O Arizona: Man Survives 1000 Bee Stings; Shadow Dies

A Green Valley man who was stung nearly 1,000 times by bees was back home on Saturday.

World War II veteran John Pool said he's again feeling "pretty good" now that he's back in his home in the community south of Tucson.

The 84-year-old is legally blind. He was using his walker to take his toy poodle Shadow for a stroll when he was attacked on Thursday morning.

Pool said he tossed aside the walker and moved as fast as he could to get home, where his wife Norma used a hose to wash off hundreds of bees and then called for help.

Firefighters used credit cards to scrape away hundreds of stingers. After sending Pool to the hospital, they tore down a block wall where the bees had made their hive.

Pool was released on Friday. Shadow was also stung. She died.

link: Man Stung 1,000 Times Recuperating - Phoenix News Story - KPHO Phoenix

Guinea's Govt. Fears Drug Gang Attacks

Guinea's military rulers have put their armed forces on maximum alert, saying drug traffickers and their allies in neighboring countries want to destabilize the world's biggest bauxite exporter, state television reported.

Much of the initial support the junta received when it seized power in December has given way to criticism from civilians and divisions within the armed forces, but this is the first time Guinea's neighbors have been linked to instability.

link: Guinea army on alert, says drug dealers plan attack | International | Reuters

Somalis Standoff: Over 40 Dead

Somali government troops backed by African Union peacekeepers battled insurgents on Sunday in clashes that killed at least 43 people in north Mogadishu, residents and officials said.

Somalia's government and a 4,300-strong AU force (AMISOM) have been unable to take control of rebel strongholds in Mogadishu and other parts of the Horn of Africa nation despite international support and training.

"We have killed 40 fighters from al Shabaab group and we continue to repulse them. We have now pushed them back from three northern districts of Mogadishu. AU peacekeepers were assisting us," said Salad Ali Jelle, a parliamentarian who was involved in Sunday's fighting.

Rebels were not immediately available for comment.

link: Fighting kills at least 43 in Somali capital | International | Reuters

Afghan Police Brutality Makes The People Welcome Taliban Control

As British troops moved into the village newly freed from Taliban control, they heard one message from the anxious locals: for God's sake do not bring back the Afghan police.

U.S. and British troops have launched a campaign to seize control of Helmand province, about half of which was in Taliban hands, and restore Afghan government institutions.

But as they advance, they are learning uncomfortable facts about their local allies: villagers say the government's police force was so brutal and corrupt that they welcomed the Taliban as liberators.

"The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter.

link: Afghans turn to Taliban in fear of own police | International | Reuters

I Choose To Fail/Until the Conversion of the Mail: No More Boxholders?

Ciara O'Rourke writes:

The Swiss national postal service has started redirecting some mail from the letter box to the inbox.

A program introduced by the Swiss Post in June allows subscribers to receive scans of their unopened envelopes by e-mail message and then to decide which they want opened and scanned in their entirety, to be read online.

Subscribers can also ask to have the contents archived, send unopened letters to another address or have them shredded and recycled.

The success of the program, called Swiss Post Box, will depend on how widely digital mail is accepted, said Mark Levitt, a former analyst at International Data Corp. in Washington.

“Even people who warmly embraced digital tools stopped short of giving up on paper,” he said. “In fact, the electronic age has generated even greater demand for printers, paper and ink because people have even more information that they feel the need to print out on paper to read.”

The program uses technology provided by Earth Class Mail, a company based in Seattle that has tens of thousands of individual subscribers worldwide, mostly in Britain, the United States, Canada and Mexico. Clients in those countries have mail sent to one of more than two dozen designated addresses for processing.

This is the first time that Earth Class Mail has licensed its technology with a postal service.

link: Delivering Letters to Your Inbox - NYTimes.com

No Cheap Lunch: The Cost of Low Cost

Stephanie Zacharek writes:

[I]n her lively and terrifying book "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," Ellen Ruppel Shell pulls back the shimmery, seductive curtain of low-priced goods to reveal their insidious hidden costs. Those all-you-can-eat Red Lobster shrimps may very well have come from massive shrimp-farming spreads in Thailand, where they've been plumped up with antibiotics and possibly tended by maltreated migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam. The made-in-China toy train you bought your kid a few Christmases ago may have been sprayed with lead paint -- and the spraying itself may have been done by a child laborer, without the benefit of a protective mask.

"Cheap" is hardly a finger-waggling book. This isn't a screed designed to make us feel guilty for unknowingly benefiting from the hardships of workers in other parts of the world. And Shell -- who writes regularly for the Atlantic -- isn't talking about the shallowness of consumerism here; she makes it clear that she, like most of us, enjoys the hunt for a good deal. "Cheap" really is about us, meaning not just Americans, but citizens of the world, and about what we stand to lose in a global economic environment that threatens the very nature of meaningful work, work we can take pride in and build a career on -- or even at which we can just make a living. . . .

Shell asserts that even outlet malls and seemingly benign, friendly, progressive stores like IKEA are part of the problem; along with more obvious bad guys like Wal-Mart, they perpetuate a cycle that, far from nurturing creativity and innovation in the marketplace, ultimately benefits a relative few at the very top of the economic chain.

link: IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart | Salon Books

Church Wants Nuns To Wimple Up

Across 30 years, the modern version of the Sisters of St. Joseph has been revolutionizing the treatment of imprisoned women in New York. Thanks to the nuns’ efforts, mothers are now allowed to care for their infants on the inside and remain close to their children in creative visitors’ programs. Once they are paroled, these women and their children can find a year’s shelter in one of nine Providence House sanctuaries the nuns created in defunct city rectories and convents.

The order has never lacked courage: five members were guillotined in the French Revolution for giving shelter to the hunted. Now it is the bewildered community of American nuns that is the subject of two sweeping Vatican investigations. The question is whether the sisters are “living in fidelity” to the religious life — a question being put to nuns in no other nation.

Vatican investigations called “visitations” usually focus on serious flaws like the pedophilia scandal. So, what are nuns doing wrong? That is the question being asked by the sisters and legions of Catholic laypeople.

link: Editorial - The City Life - What the Sisters Are Up To - NYTimes.com

But Can a Goose Help Me Find my Car Keys: Review of Collin Ellard's "You are Here"

Jonah Lehrer writes:

Let’s begin with a quick geography quiz: Which city is farther west, Los Angeles or Reno? If you’re like most people, you carefully reasoned your way to the wrong answer. Because Los Angeles is on the coast, and Reno is in landlocked Nevada, you probably assumed that Los Angeles is farther west. It doesn’t matter that you’ve stared at countless maps or taken a road trip across California — the atlas that we keep in our head is reliably unreliable.

Colin Ellard, a behavorial neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, probes this and other shortcomings of human spatial intelligence in his delightfully lucid book “You Are Here.” (The Canadian version of the book is titled “Where Am I?” Apparently, Americans don’t like asking for directions.) While modern life is full of tools that keep us from straying off course, from Google maps to the ­iPhone, Ellard sees the need for such contrivances as a sign that we’ve already lost our way. We’ve become hopelessly disconnected from our setting, burdened with a brain that needs a GPS satellite just to get across town.

link: Book Review - 'You Are Here - Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon but Get Lost in the Mall,' by Collin Ellard - Review - NYTimes.com