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POPSHong Kong's 'cage homes' Cage dwellings are just one example of worsening poverty in this southern Chinese territory, where only 35 percent of the 3.4 million working population pays income tax and the top 100,000 earners contribute 60 percent of salaries tax. Built in the 1940s to accommodate a wave of Chinese refugees fleeing the civil war on the mainland, about 100 cage homes remain, housing some of Hong Kong's poorest and most downtrodden.
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POPSJohn McCain's revolutionary foreign policy proposal In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power. Via Laura Rozen
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POPSIn defense of William Ayers But to call Ayers a "terrorist" and throw him in the Osama bin Laden pile is a reach for the moral high ground by the very people and political establishment that secretly carpet bombed Cambodia, murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians. ...Ayers is no martyr, and he's no role model. But he doesn't deserve to be the punching bag of the moral cretins who still celebrate lying wars of aggression and the pointless slaughter of untold thousands.
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POPSObama's bitter comment: wrong on every count What Obama did was just parrot the conventional wisdom about small-town, working-class Americans. As political scientist Larry Bartels points out, the CW is wrong. Mr. Obama’s comments are supposed to be significant because of the popular perception that rural, working-class voters have abandoned the Democratic Party in recent decades and that the only way for Democrats to win them back is to cater to their cultural concerns. The reality is that John Kerry received a slender plurality of their votes in 2004, while John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in the close elections of 1960 and 1968, lost them narrowly.
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POPSWater Policy in Israel and Palestine - There's Enough Water for Both The increasing difficulties with water availability, concludes the hydrogeologist, result from Israel using the majority of water resources for agricultural purposes, although this sector today represents a very small portion of the Israeli economy. Despite this, the Israeli state remains unswervingly committed to the Zionist foundation myth, which regards the promotion of agriculture as a central tenet in the Jewish settlement of Palestine. Messerschmid, in turn, sees the priorities of Israeli water policies as fundamentally flawed, leading to a wasteful use of the precious resource. Large areas of land, for instance, are still intensively watered even during conditions of very high temperatures, although most of the water immediately evaporates. The Palestinians, by contrast, do not even have the amount of water at their disposal that was promised in the Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty. Deutsche Fassung
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POPSBradley Burston, Haaretz.com: I want the Palestinians to win "I and the majority of the Palestinian people are ready for a historic agreement based on international decisions that will allow a Palestinian and Israeli state to coexist, side by side, in peace and stability." Jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti Source: Ha'aretz, 08 April 2008 Bradley Burston is Senior Editor of Haaretz.com, the Israeli newspaper's online English language edition. __________________________________ See also Kore7 's clip Bradley Burston: Ten Ways to Make Sure That Peace Stays Dead .
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POPSIdeas for Clipmarks? I think it's been a while since anyone has done it, so let me see if I can start something up. Others can follow. I would like to see on Clipmarks.... A list of 'Most active Clippers' A list of Clippers with most followers Simple interface with less drop down lists A list of Clippers currently browsing Clipmarks Ways to further decrease time it takes to clip, i.e, reduce clicks anywhere possible. More RSS integration, i.e., see if Clipmarks can auto-clip latest interesting news/feeds. More later.
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POPSTracking the Origin of the Cat Cats probably started living close to humans when people evolved from nomadic herding to raising livestock and crops and started storing food, which attracted mice and other rodents. Cats found good hunting there, and humans surely appreciated the sly little predators' help protecting their stocks."There was a mutual benefit," Lyons said. From there, domesticated cats started to radiate out to different parts of the world, often following humans on their migrations. Today cats can be divided genetically into four broad groups: those from Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa and Asia. But Lyons and her colleagues also made surprising discoveries about individual breeds. The Japanese bobtail, for example, does not seem genetically similar to cats from Japan, indicating the breed may have originated elsewhere. Despite its name, the Persian, the oldest recognized breed, looks as though it actually arose in Western Europe and not Persia, which today is Iran.
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POPSStop Cat Poaching Now! A Cause We Can All Support! Okay, so I think this will be my least controversial clip ever. I believe that the time has come to stop shooting other people's pet cats. You may call me closed minded. You may call me a radical. But is say there is right and wrong, and if you shoot other people's cats and then make clothes out of them, then you are wrong. Further more, from now on, I promise to boycott all Swiss garments made from cat fur, and I hope you all do the same! By the way, I'm dying to know the link between this and traditional Chinese medicine! Are they sure they didn't mean Cantonese cooking?