Inside India’s baby factoriesIndia’s newest boom business is “rent-a-womb”: factories full of poor women paid to be surrogate “baby vessels” for rich Westerner mothers. Mother Jones goes inside the surrogacy sweatshops.
April, 2010
Journicide: how you’ll earn more cleaning toilets than as an editor
Who says there are no jobs for young journos? Columbia Journalism Review has full-time graduate jobs, paying $27,000 p.a. Gawker compiles a list of better paying jobs, from working at Maccas to inseminating cows. Stay positive.
Barbie goes geeky
Female geeks from all over the world united to vote in a campaign by Mattel to let fans choose Barbie’s next career move. The result? Babs is now a computer engineer.
Bug of the week: f*cking flies
All the rain that has been dumped on central Australia over the past few months has given a stimulus to all sorts of things to go forth and procreate. Cue the flies getting busy, writes Bob Gosford.
Behind the frontlines of Mexico’s drug wars
Investigative journalist Tomas Kellner and former UN adviser Francesco Pipitone offer a shocking inside account of how drug cartels are tearing Mexico apart.
No taking the Mickey at Disney
It’s a fairy tale for Disney right now, with Pixar, DreamWorks and Marvel deals, a rising share and an autonomous European Disney all helping to spotlight chief exec’s Robert Iger’s Cinderella moment.
Tas Greens should stay out of the Government for their own good
The Tasmanian Greens are better off supporting a Labor government than being part of one, argues Peter Tucker. The less power the party seeks now, the more it will wield in the future.
A timeline of Presidential plane crashes
Poland’s Lech Kaczynski isn’t the first world leader to plummet to his death a plane crash. Esquire looks at six other heads of state who met their makers mid-air, and the what Poland can learn from the subsequent fallouts.
Thailand: blood in the streets and in the markets
The violent clashes between protesters and government forces in Thailand could have dire consequences for the country’s recovering economy, as locals stop shopping and tourists stop arriving.
Taylor: How the Greens went mainstream
The Greens don’t want to be a demonstration dressed up as a political party, they want to be the best bet for keeping the balance of the power in the Senate. Their policies haven’t changed, just the way they pitch themselves, writes Lenore Taylor.
The state of the internet in Australia, Q1 2010
mUmbrella launches a new quarterly report into Australia’s web traffic. Nine News is leading the news sites, realestate.com.au is killing in the real estate market and Seek is the number one jobs site.
The Black Eyed Peas are sell-outs — and proud of it
The Black Eyed Peas are “the most corporate band in America”, according to the WSJ, spruiking for Samsung, Apple, BlackBerry, Bacardi and more. will.i.am calls the band a “brand” and even has a PowerPoint presentation.
Why is Bligh so private?
It was politically irrational and not economically explainable why Anna Bligh would privatise major public assets like Queensland Rail. So why do it? What purpose does a state government have? asks Mark Bahnisch.
How the iPad will kill reading
E-books on the iPad probably will replace real books, says Paul Carr, but it’s a shame, because everyone will be too distracted with Flight Control and Twitter to actually read them.
Megalogenis: More people equals more money
Think that the best thing for society is to strictly control immigration? Well NSW has been doing it for a decade, and its economy slowed dramatically and its population fled to Victoria and Queensland, writes George Megalogenis.
exposed The signed letter that damns the Pope
The Associated Press has its hands on a smoking gun on the Pope: a signed letter from 1985 that shows he delayed the defrocking of a pedophile priest for “the good of the universal church”.
Christine Nixon: another fat sheila, another lame jibe
Whatever Christine Nixon has done in public life — being Police Commissioner, going to dinner on Black Saturday, running the Black Saturday recovery — she’ll always cop the fat sheila abuse. It’s the way we treat all overweight women, writes Claire Harvey.
Ryanair takes the piss
Irish budget airline Ryanair has announced it will start charging customers for using toilets on its planes. But are the piddling profits and PR really worth pissing off its customers? asks Ben Sandilands.
My life as a people smuggler
Fake visa stamps, paying a corrupt airport official to open a side door, waiting at McDonalds, making $500,000 profit — it was an easy life until John Howard stopped the boats, says one former people smuggler turned AFP covert agent.
Bush “knew Guantanamo prisoners were innocent”
A former senior aide to Colin Powell says Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that “the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent”, but thought releasing them would harm their case for war in Iraq.
Milne: Rudd plays referen-dumb
Constitutionally, Kevin Rudd has the power to make health policy changes — ie. the national takeover of hospitals — without a referendum if the states don’t agree. So why threaten them? asks Glenn Milne.
Dawkins and Hitchens: Arrest the Pope
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are leading a campaign to have the Pope arrested for “crimes against humanity” during his visit to the UK this week.
Tracking the Twittering and tittering on Underbelly
Dan Barrett charts the Twitter discussion of Sunday’s Underbelly 3 debut episode: it trended, but it was no Hey Hey or MasterChef.
