Linkliste unbehandelter Themen

I don't know if I can keep this up but maybe this will be a regular Wednesday item instead of something that happens whenever the number of links stored just seems too pressing. 

Politics:

Something seems to be terribly off in France: While articles trying to describe the issues in the banlieues have been a constant reminder of the failed migration and employment policies of the last years, targeting and mass deportation of Romas are new.

Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow have used the unpaving of roads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Indiana as an indicator for the continuing economic crisis and especially the enormous budget deficits of some US states and counties. This article in Slate argues that it might be a sound solution especially for roads that aren't used much, since gravel roads are much cheaper to maintain, and that this is also a sign of the depopulation of certain areas.

Pop Culture: 

CBC has a long and interesting interview with Ellen Page.

Jonathan Safran Foer talks to Die Zeit about meat. I'm currently more interested in plastic and how supermarkets manage to wrap vegetables in incredible amounts of it while the kind you can buy non-pre-wrapped are always more expensive and obviously less fresh. I also find it somewhat discouraging that the first initiative that pops up on google when it comes to plastic bags in Austria is a Freedom Party one from 2006. I remember stores in Dublin only offering paper bags when I was there in 2004, so why exactly does this need extensive studies before anything can happen?