Life of Alan

(tags: Restaurants)

(tags: Coffee)

(tags: North_Dakota)

(tags: Literature)

CPAC is Canada’s only privately-owned, commercial free, not for profit, bilingual licensed television service. Created in 1992 by a consortium of cable companies to preserve an independent editorial voice for Canada’s democratic process, CPAC provides a window on Parliament, politics and public affairs in Canada and around the world. Since 1992, the cable industry has invested close to $50 million in CPAC, and today CPAC programming is delivered by cable, satellite and wireless distributors to over 10 million homes in Canada, and worldwide via 24/7 webcasting and podcasts available on this website.

(tags: Canada)

(tags: Economics)

China is growing fast and, as it grows, it is faced with urgent environmental challenges. Environmental costs may account for 10 per cent of China's GDP and the effects of pollution, desertification and climate change are already beginning to be felt within China and outside her borders. Climate change, species loss, pollution, water scarcity and environment damage are not problems confined to one country: they are challenges that concern all the world's citizens, but the rise of China gives them a new urgency. Tackling these challenges will require a common effort and common understanding. Here at chinadialogue we aim to promote that common understanding. By establishing the world's first fully bilingual website devoted to the environment we aim to promote direct dialogue and the search for solutions to our shared environmental challenges.

(tags: China)

(tags: Liberia)

(tags: Olympics)

(tags: NYC)

(tags: Games)

(tags: Madagascar)

(tags: Saudi_Arabia Yemen)

(tags: Funny_Stuff)

(tags: Skiing:Washington)

(tags: Innovation)

(tags: DPRK)

Monocle looks at the building boom in the western Afghan city of Herat, where gaudy palaces are wiping out the face of the medieval city. Much of the construction is being fuelled by money from drugs, guns or graft, although all of the interiors photographed by Monocle belonged to businessmen importing materials for the country's reconstruction boom. Less savoury characters were not so welcoming. We were turned away from one house after the militia commander who lived next door threatened the owner.

(tags: Afghanistan)

When the Berlin Wall cracked on November 9, 1989, the clock struck thirteen in the Soviet bloc, and its hands halted. History went on. Rotting dictatorships in eastern and central Europe, long sustained by and for Moscow, had been crumpling for some time. Western-style democratic structures (some sturdy, some less so) would supplant them. Europe’s politics and that of the world were recast in a largely unforeseen but exhilarating year of liberation from police states. In its aftermath, a newly unified Germany integrated both into Europe and the Western alliance, while a hobbling Soviet Union dissolved after a failed coup against Communist Party Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev in summer 1991. Then Boris Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” enfeebled further its Russian successor.

(tags: Cold_War)

On November 9, 1989, the East German underground guitar band Die Anderen—the Others—had a gig on the other side of the Berlin Wall. They were playing the Pike Club, in the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg, home to the legendarily decadent and anarchic scene that inspired David Bowie and Iggy Pop and Nick Cave. It was actually to be their second concert on the other side of the anti-fascist protection barrier, as it was officially known in the East. The GDR had in recent months started granting travel permission to some bands—even bands from the conspicuously non-conformist punk scene. Die Anderen played West Berlin for the first time on May 26, 1989, crossing the death strip at the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint in an official-looking van being driven by a government apparatchik who was accompanying them. It was the type of van used by the police and traveling sports teams. “It was more about teenage rebellion—it was fun and cool.

(tags: Germany Cold_War)

(tags: Cold_War)

(tags: Berlin)

(tags: East_Europe)

(tags: Cold_War)

(tags: Cold_War)

(tags: Berlin Rhetoric)

(tags: Cold_War)

(tags: Germany)

(tags: Berlin)

(tags: Germany)

(tags: Cold_War)

(tags: Germany)

A West German dessert. A "flour box." A female driver. The East German secret police took an interest in all manner of banal details as it oppressed its citizenry. Now that Germany is celebrating 20 years since the fall of the Wall, more people than ever are taking a look into their Stasi files. A West German pudding. That was all it took. Once the Stasi found out about it, a family breadwinner was fired from his army job and an East German household was plunged into destitution. Even worse, the family later found out that they had been turned in by a close friend. "She was watering the plants and went through the cupboards to find a Dr. Oetker dessert," Vera Iburg, who has worked with files kept by the East German secret police for the last 20 years, told SPIEGEL ONLINE, referring to the snoop. "What was she doing? She had no business there!" The murky world of Stasi spying is hardly a secret, particularly since the 2006 Oscar winning film "The Lives of Others."

