Word: berring
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...only pleasure comes in watching Clooney do one of his favorite things: play himself as an idiot. The oafs in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Burn After Reading were mere warm-ups for this über-doofus. Striding through Iraq as if he has even a remote view of where he's going, Cassady has a confidence that almost masks his lunacy. Thus, he's the exemplar of a war rationale built on the belief in weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist...
...last week says India has consistently greened its GDP since the 1980s, with the energy intensity of India's GDP falling from 0.3 kgoe (kilogram-of-oil equivalent) per dollar of GDP in 1980 to 0.16 kgoe in 2004. This, it adds, is an achievement on par with über-green Germany and is bettered only by Japan, the U.K., Brazil and Denmark...
...their cause too. When hippies started staging "be-ins" to protest the Vietnam War, the first fat activists co-opted the idea: they staged their own event in New York City's Central Park, dubbed it a "Fat-In" and ate ice cream while burning posters of über-thin model Twiggy. Viva la revoluci...
...younger Malians, even in Ber, deep in Mali's remote north, are very different from their parents' generation. Few can read the manuscripts' old Arabic script, and some are beginning to ignore long-held taboos against selling them. When I visit Essayouti, Timbuktu's imam, at home, he shows me four ? 15th century leather-bound manuscripts that locals had sold him the day before for about $200. Many locals, he says, simply need the money, or don't know who will next look after the books. "We are trying to explain to each new generation why these are important...
...real threat comes from people - both outsiders and insiders. Ber might at first seem unchanged by modern life. Tuareg traders still arrive on camel, bearing giant bricks of salt which they transport across the Sahara for weeks - just as traders did centuries ago when the area's manuscripts were originally written. In Mahmoud's mind, too, local attitudes remain unchanged. Locals remain fiercely distrustful of outsiders, he says, including Mali's government in Bamako, with which locals have been at odds for years. Many people still jealously guard family heirlooms as a tangible form of security. "We won't sell...