are en route to Los Angeles where Laura and Euna will be reunited with their families."
Terrific news. No doubt these young journalists will have one incredible story to tell once they are safely back in the USA.
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Antigua's highest peak renamed 'Mount Obama' - WAOW - Newsline 9, Wausau News, Weather, SportsAntigua's highest mountain officially became "Mount Obama" on Tuesday as the small Caribbean nation celebrated the American president on his birthday and saluted him as a symbol of black achievement.
Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer presided over the re-christening ceremony at the base of the mountain, unveiling a stone sculpture and plaque honoring the president as an inspiration in the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda and throughout the Caribbean.
"This great political achievement by Barack Obama resonated with me in a way that I felt compelled to do something symbolic and inspiring," Spencer told the crowd of about 300, including several U.S. officials, at the base of the mountain near the island's southern coast.
"As an emancipated people linked to our common ancestral heritage and a history of dehumanizing enslavement, we need to at all times celebrate our heroes and leaders who through their actions inspire us to do great and noble things," Spencer said.
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allAfrica.com: Sudan: 185 Killed in Ethnic Clashes, Catholic Radio Says (Page 1 of 1)At least 185 people have been killed and another 31 wounded in inter-ethnic violence in South Sudan.
Catholic Radio Bakhita FM confirmed to CISA that thousands of other people have been displaced in Jonglei State following an attack on Mareng Village near Akobo County by alleged Murle tribesmen on Sunday.
The number of casualties was confirmed to Bakhita FM by Goi Jooyul Yol, Akobo's County Commissioner, who spoke to the radio station by telephone from Malakal.
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Famous historical peopleFreud was nearly always photographed with a cigar in hand. This is not really surprising, as he usually smoked 20 per day. When Freud was in his late 30's, he began experiencing chest pains and shortness of breath. His physician/friend Wilhelm Fliess urged Freud to give up cigars, attributing his problems to excessive smoking and hypersensitivity to nicotine. Fliess' warnings and the suggestion of a connection between his heavy smoking and poor health concerned Freud, but in spite of his anxiety, he kept smoking cigars at his regular rate throughout the day. Obviously Dr. Freud was not convinced that cigars were linked to his heart problems.
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Book Review - ‘ “What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”,’ by Kevin Mattson - Jimmy Carter’s ‘Malaise’ Speech - Review - NYTimes.comIn July 1979, as the fabric of American civil society seemed to be unraveling, the president of the United States disappeared. For 10 days, Jimmy Carter holed up at Camp David, engaging in sometimes painful discussions with intellectuals and clerics. Then he returned to deliver a 32-minute televised sermon that would somehow come to be known as the “malaise” speech. (Carter never actually uttered the word, which was used by advisers and popularized by the media.)
This bizarre chapter in American politics has inspired Kevin Mattson to write “ ‘What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?,’ ” a short revisitation that is exactly what political history ought to be — incisive, fast-paced and fun to read. Mattson, a liberal historian at Ohio University, means to reclaim Carter’s legacy from the dark dungeon of presidential history, but in this he is undercut by his integrity as a storyteller. The thoughtful president who emerges in these pages is exposed, nonetheless, as a man profoundly overmatched by the job.
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Al Jazeera English - Asia-Pacific - N Korea releases US journalistsNorth Korea has released two American journalists held for illegally entering the country on a reporting tour, state media has said.
The release on Tuesday occurred after leader Kim Jong-il granted a special pardon to Euna Lee and Laura Ling, following a request from Bill Clinton, the former US president, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
Clinton is on a current visit to Pyongyang in the highest-level US contact with North Korea since he was president nearly a decade ago when his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went there in 2000.
He was greeted warmly on his arrival and had what KCNA described as an "exhaustive conversation" over dinner with Kim Jong-il and his senior aides.
KCNA also said that Clinton "courteously" conveyed a verbal message from Barack Obama, the US president.
The White House denied the report.
"That's not true," Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, told reporters in Washington.
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Sociologists debate: Are Americans really isolated?A widely publicized analysis of social network size, which reported dramatically increasing social isolation when it was published in 2006, has sparked an academic debate in the August issue of the American Sociological Review (ASR), the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association.
The 2006 report by sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew E. Brashears found a near tripling in reports of Americans' social isolation—the percentage who said they discussed important matters with no one—between 1985 and 2004. The increase in social isolation was reduced markedly by sophisticated modeling of the data, yet a very significant decrease in social connection to close friends and family remained. Data underlying the findings came from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys (GSS), collected by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and funded by the National Science Foundation. The GSS has been fielded since 1972.
But sociologist Claude S. Fischer of the University of California, Berkeley, calls the research team's findings highly implausible based on the immense scale of the reported change, anomalies in the GSS data and contrary results in data on other types of network ties.
