Painting by LZakaria
Aung San Suu Kyi is a Burmese political leader who was held under house arrest for 15 years by her country’s military junta. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights”. Freed from house arrest in 2012, she is currently serving in the lower house of the Burmese parliament.
More about Aung San Suu Kyi:
Collected news stories from The Guardian (UK)
United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama today. Said the president, ”Dolores was very gracious when I told her I had stolen her slogan, Si, se puede. Yes, we can. Knowing her, I’m pleased that she let me off easy— because Dolores does not play.”
(by kruhme)
Mi-ran assumed that nowhere else in the world were people better off, and that most probably fared far worse. She heard many, many times on the radio and television that South Koreans were miserable under the thumb of the pro-American puppet leader Park Chung-hee and, later, his successor, Chun Doohwan. They learned that China’s diluted brand of communism was less successful than that brought by Kim Il-sung and that millions of Chinese were going hungry. All in all, Mi-ran felt she was quite lucky to have been born in North Korea under the loving care of the fatherly leader.
Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Korean defectors from their childhoods to their escapes. Through these stories readers learn what it was like to grown up in totalitarian North Korea, how the 1990s famine impacted the lives of ordinary North Koreans, and what it takes to escape.
North Korea is a single party state with very limited interaction with the rest of the world and one of the most militarized countries in the world. Nothing to Envy is worth reading for its look at a practically hidden population and an important political region. It is also worth reading if you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction because sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.
Wow Wednesday - Wasps that are smaller than amoebas
Thrips are tiny insects, typically just a millimetre in length. Some are barely half that size. If that’s how big the adults are, imagine how small a thrips’ egg must be. Now, consider that there are insects that lay their eggs inside the egg of a thrips.
That’s one of them in the image above – the wasp, Megaphragma mymaripenne. It’s pictured next to a Paramecium and an amoeba at the same scale. Even though both these creatures are made up of a single cell, the wasp – complete with eyes, brain, wings, muscles, guts and genitals – is actuallysmaller. At just 200 micrometres (a fifth of a millimetre), this wasp is the third smallest insect alive and a miracle of miniaturisation.
Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.
Click through to read more about this ridiculously awesome animal.
stylin dog
Path Ring, dmdmetal
Hand felted Sebold’s Originals
