links for 2009-06-13

"She admits that she always thought of the U.S. as a place with "a never-ending supply of money and material possessions," where crises are solved by Bree Van de Kamp turning up on the doorstep with freshly baked muffins. So did most of her colleagues."

Divorce in Russia is easy; a powerful man can divorce his wife "in an hour," according to one local insider. Under the country's anachronistic divorce laws, husbands are generally not obliged to give their wives a penny, and they are often awarded custody of the children. "Relationships are like roulette for modern Russian women," says the insider. "They have a lot to win and everything to lose, so they can never afford to get complacent."

"The cyanide necklace was her ultimate downfall. The macabre piece of jewelry — deadly cyanide crystals encased in a small glass vial suspended from a cord around the neck — is worn by every member of the LTTE. Once arrested, the wearer is supposed to bite down on the glass capsule. Through the tiny cuts in the mouth, cyanide races into the bloodstream and blocks the body’s absorption of oxygen, leaving the victim fatally convulsing and gasping for air. When the police saw the capsule, they beat Menake unconscious."

"These urban foragers are neither homeless nor destitute. They are committed freegans, radical environmentalists (typically vegan) who reject our wasteful consumer culture by living almost entirely on what others throw away. Freegans rarely go hungry thanks to the colossal amount of food Americans dump every day — 38 million tons annually, according to the Environmental Protection Agency."

"I asked her why she became a paramilitary, and she didn't have a good reason, nor did she have a good reason for why she'd started doing contract killings," Jason says. She told him that she had approached the militias herself to see if she could join up, because she wanted "excitement, and to find out if she had the capacity to kill."