Art MoCo: “The World is Yours”
Christopher (or C.K.) Wilde is a collagist who creates with currency. Wilde painstakingly cuts various shapes out of paper money from around the world to form collages with economic and political undertones and overlays.
Click here to see the full collection in more detail
Wired News: World's 10 Best-Selling Drugs
Pfizer's cholesterol pill Lipitor remains the best-selling drug in the world for the fifth year in a row. Its annual sales were $12.9 billion, more than twice as much as its closest competitors: Plavix, the blood thinner from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis; Nexium, the heartburn pill from AstraZeneca; and Advair, the asthma inhaler from GlaxoSmithKline.
Click here for a slide show of the top 10 best-selling drugs.
All religions have this theme of sacrifice and repentance, but one religion has finessed it in a brilliant way that few commentators have grasped. The story starts in Genesis. Instead of making Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac, God lets him sacrifice a ram instead, which you will probably agree is much more sensible. The Jews developed this form of sacrifice into a fine art. The Temple in Jerusalem had a special system to drain away all the blood when the rich brought hundreds of animals at a time to the slaughter.
But then came a radical change. About 2000 years ago in a confusing episode over which people still furiously argue, God said: Enough of all this wasteful sacrifice. Because I so love the world, I will sacrifice my own Son for your sins so you don’t have to sacrifice your sons or your livestock.
This Christian doctrine can have a practical effect. In China, when non-Christian villagers experience sickness or misfortune they often sacrifice their livestock to appease the evil spirits. But Christian villagers don’t sacrifice, for Jesus already died for their sins.
They end up being more prosperous.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Women and the world economy | A guide to womenomics | Economist.com
“WHY can't a woman be more like a man?” mused Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady”. Future generations might ask why a man can't be more like a woman. In rich countries, girls now do better at school than boys, more women are getting university degrees than men are and females are filling most new jobs. Arguably, women are now the most powerful engine of global growth.
In poor countries too, the under-utilisation of women stunts economic growth. A study last year by the World Economic Forum found a clear correlation between sex equality (measured by economic participation, education, health and political empowerment) and GDP per head.
In particular, there is strong evidence that educating girls boosts prosperity. It is probably the single best investment that can be made in the developing world. Not only are better educated women more productive, but they raise healthier, better educated children.
DEA Agent Who Shot Self In Foot Sues Uncle Sam – April 11, 2006
A Drug Enforcement Administration agent who stars in a popular online video that shows him shooting himself in the foot during a weapons demonstration for Florida children is suing over the tape’s release, claiming that his career has been crippled and he’s become a laughingstock due to the embarrassing clip’s distribution.
Telegraph | Opinion | The frightening truth of why Iran wants a bomb
The author is Amir Taheri is a former Executive Editor of Kayhan, Iran's largest daily newspaper, but now lives in Europe.
In Ahmadinejad's analysis, the rising Islamic "superpower" has decisive advantages over the infidel. Islam has four times as many young men of fighting age as the West, with its ageing populations. Hundreds of millions of Muslim "ghazis" (holy raiders) are keen to become martyrs while the infidel youths, loving life and fearing death, hate to fight. Islam also has four-fifths of the world's oil reserves, and so controls the lifeblood of the infidel. More importantly, the US, the only infidel power still capable of fighting, is hated by most other nations.
Click here to see Google Maps of the Iranian Nuclear Facilities
Cost of Illegal Immigration May Be Less Than Meets the Eye – New York Times
Even economists striving hardest to find evidence of immigration's effect on domestic workers are finding that, at most, the surge of illegal immigrants probably had only a small impact on wages of the least-educated Americans — an effect that was likely swamped by all the other things that hit the economy, from the revolution in technology to the erosion of the minimum wage's buying power.
Going Nuclear
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
U.S. Plan For Flu Pandemic Revealed
The document is the first attempt to spell out in some detail how the government would detect and respond to an outbreak, and continue functioning through what could be an 18-month crisis, which in a worst-case scenario could kill 1.9 million Americans.