"Results that seem to be too good, too strong or too stark to be true probably are, as seems to be the case in this instance," said Fischer. "The survey question used in 2004 to measure social network size yielded results that were so inconsistent with other data and so internally anomalous and implausible that they are almost surely the product of an artifact."
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3quarksdailySam Anderson writes:
I should not, probably, hate Thomas Pynchon. He is an indisputably, uniquely gifted genius who shares artistic DNA with almost all my favorite writers (Joyce, Barthelme, DeLillo, et al). Basic demographics and taste-algorithms suggest, in fact, that I should be a full-fledged Pynchon groupie, the kind of guy who names all his hamsters Slothrop and slaps W.A.S.T.E. stickers on the windows of his local post office. But I can’t help it. My distaste is visceral, involuntary, and preconscious—a spasm of my aesthetic immune system. While I fully appreciate Pynchon in the abstract, as a literary-historical juggernaut—a necessary bridge from, say, Nabokov (with whom he studied at Cornell) to David Foster Wallace—sitting down with one of his actual books makes my eyebrows start to smolder. I find him tedious, shallow, monotonous, flippant, self-satisfied, and screamingly unfunny. I hate his aesthetic from floor to ceiling: the relentless patter of his Borscht Belt gags, his parodically overstuffed plots, his ham-fisted verbs (scowling, growling, glaring, leering, lurching) and adjectives (lurid, louche, lecherous), the tumbling micro-rhythms of his sentences, the galloping macro-rhythms of his larger narratives. I hate the discount paranoia he slathers over everything with an industrial-size trowel. I hate the cardboard cutouts he tries to pass off as human characters, and I hate—maybe most of all—his characters’ stupid names. (I even hate his name, which makes him sound like some kind of 29th-century sci-fi lobster.) I hate the fake song lyrics he invents for his characters to sing and the fake restaurants (Man of La Muncha) he invents for them to eat at and the stupid acronyms he invents for them to pledge their lives to.
This confession comes courtesy of Pynchon’s newest novel, Inherent Vice, a manically incoherent pseudo-noir hippie-mystery that should fit in nicely with the author’s recent series of quirky late-career non-masterpieces (Mason & Dixon, Against the Day).
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N. Korean leader reportedly pardons U.S. journalists - CNN.com"Clinton expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong Il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists against the DPRK after illegally intruding into it," the [KCNA official North Korean] news agency reported. "Clinton courteously conveyed to Kim Jong Il an earnest request of the U.S. government to leniently pardon them and send them back home from a humanitarian point of view.
"The meetings had candid and in-depth discussions on the pending issues between the DPRK and the U.S. in a sincere atmosphere and reached a consensus of views on seeking a negotiated settlement of them."
The report said Clinton then conveyed a message from U.S. President Obama "expressing profound thanks for this and reflecting views on ways of improving the relations between the two countries."
It added, "The measure taken to release the American journalists is a manifestation of the DPRK's humanitarian and peace-loving policy.
"The DPRK visit of Clinton and his party will contribute to deepening the understanding between the DPRK and the U.S. and building the bilateral confidence."
DPRK is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the nation's official name.
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Wars are not inevitable. - By John Horgan - Slate MagazineJohn Horgan writes:
Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland's School for International and Security Studies has estimated that war and state-sponsored genocide in the first half of the 20th century killed as many as 190 million people, both directly and indirectly. That comes to an average of 3.8 million deaths per year. His analysis found that wars killed fewer than one-quarter of that total in the second half of the 20th century—40 million altogether, or 800,000 per year.
Even these staggering figures are low in comparison with prehistoric ones, if considered as a percentage of population. All the horrific wars and genocides of the 20th century accounted for less than 3 percent of all deaths worldwide, according to one estimate. That is much less than the probable rate of violent death among our early ancestors.
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The Washington Independent » Lead Military Lawyer Confirms Afghan Witnesses Said They Were Paid By U.S.
Daphne Eviatar writes:
Following up on my story posted this morning about the government’s botched case against an Afghan teenager held at Guantanamo Bay, I spoke today to Maj. Gen. David Frakt, the lead military defense lawyer on the case who’s represented Jawad both before the U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay and in his habeas corpus case in federal court. Frakt confirmed what Marine Corps Maj. Eric Montalvo, his assistant on the case, told me earlier: that the government’s key witnesses in the case said they were paid or given gifts to testify.
Frakt said the witnesses seemed to expect the same from the defense lawyers. “They acknowledged it on tape,” Frakt said. “It was in the context of, ‘well, they gave me $400, what can you do for me?’”
These witnesses were mostly Afghan police, said Frakt. “It just shows that the level of Afghan police corruption, as addressed in numerous reports by the U.S. State Department, is incredibly high and makes it very difficult to make a compelling case based on Afghan police statements,” said Frakt. “After all, it’s the Afghan police who were determined to have tortured Jawad, so their statement must be taken with a grain of salt.”
