Fouad Ajami wrote the opinion piece below for the Wall Street Journal back in June. It’s still timely a couple months later as Palestine seeks a declaration of statehood from the United Nations this week. While it’s high time that the Palestinian people join the international community and adopt the responsibilities of statehood, Ajami makes a crucial point that achieving statehood takes much more than declarations.
The Economist presents a thorough primer on what’s going on at Japan’s failed nuclear energy facilities–the science, technology, obstacles, crises, and solutions are all explained well. A good read if you want a high-level overview of the terrible situation there.
>> Link: The post-earthquake nuclear crisis: The Japan syndrome | The Economist
While the news media has been brining us incredible and sad accounts of what’s happened in Japan, the response from Google has been different–and incredible in its own right.
Within hours of the earthquake and tsunami, Google had compiled a special site with information about local municipalities, a person finder that you can embed on your website, maps with overlays of all kinds of geological data, and a trove of useful information.
It’s all part of Google Crisis Response, which I had not realized was a formal group at Google until today. I think this is fantastic. Kudos to Google for being on the ball and leveraging their technology and prominence this way.
>> Link: 2011 Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami
Remember the disgraced city manager of Bell, CA? The guy who was accused of bilking the city out of hundreds of thousands of dollars that went into his own inflated salary? Seems he found a new day job. And as usual, truth is better than fiction here.
>> Link: Steve Lopez: Robert Rizzo is serving time behind cars – latimes.com
Headlines from today’s L.A. Times include the story of mummified remains of two babies found in a trunk in the basement of an apartment complex in mid-city. Grim–yet also fascinating, considering the remains are perhaps 80 years old. They were found along with newspapers from the 1930s and a ticket to the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
This seems like exactly the kind of crime that gets unearthed in noir novels and thriller movies–the very kind of stories that were fantastically popular around the time of the infants’ deaths. (Think Raymond Chandler or Patricia Highsmith novels.)
It would surprise me if every agent in Hollywood hasn’t been trying to acquire the film rights to this story…and we don’t even know how it ends yet.
From everything I read online and hear on the radio, supplies of food, water, and basic shelter are in dire need for rescue operations in Haiti. With the extreme interconnectedness of communications online today, I feel that there’s a duty to use the internet not only to stay informed but to play a contributing part where possible.
Google has established an excellent set of resources and liked to it right off their home page.
The American Red Cross International Response Fund also does relief work around the world, including in Haiti right now. Consider donating money to the Red Cross or any of the organizations listed on the Google site. Small amounts add up to a significant sum contribution when many people pitch in.
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