(tags: Cold_War)

The ex-communist countries of central Europe have fared well, mostly, since 1989. But they still have to shed their image as poor and troubled relations.

(tags: Cold_War)

(tags: Poland)

Do you call a ‘bread roll’ a cob, batch, bread cake, barm cake or scuffler? How do you pronounce the words cup and plant? And are you sitting or sat at this computer? The UK is a rich landscape of regional accents and dialects, each evidence of our society’ s continuity and change, our local history and our day-to-day lives. This site captures and celebrates the diversity of spoken English in the second half of the twentieth century.

(tags: English)

Haitian cabbie Pierre Jean-Charles climbed into his yellow taxi van while cradling a bottle of Coke and a bag of Doritos — the customary get-me-through snack for the 51-year-old full-time student and father of five. He had parked at a meter in front of a corner store at 75th Street and Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. It was before noon September 7, Labor Day, and the sweltering streets were full of people draped in towels, wearing bathing suits, and flip-flopping to the beach. Jean-Charles found that an SUV had parked inches behind him, jamming him in. He honked and stepped out of the taxi, gesturing for the woman behind the SUV's steering wheel to back up. A short, stocky Hispanic man emerged from the passenger side and stomped toward the cab. "Where you from?" the man snapped.

(tags: Miami)

(tags: Sports)

Known as Navajo Code Talkers, they were young Navajo men who transmitted secret communications on the battlefields of WWII. At a time when America's best cryptographers were falling short, these modest sheepherders and farmers were able to fashion the most ingenious and successful code in military history. They drew upon their proud warrior tradition to brave the dense jungles of Guadalcanal and the exposed beachheads of Iwo Jima. Serving with distinction in every major engagement of the Pacific theater from 1942-1945, their unbreakable code played a pivotal role in saving countless lives and hastening the war's end.

(tags: Native_America)

(tags: Russia)

(tags: Jazz Azerbaijan)

(tags: Jazz Azerbaijan)

This is the definitive guide to becoming a seasoned all-you-can-eat buffeter. If you would like to gain knowledge of each and every aspect that lay between you and getting the most fulfilling meal possible you have come to the right place. You will learn with specific techniques the dos and don’ts that every professional smorgasbord eater must adhere to. Within these tough economic times it is important to make sure our dollar stretches as far as possible.

(tags: Restaurants)

(tags: Nonproliferation)

How do American Jews speak English? Who uses Hebrew and Yiddish words and New York regional features? When using Hebrew words, who prefers Israeli pronunciations and who prefers Ashkenazic ones? Which Yiddish-origin features do some non-Jews use? Two researchers from Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion have begun to answer these questions. Linguist Sarah Bunin Benor and Sociologist Steven M. Cohen have released the results of a large-scale survey of Jews and non-Jews in the United States.

(tags: Judaism)

(tags: Berlin)

What's After The Credits is simply a site that you can utilize to quickly find out if a movie, television show, video game, etc. has any special scenes during the credits or post credits (aka Stinger / Movie Stinger).

(tags: Movies)

(tags: Global_Warming)

(tags: Marketing)

(tags: PBS)

Some of the greatest baseball players the world has never seen are in Cuba, where their talent is government property, and their only chance of turning pro is the risky boat ride to Florida. Gus Dominguez, an L.A. sports agent, has done more than anyone to help escaped players join major-league U.S. teams, but now he sits in a California jail, convicted of smuggling athletes. The author flies to Havana for an unprecedented scouting of the island’s stars as he reports on the twisted dynamics behind the Dominguez case.

