The new 703km long - 8m tall wall separating the West bank from Israel, will eventually have the luck of the old one in Berlin. In the mean time, it can also start looking more colourful, like the Berlin one eventually did, with graffitti!With Euros 30, you can have something written on it (not as exciting as Banksy's of course)and at the same time - organisers promise - support peaceful, small social, cultural and educational projects in Palestine.How about the classic "walls have ears, and ears have walls"Related:http://www.sendamessage.nl

Every mainstream politician seems to have an opinion about the root causes of the latest crisis. But let's hear it from someone far more intelligent: The Einstein few know, writing in 1949, in the first issue of the Monthly Review: QUOTEI have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence........Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society. The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the...

  zero carbon travel from your desktop! wonderful pics & sounds from Africa, live Technology gives us so many solutions. We must rethink if it is worth covering thousands of kilometres just to annoy wild animals, or insisting on seeing them when visiting a country. And something surreal: as I was watching this, an ad "Taxidermy Mounts" came up. OOps!

Athenians riot when a 15 year old student, Alexander Grigoropoulos is killed in the Exarheia district, Athens' "Quartier latin", by a policeman's bullet, a "ricoched one" according to the policeman's lawyer, a direct hit according to eyewitnesses. What is certain is that he is a victim of an uninhabitable city that hosted the pharaonic Olympics, which added more unsustainable buildings and roads and brought security paranoia, cameras and an armed & militarised police with "rambo" mentality patrolling the sea of cement that is the inner city of Athens, once more (as in ancient times) a globalised metropolis complete with ghettoes for all those who fail to partake in the bright side of globalisation, unemployed and radicalised youth, poorly paid "illegal'' immigrants fleeing western wars in the east, trafficked prostitutes from western Africa and eastern Europe, mob gangs and laid off workers and ... and...In Athens, and other large cities worldwide, citizens...

IUCN regularly issue updates of their famous "Red List of Threatened Species". The latest results for mammals show at least 1,141 of the world's 5,487 recognised mammal species to be threatened with extinction. Some, unfortunately even within the sustainability ranks, try to justify conservation via Economism, arguing that it pays to conserve an animal and 'sell' it many times over to tourists, rather than killing it. According to this argument however, the rarer (i.e. the more endangered) an animal, the higher would be its economic value. So it would pay to decimate numbers reducing them to an 'optimum' endangered level, that would also minimise human-animal conflict. Is this what is actually taking place? It would be interesting to research a correlation between countries that have successfully developed mass tourism in protected areas and those with a high percentage of endangered species. Some endangered species percentages in popular nature tourism destinations are:...

According to Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meat production puts more greenhouse gases (18% of the total) into the atmosphere than transport. This 18% includes gases released by clearing forested land, making & transporting fertiliser, burning fossil fuels in farm vehicles and "the front and rear end emissions of cattle and sheep" as BBC politely puts it.So "offset" your meat, rather than your flights, and offset it the real way, by not consuming it!Which may also help you limit your rear end emissions

one of the axioms of economics is that there are no free meals. FreeRice.com disagrees. Play a word definition game, win and donate 20 grains of rice each time to the UN World Food Program, as an advertisers banner is displayed. Hmmm, every time the banner is from...Unilever. ...So I tried the word game and made Unilever pay for a whopping 2,500 grains of rice. What nonsense.

Once more, fires decimating what's left of suburban forests in Athens. 'Arsonists', 'usual suspects' etc. are blamed by gullible & hysteric media, as they are convenient for the inadequacy & indifference of officials, who can spend millions on fire-fighting aircraft (with some associates pocketing some nice commissions), but can find no funds to adequately pay, train, equip, dress or hire firemen, municipal workers and volunteers, so that the highly-flammable pine forests can be relatively clear of fallen branches and leaves, monitored and patrolled. Oh yes, and our army is busy cleaning toilets, fighting in exotic places where our good allies arm-twisted it to be, going shopping (and elsewhere) with the wives of generals, and heroically blocking the entry to fortress Europe to impoverished immigrants escaping the wars of our allies...

The Ancient Nemean Games (NEMEIA), one of the four major athletic events of ancient Greece (others were Olympeia, Isthmeia & Delpheia) were revived once more in the ancient stadium of Nemea, in the Peloponnese, Greece, on Solstice Day. 600 athletes from around the world, clad in tunics, run barefoot in the ancient stadium, to earn nothing more than palm branches and wild celery.BBC Video - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7470858.stmSociety of the Revival of the Nemean GamesNemea Excavations - University of California, Berkeley

QUOTEI am not a labor leader. I don't want you to follow me or anyoneelse. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalistwilderness you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you intothis promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someoneelse would lead you out. John dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (1930)