Headlines from October 17, 2006
- Innovative housing pitches for expensive homes include writing blogs, giving away a Maserati.
- An ex-drug dealer and burglar leads a wheelchair posse terrorizing Southern California businesses.
- Met Life agrees to sell Stuyvesant Town for $5.4 billion to investment group led by Tishman Speyer.
- The world's ugliest animals, ranked.
- Video: Behind the scenes documentation of how to teach Glasgow to paint itself.
- "Bodies" exhibit runs into trouble in Seattle for displaying dead Chinese citizens who didn't give consent prior to expiration.
- Governmental seams splitting as horrific bloodshed continues between Sunni and Shiite gunmen in Iraq.
- Collision between two subway trains in Rome kills two, injures up to 250.
- Number of pedestrians killed by hit-and-run drivers has jumped 20 percent since 2000.
- In-flight fires are the fourth leading cause of commercial aviation fatalities.
- Wal-Mart stands one billion-dollar step away from becoming the biggest foreign chain in China.
- Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing about 38,000 people out of poverty in China each month, about 460,000 per year.
- Fuel in North Korea's bomb was plutonium, not uranium; North Korea says this past weekend's U.N. resolution is a "declaration of war."
- Starbucks baristas and customers go to war over whether the company should sell fewer sugar and calorie-stuffed drinks.
- Is buying mp3s instead of CDs more environmentally friendly if you keep upgrading your iPod?
- Op: Africa may have had the best week ever, but try mailing cash to the Global Fund instead of buying a new mp3 player.
- Pop-art quilts by Ai Kijima.
- The role of professor has gone from an earth-shaking, student-rousing myth to she who addresses lowered baseball caps.
- British universities to be asked to spy on Muslim and "Asian looking" students for signs of Islamic extremism.
- Diaries of a San Francisco sex slave (entries one, two, three, four).
- The total number of recovered pairs of women's thong-style underwear was 854.
- Foodcandy: Where those urbanites who love food (but not so much as to be too fat for fancy jeans) can meet and get laid.
- The backstory behind the incredible résumé of one Aleksey Garber (see YouTube video of miracles)
- Video: Harvard sleep researcher Robert Stickgold interviews Michel Gondry about dreams.
- You know what would be really cool? If instead of baby music you played Eminem. Thirteen-year-old's tips for parenting.
- Is contemporary teen dancing an evolution of the jitterbug, or only one step from events that happen on honeymoons?
- Eighteen ways to appreciate death.
- Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn poked his arm through his $139 million Picasso. (Nora Ephron's glad she didn't do it.)
- Tell-all sex book about politicians and their lovers captures French hearts.
- Confessions of a bookplate junkie. See also, much love for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's "Glass House" apartment buildings in Chicago.