US In Worst Top 3 For Income Inequality

clipped from finance.yahoo.com The U.N. Development Program recently came out with a report looking, among other things, at income inequality worldwide. The UNDP ranked countries and regions based on a number of factors, including their Gini coefficient, named for Italian statistician Corrado Gini. We have listed the world's most advanced economies based on their Gini score, with zero marking absolute equality and 100 absolute inequality. Scandinavian countries, Japan, and the Czech Republic have the least amount of inequality. The U.S. is among the most unequal, but it's not No. 1. No. 1 Hong Kong No. 2 Singapore No. 3 U.S. No. 4 Israel No. 5 Portugal No. 6 New Zealand No. 7 (tie) Italy No. 7 (tie) Britain No. 9 Australia No. 10 (tie) Ireland No. 10 (tie) Greece

Creative Bus Stops

clipped from green.yahoo.com Taking the bus can be a cheaper commute than driving a car. No fluctuating gas prices or expensive vehicle maintenance to deal with. Leave the driving to someone else, and you can read a book, talk on the phone, or listen to your iPod for a more relaxing route to work or school. But waiting for the bus can be a chore ... unless you get to hang out in one of these unusual bus stops around the world. Some communities celebrate their heritage, others places make use of creative materials, and a few towns let artists express themselves with a bus stop as the canvas. Maybe if more transit systems had attractive bus stops like these, more people would enjoy a car-free commute!

Tom Fun Orchestra: Bottom of the River

clipped from drawn.ca Superb music video for the Tom Fun Orchestra, directed by Alasdair Brotherson and Jock Mooney of Trunk Animation.

It Has The Stench Of Opportunity

By reducing the amount of the potent greenhouse gas released into the air, the projects also potentially could turn cow dung into dollars, if a climate bill before Congress becomes law.

"Agriculture and agribusiness is what Greeley is all about," Biggi said. "We needed to take that strong traditional economic base and ... merge it with emerging renewable energy and technology."

Waste may be the new energy crop in these parts. But elsewhere, communities are looking anew at power sources such as the sun and wind that may exist in their own backyards.

clipped from news.yahoo.com Climate concerns turn city's smell into cash cow GREELEY, Colo. – The smell of manure hangs over Greeley as it has for half a century. These days it's more than just a potent reminder of the region's agricultural roots and the hundreds of thousands of cattle raised on the city's outskirts. The stench smells like an opportunity. Investors are lining up to support a planned clean energy park that eventually will convert some of the methane gas released from the manure piles into power for a cheese factory and other businesses. JBS, which runs two of the largest feed yards and the local slaughterhouse, is testing a new technology that heats the cattle excrement and turns it into energy. The idea is to lure new business to the area with what Biggi likes to call its renewable natural gas — the endless supply of methane from cheap manure The shift is being driven partly by legislation in Congress that would reduce the gases linked to global warming.

An Octuplet Of Opticle Illusions

sorry couldn't resist the alliteration

clipped from health.yahoo.com If you’ve ever felt like you go a little cross-eyed after taking a peek at an optical illusion, then you know they can be a pretty intense phenomenon. What your eyes perceive when looking at one of these images is actually a visual illusion; you see the image as something different than what it is because the different cells and receptors in your eyes distinguish images and colors at dissimilar speeds. The eye can only receive a limited amount of visual stimuli, but as your brain constantly processes the visual information, it gives you the illusion of continuous sight. Whether it’s an optical, physiological or cognitive illusion, the design plays a trick on your eyes (and mind). Check out some of the interesting illusions below—but beware, you may not be able to absorb them all in one sitting.

If You Can't Beat Em, Don't Count Them

They hope to not only push the undocumented further into the shadows, but erase from the rolls a whole community of people, immigrant or otherwise, who are shaping the largest population shift this country has ever seen.

The Republicans are not seeing past the idea that these people are "other" or that they are "foreigners" because if they did, they would realize they have the potential for attracting scores of first generation immigrants, who typically have conservative, Christian ideals and come from center-right countries.

clipped from news.yahoo.com The amendment to the fiscal 2010 Commerce-Justice-Science spending bill (HR 2847) being proposed in the senate right now to stop funding the 2010 Census until they change their survey to include questions about citizenship may be the final nail in the coffin of the GOP/Latino relationship. proposed to require all those who fill out the surveys to affirm their citizenship status, and then attempt to discount millions of people who peacefully live, work and contribute to America. The justification is that the undocumented should not be counted because they can't vote. However, there is no question of whether people are ex-cons, another population of people who do not have voting rights in many states, but are counted within the census numbers. gets even narrower as they consider making the choice "citizen" or "non-citizen" seeking to discount even further those who are "legal" residents or have visas but haven't yet become full citizens.

Racist Undertones Of The 'Socialist' Epithet

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Take another black leader, another society fraught by racial division. In 1956, Nelson Mandela and 155 other antiapartheid activists were arrested by the South African government under the infamous Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, a law that was used gratuitously to incarcerate anyone who was critical of the government.

The treason trial that followed resulted in a 1961 acquittal for all those involved, the government unable to prove any "socialist" intentions. But the political equation of black activists as "communists" would continue up through the 1980s.

The Reagan administration egregiously soft-pedaled the issue of apartheid on the basis of the South African government's purported anticommunist stance. Indeed, the South African government itself viewed its policies not as racist, but as anticommunist. Only popular pressure through a global antiapartheid movement persuaded the US to isolate South Africa.

It takes the cry of "socialism!" liter

clipped from news.yahoo.com Americans are famously reluctant to talk about race and racism, Yet, as seen at various town hall meetings and the Tea Party rally in Washington Sept. 12, a deeper sign of racial tension has emerged with the reappearance of a different inflammatory expression: socialism. n the context of American politics, socialism has seldom been about the economy or state power alone, despite its political-economic roots. Instead, it has been a slur, synonymous with the charge of communism, but with meaning extending beyond this term as well. Black leaders in particular have faced this accusation. In 1964, amid the momentous occasion of congressional approval for the Civil Rights Act, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina declared its passage the result of "Negro agitators, spurred on by Communist enticements to promote racial strife." Martin Luther King Jr. was not an exception to this allegation, but a direct target.