Word: humanism
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...Greece grants political asylum to only a tiny proportion of illegal immigrants - another source of concern for refugee advocates and human-rights groups. Last year fewer than 1% of those who applied received asylee status, far below the rate in Germany (18%), Italy (11%) or even Spain (4%). Giorgos Karagiannis, country director for aid group Doctors Without Borders, says Greek authorities should be doing more. "Ours is not a political argument. It's practical and medical," he says. "Let's at least meet the minimum standards. We do it for natural disasters. It's not easy, but it's possible...
...buildings after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake or the poisonous red ants which descended on a Caribbean town during a 1902 volcanic eruption. More worrisome is the realization that mankind's existence is, according to the laws of probability, fleeting. Writes de Villiers: "The period of calm in which the human species was formed is only a brief drawing of the breath before the cosmic assault begins once more." So how do we maximize our time in what de Villiers calls a "perilously thin habitable layer on a vulnerable and unstable planet in a hostile neighborhood"? Plan for the worst...
...what's the band been doing? Breaking up mostly. The current lineup has just one original member, Axl Rose. The rest, including guitar savant Slash, departed years ago, presumably too intrigued by the Internet and other human advances to stay locked up in a recording studio with their famously controlling singer. Rose, once as blond and lithe as a stalk of wheat, has suffered the pudgification of middle age and burned through a reported $14 million in production costs, making Chinese Democracy the most expensive record in history. But given the cruelty with which pop culture devours its celebrity eccentrics...
...need musical talent to play these games. What you need is a weird combination of vanity and lack thereof: vanity in that you have to really believe, somewhere in your lizard brain, that you are a rock star; lack of vanity in that your human brain still knows you look like an idiot. But when it works, you experience music in a completely new way. Never before have I actually enjoyed Megadeth. Conversely, never before have I hated Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue." But it's really long, and the drum part is really boring...
...Adrian Kantrowitz, 90, performed the first human-heart transplant in the U.S., in 1967. The patient, an infant, received a heart from another child but lived only 6 1/2 hours after the surgery. Despite the loss, Kantrowitz's work ushered in a new era in approaches to heart illness...