Little House on the Prairie
There is an address in Cheyenne, Wyoming -- 2710 Thomes Avenue -- where 2,000 companies are based. But it is not a skyscraper. Or even an office complex. It is a basic, 1,700-square-foot brick house. And it is the subject of an investigative report by Reuters called "A Little House of Secrets on the Great Plains." One of the reporters on the project, Brian Grow, says it looks like a typical home -- until you go inside. "Lo and behold, the corporate suites for the companies that are registered at that address are in fact cubbyhole mailboxes, floor to ceiling in the main room," Grow tells Guy Raz, host of All Things Considered.
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/02/137573513/shell-game-2-000-firms-based-in-one-simple-house
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Revolution U
The Serbian capital is home to the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), an organization run by young Serbs who had cut their teeth in the late 1990s student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic. After ousting him, they embarked on the ambitious project of figuring out how to translate their success to other countries. To the world's autocrats, they are sworn enemies, but to a young generation of democracy activists from Harare to Rangoon to Minsk to Tehran, the young Serbs are heroes. They have worked with democracy advocates from more than 50 countries. They have advised groups of young people on how to take on some of the worst governments in the world. In the summer of 2009, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old blogger and activist, went to Belgrade, where he took a week-long course in the strategies of nonviolent revolution. He learned how to organize people -- not on a computer, but in the streets. And most importantly, he learned how to train others. He went back to Egypt and began to teach.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/16/revolution_u
Excessive awareness of one's rights
Amnesty International has urged the Ukrainian authorities to stop the harassment of a trade union activist who remains in hiding after a court ordered him to undergo a forced psychiatric examination last week. A court in Vinnytsia granted the order for an examination after prosecutors argued that Andrey Bondarenko has an "excessive awareness of his own and others' rights and an uncontrollable readiness to defend these rights in unrealistic ways."
Salt Mine Sanatorium
A former salt mine in Ukraine, 300 metres below the surface, offers asthma and allergy sufferers what medicine cannot: relief. The starkly lit tunnels of the mine wind their way through a crust of underground mineral deposits. The air in these seemingly interminable subterranean passageways is replete with the salt particles once mined by workers. One might think the air in such a place would be harsh on the lungs of those miners but not so: the salt mine in fact has remarkable curative properties.
http://1800recycling.com/2010/10/curative-powers-ukraine-repurposed-salt/
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