If we can aid people into coming into the world, why can’t we aid them in exiting the world?
You just lost the game
Enthralling tale, brethren
Wikipedia joins blackout protest at US anti-piracy moves
Wikipedia has taken its English-language site offline as part of protests against proposed anti-piracy laws in the US.
Users attempting to access the site see a black screen and a political statement: “Imagine a world without free knowledge.
The user-generated news site Reddit and the blog Boing Boing are also taking part in the “blackout”.
However, Twitter has declined to join the shutdown.
Wikipedia, which attracts millions of hits every day, is opposed to the US Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) being debated by Congress.
The legislation would allow the Justice Department and content owners to seek court orders requiring search engines to block results associated with piracy.
(Source: BBC)
George Lucas says Hollywood won’t support black films
Director George Lucas says it took 20 years to get his latest film made, “because it’s an all-black movie”.
Speaking on The Daily Show, Lucas said he had to self-fund Red Tails, the true story of a group of African-American pilots who fought in World War II.
He claimed major film studios would not back the movie because “there’s no major white roles in it at all”.
“I showed it to all of them and they said, ‘No. We don’t know how to market a movie like this,’” he said.
“They don’t believe there’s any foreign market for it, and that’s 60% of their profit,” he added.
Lucas co-wrote and produced Red Tails, which which was directed by Anthony Hemingway.
It features several well-known names - including Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr, Terence Howard and R&B star Ne-Yo - and shows how the pilots were segregated and kept on the ground for most of the war, until they were called up to fight for their country.
The real-life airmen featured in the drama were given a Congressional Gold Medal by then-President George Bush in 2007.
(Source: BBC)
Should unfinished works be left untouched?
A new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was given an ending. But should unfinished works be left untouched, asks Sarah Barclay.
It’s infuriating that of all the works he could have left unfinished, Dickens managed to die in the middle of a murder mystery.
This week the BBC attempted to solve The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Writer Gwyneth Hughes not only adapted Dickens’s half-written novel into a new television drama but also gave it an ending of her own.
(Source: BBC)
US military identifies all four ‘urinating’ Marines
All four US Marines seen in a video apparently urinating on dead Afghans have been identified by American military investigators, US media say.
Two of the men have already been interviewed by the US Navy’s criminal investigation branch.
The Marine Corps has also appointed Lt Gen Thomas Waldhauser, a three-star general, to decide what, if any, disciplinary action is to be taken.
It is understood the troops served in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
US media reported that the unit belonged to the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, but that two of the men and the battalion’s commander had moved on to other assignments before the video became public.
The names of the men, who are thought to be Marine snipers, have not been released.
The battalion has had a range of deployments, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and fighting wildfires in the US state of Idaho.
Marine General John Allen, the top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, called for the facts of the case to be established quickly.
He said: “These actions are in direct opposition to everything the military stands for. Such acts in no way reflect the high moral standards and values we expect of our armed forces on a daily basis.”
(Source: BBC)
Who Was Harvey Milk and why is he important?
Hello err’body. I’m doing Harvey Milk for one of the people who inspire me the most, and found this article on him. I thought it was fairly well written (sparing the lack of paragraphing). Thought you guys may want to give it a read as well!
Lingering stigma helps AIDS epidemic ravage US South
The American South has been quietly ravaged by HIV/Aids, even as the rest of the US has made great advances in treatment and prevention. As Michael Maher reports, the conservative region’s reluctance to speak publicly about the epidemic has hampered its ability to fight it.
About this time every year, the Reverend Patricia Starr runs a Christmas drive for HIV-positive children in the small town of Clover in the state of South Carolina.
A few years ago, she recalls, one boy asked her for a telescope so he could look up to heaven, where he expected to be soon.
Four months after receiving the Christmas gift he was dead, another HIV/Aids victim for Clover’s graveyards.
”The cemeteries keep getting larger,” says Ms Starr. ”They keep pushing the woods back and making more graves.”
In the American South, HIV/Aids remains a silent epidemic.
(Source: BBC)
Wiener Library relocates Nazi archive to new premises
The world’s oldest Holocaust museum has moved to a new home in London’s Russell Square. As well as archiving documents from Jewish victims of repression, the museum also holds chilling examples of how the Nazis used games and books to indoctrinate Germany’s youth with anti-Semitic values.
Karen, the pretty young woman in the photograph, looks excited, as one might when about to meet someone famous.
She is just visible among the crowd, her white summer dress contrasting with the black uniforms of the soldiers around her.
Stood on a wall nearby is Adolf Hitler, reaching out to sign her book, an English version of his Mein Kampf.
The full identity of the woman remains unknown, save for her first name written next to her image, but a pencilled note beneath says how the family, clearly English, were in Germany’s Berchtesgaden when Hitler “came into the village, shook hands with tourists, signed standing up - in pencil!”.
(Source: BBC)
HIV funding cut as science brings ‘decisive moment’
This year’s World Aids Day comes at what many scientists and campaigners agree is a decisive moment in the 30-year history of the epidemic.
Although there is still no vaccine against HIV, key trials in the past year have confirmed that the combination drug treatment makes people with HIV less infectious - and more men in Africa are being circumcised, to help prevent the virus being transmitted.
But just as the science is bringing much-needed new results, funding is tailing off for the first time.
Two leading experts expressed concern, and even anger, during separate interviews in London this week.
Professor Francoise Barre-Sinoussi is a Paris-based virologist who jointly won the Nobel Prize - along with a colleague, Luc Montagnier - for discovering the Aids virus in 1983.
(Source: BBC)
Glee is not progressive.
You all need to read this.
Read it, now.
Pretty extreme, generalisation, but worth a read.
Is it okay to be showing TV shows like this to youths, whom, from what we’ve proven at the alcohol/tobacco ad debate, are impressionable? No, not really, I suppose. But then again how are we to stop teens from accessing shows like this?
It’s also quite ironic, considering Glee is about accepting who you are and accepting others for who they are, and yet, there’s a subplot like this.
(via padawanintheshire)