Meanwhile, there seemed for years to be no eyewitnesses to the 2002 grenade attack that Jawad is accused of perpetrating. “I questioned repeatedly why, with a grenade attack that occurred in broad daylight in a public bazarre, there was not a single eye witness. Particularly when news accounts said civilians helped subdue the suspects who were arrested,” said Frakt.
Finally realizing this shortcoming in its case, a joint Defense and Justice Department task force in February 2009 — more than six years after the attack occurred — went to Afghanistan to try to find new witnesses. But the one “new” witness the government claimed in court proceedings that it has, said Frakt, recanted the entire story when Montalvo interviewed him in Afghanistan. “He admitted he actually hadn’t seen the attack, and from his vantage point couldn’t have seen it,” said Frakt.
In exchange for his testimony, or “as a token of appreciation for the inconvenience,” Frakt said, “he said he was given a new pair of shoes.”
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t r u t h o u t | Israel's Jerusalem Evictions Defy Obama, Undermine Peace Process Israel said the evictions were legal and mandated by a ruling of its supreme court. But the country's decision Sunday to forcibly remove two Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem - and to immediately usher in Jewish replacements - has complicated the prospects for successful peace talks any time soon.
On Monday, three people protesting the eviction were arrested by the police. The two families had lived in the homes for almost 50 years. They moved into the neighborhood after being evicted from their homes in West Jerusalem in 1947 by Israeli forces.
Two families might not seem like much after a 50-year conflict that has displaced hundreds of thousands and cost countless lives. But they came in symbolically fraught East Jerusalem, where President Barack Obama has practically begged Israel to stop settlement expansion to give peace talks a chance. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 - a move that the international community has not accepted - and Palestinians hope the eastern portion of the city will one day form the capital of their own independent state.
The images beamed around the region were a stark illustration of the Israeli-Palestinian divide as could be imagined: Israeli soldiers force distraught families from their homes and then stand guard as Orthodox Jewish settlers bring in moving vans and take possession (an Al Jazeera English video report on the event is here). The event will have likely deepened a growing Arab belief that Obama will not be more successful than his predecessors in advancing the peace process.
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Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and PakistanThe passing away of Gayatri Devi, the last of the notable Indian maharanis, or queens, has signed off a final postscript to India's colorful royal past.
On July 30, two elephants led her funeral procession in Jaipur, state capital of Rajasthan (land of kings) in western India. The 90-year-old frail body of the lady, once ranked among the 10 most beautiful women in the world, was carried with state honors to the "Maharani Ki Chhatri", a special cremation ground for the former queens of Rajasthan.
The funeral pyre smoke seems to have carried away a living link to an India known for maharajahs and palaces, palanquins and
polo matches, fabled jewels and custom-made Rolls Royces, debauched lifestyles and cowardly animal-hunting parties.
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allAfrica.com: Central Africa: Go Home, Uganda Tells Rwandan Refugees (Page 1 of 1)Thousands of Rwandan refugees in Uganda could lose their status following the expiry of a deadline for voluntarily return to their country, officials said.
"We have been pushed to the limits, there is no justification for them to remain in Uganda," Tarsis Kabwengyere, Uganda's minister of disaster preparedness and refugees, said.
Money, he added, was being spent on refugees whose home country was stable and willing to take them back. Ugandan camps had also swollen due to renewed violence in eastern Congo, and there was need for some refugees to return home.
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Satellites Track Object With Magnetic Field 100 Trillion Xs Stronger Than Earth's
On Aug. 22, 2008, NASA's Swift satellite reported multiple blasts of radiation from a rare object known as a soft gamma repeater, or SGR, some 15,000 light years away. This ancient stellar remnant -one of the totally weird stars of this awesome ongoing hit movie we call the cosmos- is one the most magnetized objects in the universe. Only 15 are known to exist.
Astronomers think the eruptions of SGRs arise from the most highly magnetized objects in the universe -- magnetars, or neutron stars -- the crushed cores of exploded stars -- that, for reasons not yet known, possess ultra-strong magnetic fields. With fields 100 trillion times stronger than Earth’s, a magnetar placed half the moon’s distance would wipe the magnetic strips of every credit card on the planet.
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Arizona universities to get $154 million in stimulus cashArizona's three state universities will start receiving $154 million in federal stimulus funds next week.
The money won't make up for all the cuts in their state funding, but university officials say the infusion will help save hundreds of jobs.
Arizona State, the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University have struggled amid record cuts in state funding. The national recession has caused state tax revenues to drop sharply and has led to widespread funding cuts to state agencies and schools. The universities saw a 20 percent, or $190 million, reduction in state funding for the 2008-09 school year.
All three universities laid off employees during the past school year, eliminated academic programs with low enrollments and boosted some class sizes.
While the $154 million in federal stimulus will backfill some of the loss in state funding, the $190 million is a permanent reduction to the university system's budget, so the federal money won't entirely cover the deficit in coming years.
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