Rapid fire Friday

• Tupac Shakur arts center opens - and so very close to me. Meanwhile the guy who created the first schools for blacks in this state can't even get an elementary school named after him.
  
  
• Poll: In wake of Iraq war, allies prefer China to U.S. - To thine own self be true America. If all of the aid we donated both publicly and privately in the wake of the Tsunami didn't help anything in these countries, then not much will. Immigration is a much better metric than polls anyway.
  
  
• The One Campaign - solve Extreme Poverty and Global Aids (why are they extreme and global?) via nagging and fashionable wristbands. It's so cool, after all Bono and Angelina Jolie are for it. Brought to you by people who don't understand the difference between stock and flow.
  
  
• Palestinian Woman Heading for Treatment at Israeli Hospital Caught Carrying Explosives - really! To Quote:
  

  At the Shikma Prison in Israel's Negev Desert, where the Shin Bet security service allowed Israeli TV reporters to interview her, al-Biss said she was determined to carry out a suicide attack against Israel because of its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

  "My dream was to be a martyr," she said, adding that she was recruited by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a violent offshoot of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement. "I believe in death."

  Sitting calmly across from an Israeli TV interviewer, the young woman with large brown eyes and curly dark hair pulled back in a ponytail said her decision had nothing to do with her disfigurement, which might make her less desirable as a bride.

  "Don't think that because of how I look I wanted to carry out an attack," said al-Biss. "Since I was a little girl I wanted to carry out an attack."

  RTWT. She takes a bit of it all back, worth reading.
  
  
• The Two Blogospheres - an interesting article by Mathew Yglesias
  
  
• ScriptCenter: ATM for Drugs - much more on this later, but definitely a step in the right direction.