Culture in the Blender

This morning, I read my American boyfriend some parts of Jeremy Rifkin’s book The European Dream. I read the sections pertaining to the American Dream and the religosity of the United States. The extent of religosity and its ties to the American Dream in the United States was made clear to me for the first [...]

Today’s scary piece of news: The horrible Soviet legacy of pollution is alive and well. I once read one of the environmentally scariest articles I’ve ever read in National Geographic about pollution in the former Soviet Union. At the time it was written, the Soviet Union had collapsed, of course. Openness and transparency were hardly [...]

The BBC reports that Dragan Zelenovic, a Bosnian Serb, has been convicted of crimes against humanity.
From the BBC report:
Zelenovic was among Bosnian Serb forces responsible for a campaign of rape and sexual assault of Muslim women in 1992 and 1993 in Foca, where he was deputy commander of the military police.
One of the women was [...]

The BBC reports that a TGV (Train de Grande Vitesse, “train of great speed”, a bullet train) made by Alstom has broken the previous speed record for trains on conventional tracks by going 574.8 km/h. That’s about as fast as a 747 or an A380. It is no surprise to me that the record was [...]