Lone Gunman

I’m pretty sure we’re all agreed that trav­el­ling the world is a great thing to do. And when you can do it on a fru­gal bud­get (not a cheap one), it’s even better!

That makes Plonkee’s lat­est post, 21 Resources for Bud­get Travel great in every respect — links galore!

take the train, not the plane — pos­si­bly the most civilised form of trans­port avail­able. I love tak­ing the train when I’m on hol­i­day. My cur­rent favourite trip was from Budapest to Vienna, so cheap and so easy. One of these days I want to travel on the Trans-Siberian express from Moscow to Beijing.

My added tip? If you do con­sider using the train — even for a moment — you must check out The Man in Seat Sixty-One; the great­est site on the topic of inter­con­ti­nen­tal train travel (I have men­tioned this site before).

Unsub­scribe is an Amnesty Inter­na­tional cam­paign ask­ing you to ‘unsub­scribe’ from the human rights abuses under­taken around the world in your name. Ille­gal deten­tion and tor­ture are just two of the acts that are com­mon place in the so-called ‘War on Ter­ror’, and guilty or not, peo­ple deserve bet­ter treat­ment than what they cur­rently get in (ille­gal) pris­ons around the world.

To raise aware­ness of this cam­paign, Amnesty pro­duced two excru­ci­at­ingly pow­er­ful films show­ing, for real, the CIA-endorsed tor­ture tech­niques enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion pro­ce­dures cur­rently used around the world on pris­on­ers who are yet to face a trial (i.e. in the eyes of the law, they are still innocent)*.

Wait­ing for the Guards depicts the hor­ror of Stress Posi­tions, held for a measly six hours.

The Stuff of Life shows us — in a real and unam­bigu­ous way — that ‘water­board­ing’ is tor­ture, not an inter­ro­ga­tion tech­nique. (Cur­rently only avail­able on the campaign’s main page.)

Whether or not you agree with the pol­i­tics (although it’s dif­fi­cult not to), these films are worth a watch — they are exquis­itely directed and pro­duced. The mak­ing of clip for ‘The Stuff of Life’ is also worth a watch.

* Only 1 in 10 peo­ple at Guan­tanamo are expected to face charges (and a court) — the rest will be set free with­out charge.

The X Prize Foun­da­tion is a non-profit insti­tute that awards rather large prizes to non-governmental organ­i­sa­tions who achieve a num­ber of mile­stones, classed as ben­e­fi­cial to mankind. The most famous of these was the Ansari X Prize awarded to the first NGO to send a reusable manned space­craft into space twice in two weeks — this was even­tu­ally won by the Tier One project, and they were awarded with the $10,000,000 prize in 2004.

Today it appears that everyone’s favourite ani­mal rights group, PETA, is get­ting in on the action too; they have offered a $1,000,000 prize to the first organ­i­sa­tion to cre­ate and mar­ket in-vitro chicken meat within the next four years. As El Reg puts it:

PETA announced today it will offer $1m to an orga­ni­za­tion that can suc­cess­fully cre­ate and mar­ket “in vitro meat,” i.e. mus­cle tis­sue grown with­out the pesky ani­mal attached.

To col­lect PETA’s $1m car­rot, sci­en­tists must develop a com­mer­cially mar­ketable in vitro meat in just four years. At least they’re first set­ting the bar down to cre­at­ing a chicken flesh sub­sti­tute, which report­edly tastes like every non-traditional ani­mal in the known universe.

This brings to mind my favourite Thread­less t-shirt… Meat is mur­der. Tasty, tasty mur­der.

This morn­ing I read an inter­est­ing BBC News arti­cle titled Inno­cent pho­tog­ra­pher or ter­ror­ist? that tack­les the issue of ille­gal stop and searches of pho­tog­ra­phers and the grow­ing inci­dence of this in the UK. A good accom­pa­ni­ment to my pre­vi­ous post, The Photo Police.

It reminded me of this handy lit­tle book­let on Pho­tog­ra­phers’ Rights in the UK pro­duced by Linda Macpher­son in con­junc­tion with The Cam­era Club of Lon­don.

Some years ago it was said in a judge­ment that there is “no law against tak­ing a pho­to­graph”. This implies a gen­eral free­dom to take pho­tographs that, sadly for pho­tog­ra­phers, does not really exist. There are, in fact, many legal restric­tions on the right to take a pho­to­graph, and it would be more cor­rect to say that one is free to take pho­tographs except when the law pro­vides otherwise.

So the ques­tion is, when does the law pro­vide oth­er­wise?

Remem­ber that great visual that accom­pa­nied Alisa Miller’s 2008 TED Talk?

Oxfam in Action have pro­duced a sim­i­lar graphic cov­er­ing the top­ics of world poverty, edu­ca­tion, HIV infec­tion rates, hunger, pop­u­la­tion, and trade.

Ever won­dered what extreme poverty on a global scale looks like? It’s not a pretty sight – as you can see on our clever inter­ac­tive map. Oxfam is busy fight­ing poverty with part­ners and poor com­mu­ni­ties in more than 70 coun­tries world­wide to reshape our world for the better.

Click on the cat­e­gories above to find out what kind of shape the world is in on some of the big poverty-related issues Oxfam works on.

These maps were cre­ated by Map­ping Worlds whose web­site also con­tains more great graph­ics — worth a look!