Firefox 3 winning rave reviews. Scientists creating see-through fish. Hillary Clinton playing the gender card and a university for marijuana lovers. These are the top stories making headlines around the world.
Technology & Internet
Call him old-school, but the father of the Internet is cautioning Netizens to stop posting personal info on websites. Sir Tim Berners Lee said future generations will have access to that personal data, which can come back to haunt people years later, Maverick reported. Hmm, wonder if Berners-Lee is speaking from experience.
The tech and Internet categories of news were pretty busy this week, so if you’re looking for a run-down of what is important right now, have a look at these: Firefox 3 surpasses Internet Explorer 8 and Opera 9.5 in browser tests, according to cgull; Facebook endured a one-month decline in British and Canadian membership, but the social media powerhouse is still going strong, momentsintime wrote; in other Facebook news, the site rolled out more secure privacy controls and plans to introduce a chat service, Angelique van Engelen reported; “King of Spam” Robert Soloway faces up to 26 years in prison and a $625,000 fine for flooding our inboxes with drivel, Susan Duclos found; and a new widget can detect harmful bacteria in grocery-store milk or juice, thanks to some engineering prowess from Penn State University. Salmonella, your new enemy is a thin piece of iron.
Science & Health
What happens when you mix anorexia with alcohol? You get “drunkorexia,” a new trend among skinny-obsessed women and the subject of cgull’s article on this disturbing eating disorder. Instead of eating meals, drunkorexics down glasses of wine, thinking they’re helping their body with the vino binge. What’s next, booze-imia?
Several other science and health stories warrant a close look: a university in California is running classes to teach pot lovers how to grow good bud, or serve up a Mary Jane cheesecake; global warming is being blamed for an early spring, Bob Ewing noted; scientists created see-through fish to observe tumor growth in marine life, malan discovered; mental health groups aren’t helping U.S. soldiers as they promised, momentsintime wrote (as if shell shock weren’t bad enough); pertinent info about the penis populated Can Tran‘s intriguing sexy piece; and you should be wary about which organic personal care products you buy, because some of them many contain carcinogenic chemicals. I can already hear Body Shop managers quaking in their booties.
World
Sometimes, daily newspapers actually apologize to the people they’ve wronged. Such was the case with the UK’s Daily Mirror, which printed a front-page apology to the McCann family, whom they accused of kidnapping their daughter, Planet Janet told us. Of course, the “sorry” only came after the family won a libel case against the tabloid.
To get caught up on more world news, keep reading: a Mexico-U.S. border fence is troubling Native Americans who often visit their families over the border, momentsintime reported; a former Luftwaffe pilot may have killed the author of The Little Prince, Can Tran posted; the controversy over CIA’s secret prisons was re-opened after a Yemeni described the torture he faced at the hands of CIA interrogators, jxtra wrote; a top Al-Qaeda operative was captured and recently turned over to the Pentagon, Knight Shield said; and in an informative and thorough feature, Pamela Jean discussed the U.S. foreclosure crisis and its effect on the growth of “tent cities.” She described such a situation in California:
Most residents live in tents, some in mobile homes in various states of disrepair, their possessions crammed in with them or spread out on the ground.
TopFinds Awards
Hillary Clinton is playing the sex and race card? African-Americans are voting for Obama strictly for racial reasons? That argument formed the basis behind the winner of this week’s TopOpEd Award, given to Hargrove for her impressively laid-out statement about Clinton’s war of words relating to sex and race. She cited many examples, even going back to the Bill Clinton days, and she addressed the new “racial strategy” currently storming the U.S. presidential race. It’s always informative to see how politics is being informed not by policy but by social and racial divides.
Returning to Mrs. Clinton, the TopPolitics Award winner also takes her to task with a powerful attack on her constant recycling of the line, “I am offering 35 years of experience.” Carolyn E. Price wondered what kind of public service Hillary has been giving the American people. Penning a detailed bio of the Senator and explicitly describing her various careers throughout the past three decades, this Citizen Journalist gave us good reason to doubt Clinton’s self-praising statements. Susan Duclos may have a point when she commented: “The problem is people are too busy bashing Bush, whom is NOT running in 2008, to bother doing any legwork into Hillary or Obama.”
Nothing like non-lethal weapons to perk our journalistic Spidey sense. And malan‘s article on an innnovative new satellite canon deserves this week’s TopTech Award. He clearly explained how police can use this weapon to shoot a gooey satellite-tracking gadget on a stolen vehicle, allowing officers to avoid engaging in any violent tailspin techniques. High-speed chase deaths are constantly in the news, so this weapon could be a welcome addition to a cop’s choices.
When Wall Street Goes Down, New York City Follows. It was a perfect headline to summarize why hard economic times on Wall Street hurts NYC as a whole, as Wanderlaugh reported in his TopBusiness Award-winning article. Illustrating his argument with poignant examples and backing up the piece with financial tests, the Citizen Journalist dissected how the CEO bonuses benefits New York City’s economic prosperity. Whoulda thought?
In Mexico, abortion is legal but women seeking the operation are still enduring obstacles due to doctors with a religious agenda. DigitalJournal.com readers may not have known about this crisis if it weren’t for the intrepid reporting from ocean, who takes home the TopWorld Award. His feature on the Mexican abortion issue, complemented with specific evidence, gave us an inside glimpse into what many women are facing but what the media rarely amplifies. Well done, ocean, we look forward to more of your important articles.
Whenever a Citizen Journalist attends an event and publishes a comprehensive review, we take notice. And winning this week’s TopEntertainment Award for a review of a recent Iron Maiden concert in Toronto is Ringwraith, whose musical hobby has given us other noteworthy articles. Dissecting the concert song by song, Ringwraith also provided readers with excellent photos of “England’s premiere metal act.” This was no ordinary article about Maiden; it belonged alongside the stellar reviews you’d find in Rolling Stone or NME.
And from the department of “Huh?” comes a weird story about the Kremlin looking for 3,200 white mice. It looks like the Russians paid $20,000 US for thousands of mice for reasons that remain unknown. cgull can add the TopOffBeat Award to his crowded trophy case for finding this unusual story and explaining exactly what the Kremlin was looking for. It almost seems too ridiculous to be real, but that’s the news for you — bizarre, sometimes confusing but always giving us something to think about.
