MIT’s OpenCourseWare project aims to offer the complete course material for every class online, free of charge.

President Susan Hockfield offers this explanation:

“OpenCourseWare expresses in an immediate and far-reaching way MIT’s goal of advancing education around the world. Through MIT OCW, educators and students everywhere can benefit from the academic activities of our faculty and join a global learning community in which knowledge and ideas are shared openly and freely for the benefit of all.”

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Saddam dead, hanged around 6AM Baghdad time
Malaysia Sun

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been executed by hanging.

The execution took place around 6:00am Baghdad time Saturday, just before the sun rose which marked the commencement of the Eid Al Adha holiday.
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Wow.This is not a joke! The US Transportation Security Agency has already installed a machine in the Phoenix airport that literally sees through 100% of your clothes down to your bare skin and can display high resolution images of you in all your naked glory.

Assuming that all goes well with the initial run of the backscatter at Sky Harbor, similar technologies will be introduced to a number of other major U.S. airports early in 2007.
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Foreign Policy magazine has an excellent photo essay entitled Trail of Diamonds by photographer Kadir Van Lohuizen which follows the life of a diamond from the mines in Africa where people work 12 hours shifts a day in return for meals (no pay) to the sweat shops in India that control 70% of the world’s diamond cutting, to the jewelry store where we buy them.
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Damn! This British news video demonstrates yet again evidence of police brutality. They claim that their investigation uncovered abuses at every level of the prison systems, and they present enough evidence in this video that I believe their claim.

This 50 minute program is NOT appropriate for children.
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Did you know that even if you’re an 80 year old god-fearing woman, if the police kick your door in at 2am and kill you, you have no recourse so long as some criminal drug using informant previously swore that there were drugs in your home?

And that’s not just a hypothetical situation. It actually happened. And so did a whole bunch of other shocking examples just like it.
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This is a fascinating 6 minute video, created by a reporter living in Colombia named Matthew Bristow, documenting the process that cocaine goes through from the point at which it is a plant growing in the ground until it is refined enough to actually use as a drug.

They stop just short of the point that it gets sold to a drug trafficker or guerrilla - who further refine the drug.
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If there weren’t enough things to be paranoid about already, manufacturers continue to release more and more “ethically challenged” pieces of surveillance equipment.

The latest is a Shower Mirror Radio wireless camera. It uses a two-way mirror and broadcasts wirelessly in full color to the pervert next door.
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A new site dreamt up by the rock star Peter Gabriel called Witness.org focuses on the noble, yet disturbing, concept of documenting human rights violations.

The site currently catalogs one of the largest collections of human rights violations in the world, and has gathered the data by training hundreds of people in over 80 countries to use video recording technology.
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