Trend News

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29496655/

Raining eggs Guards cover Ukraine parliament speaker Volodymr Lytvyn with an umbrella from eggs thrown by opposition lawmakers during ratification of the Black Sea Fleet deal with Russia, in Kiev, Ukraine, on April 27. Ukrainian prosecutors are considering filing charges against parliament members who hurled the eggs and set off smoke bombs in the chamber in protest of the deal. 

Stanford d.school Proves You Really Can Design a Space for Innovation BY   LINDA TISCHLER Mon Apr 26, 2010 "Space matters." That's the mantra at the  Stanford d.school , where students and staffers have spent six years figuring out how to tweak an environment to make it a more fertile breeding ground for ideas. Now they're going to find out if those ideas work. The boxes were unpacked in late March, in time for the start of the university's third quarter. But the official ribbon-cutting on the 40K square foot new building (which houses both the d.school and all other design programs at Stanford) isn't until May 7.  Fast Company  got a sneak preview, and we'll be giving you a guided tour (along with photos, videos and critiques of the space from the students themselves) in the days ahead. We'll go behind the scenes to show how every nook, cranny, and fungible wall system has been smartly designed to maximize collaboration. The school, which is offi...

Kids in Argentina learn to grow their own food By  Brian Byrnes , CNN STORY HIGHLIGHTS Community efforts have reclaimed lots filled with garbage into urban gardens Children's hunger and undernourishment are big problems in Argentina Organizations hope that by teaching children about farming, they can have access to nutritious food BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (CNN)  -- On his knees in the soggy soil, 9-year-old Alexis Ocampo digs deep into the earth, his small gardening rake separating dirt from rocks. "Look, I found a worm!" he shrieks. Towering above is Andrea Girardini, calmly instructing Alexis and the half-dozen other children working to clear spots for new crops. "We can put a squash plant here, and some lettuce over there," says Girardini, a director of Semillas al Viento, a community organization that teaches neighborhood kids practical skills that help them put food on the table. "The children come here and learn how to farm and how to cultivate the...

An anti-government protester waves a flag bearing a portrait of Che Guevara behind a barricade built with bamboo poles and tires in Bangkok on Sunday, April 25. Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva on Saturday rejected an offer by demonstrators to end weeks of increasingly violent protests in return for early polls. BANGKOK - Security forces and agitated protesters faced off at a major intersection Friday after bloody grenade attacks rattled Thailand's chaotic capital — a scene of tense, weekslong confrontations between die-hard demonstrators and a wavering government. The late-night attacks killed three people and wounded 75, Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban said. Attackers shot five M-79 grenades from near where anti-government Red Shirt protesters have been encamped and the blasts struck areas where counter-demonstrators have gathered, but Suthep stopped short of directly blaming the Red Shirts for the attack. The mostly rural Red Shirts have been entrenched on ...

The Billionaire Dissident An oil tycoon in a glass cage aspires to be Russia's next Sakharov. BY SUSAN GLASSER, PETER BAKER   |   MAY/JUNE 2010 He has been stabbed, spied on, and sent to solitary confinement. His oil company assets have been seized by the state, his fortune decimated, his family fractured. And now, after nearly seven years in a Siberian prison camp and a Moscow jail cell, he is back on trial in a Russian courtroom, sitting inside a glass cage and waiting for a new verdict that could keep him in the modern Gulag for much of the rest of his life. Each day, he is on display as if in a museum exhibit, trapped for all to see inside what his son bitterly calls "the freaking aquarium." Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once Russia's richest man, the most powerful of the oligarchs who emerged in the post-Soviet rush of crony capitalism, and the master of 2 percent of the world's oil production. Now he is the most prominent prisoner in Vladimir Putin's Russia...