Absolutely the last thing Iraq needs right now is to have thousands of Turkish troops pour across the border into the country's one relatively peaceful region - the Kurdish-administered northeast. Turkey's government needs to know that it will reap nothing but disaster if that happens.

and then it started raining type it couldn't get worse thing

Turkey poses a new danger in Iraq - International Herald Tribune

The latest news-as-entertainment spectacular is the Paris Hilton criminal justice fiasco. She’s in! She’s out! She’s — whatever.

Far more disturbing (and much less entertaining) is the way school officials and the criminal justice system are criminalizing children and teenagers all over the country, arresting them and throwing them in jail for behavior that in years past would never have led to the intervention of law enforcement.

School to Prison Pipeline - New York Times

Scientists have transformed mouse skin cells into embryonic stem cells and proved their potency by using the new cells to produce baby mice.

The experiments are seen as a major advance for regenerative medicine, which aims to custom-build tissues and cells to repair ailing and ageing bodies.

Scientists caution there are serious safety issues that must be resolved before the techniques could ever be used on people, but say the advance points to a new way of making embryonic stem cells for patients from their own cells.

There is no need to destroy embryos, and the procedure might allow researchers to sidestep many of the ethical objections now dogging stem-cell research.

Until now, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells has been to take them from an embryo. Producing cells that are a genetic match for a patient would entail making a clone of that person and harvesting the cells when the cloned embryo is days old, which raises thorny ethical issues and is illegal in several countries, including Canada.

The new work promises cells free of such contentious issues.

"You could take a skin cell, or a blood cell, and reprogram it with these four genes to make embryonic stem cells," Mr. Rudnicki said. The cells could then be turned into any type of cells required for therapeutic use, be they neurons to treat Alzheimer's or insulin producers for diabetics.

He cautions that significant hurdles still need to be overcome.

Embryonic stem cells made from mouse skin

When the populist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr emerged from 14 weeks of invisibility on May 25, it was hard not to focus on his typically passionate anti-Coalition rhetoric: "No, no to America; no, no to occupation," he thundered from the mosque at Kufa, Iraq, a ragged town a few miles north of rich holy city of Najaf.
...
Sadr is supporting what remains of hope in Iraq far more actively than it appears.
...
The real story about Moktada al-Sadr is not his exciting sermons but his broad underwriting, both passive and active, of the official project in Iraq.

An enemy Americans can work - International Herald Tribune

In the United States and Britain his most loyal audience tends to be gay men, teenagers and mother-daughter fans. (Several sets turned up at Barnes & Noble.) “There’s a tinge of sadness to their devotion,” he said. “It relates with the alienation that I bring up. So I still feel somewhat subversive, which is nice.”

well i'm not gay, a teenager or a mother-daughter
but i'm certainly a fan of his album Want One
and I think i have an affinity with alienation
so *shrug* so I would say Rufus is *in a Rufus tone the way he says it at the end of Vicious World* "super"

Rufus Wainwright - Music - New York Times

In an archipelago of safe houses here, part of a 21st-century Underground Railroad, I met groups of people who live every moment with sickening fear.

These are North Koreans who have escaped to the “free world” — China — and are now at constant risk of being captured by Chinese police. The Chinese government, in a disgraceful breach of its obligations under the 1951 Refugees Convention, hands these escapees back to North Korea, where they face beatings and imprisonment, occasionally even execution

Escape From North Korea - New York Times

Abu Taha, a portly, smiling man with two young children, lives a couple of blocks from our house in Baghdad. I arrived here to cover the war for ABC News last July, and one of the few pleasures I have found is sitting with him on his flat roof, where he keeps pigeons in a series of coops.

a lovely aricle
starting with a glimpse of serenity before confronting the madness
a taste of life
the sweet and the sour

Life in the Inferno of Baghdad - washingtonpost.com

Yes, it's been 40 years exactly since Sgt. Pepper, having labored the previous 20 years teaching his band to play, arranged for its debut in full psychedelic regalia.
...
Great songs seem as though they've always existed, that they weren't written by anyone. Figuring out why some songs and not others stick in our heads, and why we can enjoy certain songs across a lifetime, is the work not just of composers but also of psychologists and neuroscientists. Every culture has its own music, every music its own set of rules. Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture's music. Through a lifetime of listening, we learn what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities (instantiated as neural firings) of what chord is likely to follow what chord and how melodies are formed.

Skillful composers play with these expectations, alternately meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory, we've found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as eating chocolate, having sex or taking opiates. There really is a sex, drugs and rock-and-roll part of the brain: a network of neural structures including the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. But no one song does this for everyone, and musical taste is both variable and subjective

Daniel J. Levitin - It Was 40 Years Ago Today - washingtonpost.com

Zanshin means “the remaining mind” and also “the mind with no remainder.” This is the mind of complete action. It is the moment in kyudo (Zen archery) after releasing the arrow. This is “ Om makurasai sowaka” in oryoki practice and drinking the rinse water. In shodo, it is finishing the brush stroke and the hand and brush moving smoothly off the paper. In taking a step, it is the weight rolling smoothly and the next step arising. In breathing in completely, it is this breath. In breathing out completely, it is this breath. In life, it is this life. Zanshin means complete follow through, leaving no trace. It means each thing, completely, as it is.

When body, breath, speech and mind are broken from each other and scattered in concept and strategy, then no true action can reveal itself. There is only hesitation, or trying to push oneself past hesitation. This is the mind of hope and fear, which arises because one is trying to live in some other moment, instead of in the moment that arises now. One is comparing, planning, or trying to maintain an illusion of control in the midst of a reality which is completely beyond control.

zanshin

That would not happen if students instead read the Bible, Mallory said.

She added that the books were harmful to children who are unable to differentiate between reality and fantasy.

Right, sticking your head in the sand is reality. Teach your children to read between the lines and to understand the difference between facts and ideas. Harry Potter may be using magical spells to accomplish his goals, but the idea within the message is akin to many in the Bible - selfless acts for the greater good, with the constant nemesis of those who embrace greed, prejudice and bigotry. I'm sure that's why all of the school shootings proliferate - because the shooters all believe that they are doing selfless acts against the greedy, prejudicial bigots.

quite

RE: 'Ban Harry Potter or face more school shootings' | the Daily Mail