(tags: Cuba)

(tags: Cuba)

(tags: Microcredit)

After eight years of arduous state and federal environmental reviews, the promoters of Cape Wind, a wind energy project off the Massachusetts coast, had every reason to believe that they were home free. Then the Wampanoag tribes asked the Interior Department to declare all of Nantucket Sound, where the 130 wind turbines would be built, a “traditional cultural property” and, they hoped, block construction. Tribal officials say their culture requires them to greet the sunrise each day and that this ritual requires unobstructed views. Their claim should be rejected by the responsible federal and state officials. Another round of bureaucratic reviews would drag out an approval process that has gone on much too long and give opponents time to find some other way to derail the effort.

The tribes’ claim seems unsupportable. “Traditional cultural properties” tend to be defined areas — a ceremonial burial ground, for instance — not a huge, unenclosed portion of the ocean.

(tags: Massachusetts)

(tags: Detroit)

The troubles of Detroit are well-publicized. Its economy is in free fall, people are streaming for the exits, it has the worst racial polarization and city-suburb divide in America, its government is feckless and corrupt (though I should hasten to add that new Mayor Bing seems like a basically good guy and we ought to give him a chance), and its civic boosters, even ones that are extremely knowledgeable, refuse to acknowledge the depth of the problems, instead ginning up stats and anecdotes to prove all is not so bad.

(tags: Detroit)

(tags: Michigan)

(tags: Michigan)

The New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan is an innovative philanthropic effort that will help restore southeast Michigan to a position of leadership in the new global economy. Ten national, regional and local foundations have committed $100 million to this unprecedented eight-year initiative. The New Economy Initiative is the one of the largest philanthropic initiatives focused on regional economic development in the country. The New Economy Initiative is philanthropy’s response to the declining economy of Metropolitan Detroit.

The goal of the initiative is to “accelerate the transition of metro Detroit to an innovation-based economy that expands opportunity for all.”

(tags: Michigan)

This paper is a call to action for business to embrace anti-corruption as strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR)—moving beyond risk mitigation toward proactively solving social problems critical to the business. With a particular focus on the developing world, it suggests that corporations can build on existing models for compliance and collective action and take a greater leadership role in the broader anti-corruption effort. Just as top corporations have staked out proactive positions on other social issues, such as child labor and the environment, it's time for anti-corruption to become part of companies CSR missions.

(tags: corporate_social_responsibility Corruption)

It was once the “land of a thousand cities” and home to some of the world’s most renowned scientists, poets, and philosophers. Today it is seen mostly as a harsh backwater. To imagine Central Asia’s future, we must journey into its remarkable ­past.

(tags: Central_Asia)

(tags: Mathematics)

During one of our first conversations, Brent James told me a story that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to hear from a doctor. For most of human history, James explained, doctors have done more harm than good. Their treatments consisted of inducing vomiting or diarrhea and, most common of all, bleeding their patients. James, who is the chief quality officer at Intermountain Healthcare, a network of hospitals and clinics in Utah and Idaho that President Obama and others have described as a model for health reform, then rattled off a list of history books that told the fuller story. Sure enough, these books recount that from the time of Hippocrates into the 19th century, medicine made scant progress. “The amount of death and disease would be less,” Jacob Bigelow, a prominent doctor, said in 1835, “if all disease were left to itself.”

(tags: Health_Care)

The merry month of July 2009 had barely witnessed the spectacle of Al Franken eventually taking his seat as the junior senator from Minnesota when, immediately following the death of Walter Cronkite, Time magazine took an online poll to determine who was now “America’s most trusted newscaster.” Seven percent of those responding named Katie Couric. Nineteen percent nominated Charles Gibson. Twenty-nine percent went for Brian Williams. But the clear winner, garnering 44 percent, was Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. Either I missed it, or the poll failed to specify, in that wonderfully reassuring way that polls purport to do, what had been its “margin of error.”

(tags: funny_stuff)