TIME.com: Meet the Hard-Nosed Do-Gooders -- Dec. 19, 2005 -- Page 2

TIME.com: Meet the Hard-Nosed Do-Gooders -- Dec. 19, 2005 -- Page 2: "Enter a different breed of M.B.A.: social entrepreneurs like Priya Haji, 35, Siddharth Sanghvi, 30, and David Guendelman, 28, who last year founded the giftware company World of Good. A for-profit, socially responsible start-up that makes grants to a nonprofit sister organization, World of Good has impressed venture capitalists who usually put their money into the latest technological innovation. But the business plan put forward by the Berkeley M.B.A.s--which won this year's Global Social Venture Competition--has VCs convinced that there's also money to be made from handmade silk scarves, woven bags, beaded jewelry and 'nonviolent' leather products (the cow must die of natural causes). The business 'can help thousands and thousands of communities,' says Haji. And within a year, it was in the black. Says Duke's Dees: 'Business doesn't know better than the nonprofit world. It just provides another set of tools that we should look at using for social good. And we should use any tools we can.'"

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Indecency guide for tourists to India

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Indecency guide for tourists to India: "Do not hug or kiss in public - even when meeting at stations and airports - and do not smoke or consume alcohol publicly either.

These are some of the guidelines being given to tourists visiting a popular part of India's north-western Rajasthan state to ensure they can respect local culture.

The guidelines come after a number of unfortunate cultural faux pas, including an Israeli couple kissing at their Hindu wedding ceremony and a Finnish woman walking naked down the streets of Pushkar.

Officials say the list of these dos and don'ts has been prepared by the local administration in Ajmer district to 'educate foreign tourists about local culture and sensibilities'.

Prithvi Raj Sankhla, Ajmer city's sub-divisional magistrate, told the BBC: 'We have asked hotels and restaurants across the city to hand out the 20-page booklet to tourists as soon as they check in.'

The guidelines say:

* Men should never touch women in public, even to help a woman out of a car, unless the lady is very elderly or infirm

* In Indian culture... men socialise with men, and women with women

* Married couples in Asia do not hug, hold hands or kiss in public. Even embracing at airports and train stations is considered out of the question

* Generally it is improper for women to speak with strangers on the street and especially to strike up a casual conversation

* Drinking alcohol or smoking in public, no matter how innocent, are interpreted as a sign of moral laxity and are not acceptable."

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgender Symbols

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgender Symbols: "Pink Triangle

As most everyone knows, the pink triangle is a symbol taken directly from the Nazi concentration camps. Usually when concentration camps and Nazis are mentioned, most people tend to think of Jews and the Jewish Holocaust (for good reason). But the fact that a large number of homosexual prisoners were in those same camps is an often ignored or overlooked fact of history.

The real story behind the pink triangle begins prior to World War II. Paragraph 175, a clause in German law, prohibited homosexual relations (much like many states in the U.S. today have laws against 'crimes of nature'). In 1935, during Hitler's rise to power, he extended this law to include homosexual kissing, embracing, and even having homosexual fantasies. An estimated 25,000 people were convicted under this law between 1937 and 1939 alone. They were sent to prisons and later concentration camps. Their sentence also included sterilization, most commonly in the form of castration. In 1942, Hitler extended the punishment for homosexuality to death.

Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were labeled according to their crimes by inverted colored triangles. 'Regular' criminals were denoted by a green triangle, political prisoners by red triangles and Jews by two overlapping yellow triangles (to form the Star of David, the most common Jewish symbol). Homosexual prisoners were labels with pink triangles. Gay Jews- the lowest form of prisoner- had overlapping yellow and pink triangles. This system also created a social hierarchy among the prisoners, and it has been reported that the pink triangle prisoners often received the worst workloads and were continually harassed and beaten by both guards and other prisoners.

Although homosexual prisoners were not shipped en mass to the Aushwitz death camps like so many of the Jewish prisoners, there were still large numbers of gay men executed there along with other non-Jewish prisoners. The real tragedy thou"

Stonewall Revisited: Homosexual, Lesbian & Gay Issue of Sex & Sexuality

Stonewall Revisited: Homosexual, Lesbian & Gay Issue of Sex & Sexuality: "About Stonewall. For gay, lesbian and bisexual activists, the word 'Stonewall' signifies quite possibly the most important, single landmark in the worldwide struggle for gay rights. Most chroniclers of the homosexual rights movement trace the beginnings of the movement's militant phase to 1969 and New York's lower-Manhattan (largely gay-frequented) Stonewall Bar. There, for the first time on record, homosexual patrons fought back when Stonewall was raided one hot summer night by New York City policemen, who came hoping to arrest gay individuals for engaging in then illegal homosexual acts.

Eyewitnesses claim that the homosexual patrons' counter-riot began when one burly, Stonewall patron hurled a lidded, metal garbage can filled with empty liquor bottles through a police car window.

Ever since that night, Stonewall has been revered as an enduring symbol of the gay militant spark lit that night, which has become a gay/lesbian/bisexual militant conflagration setting America -- and the world -- aflame with gay rights issues and conflicts. "

First result of the SNLS

First result of the SNLS: "WAS EINSTEIN'S BIGGEST BLUNDER A STELLAR SUCCESS? The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a 'cosmological constant' to his equation for the expansion of the universe but later retracted it, may be vindicated by new research. The enigmatic dark energy that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe behaves just like Einstein's famed cosmological constant, according to the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS), an international team of researchers in France and Canada that collaborated with large telescope observers at Oxford, Caltech and Berkeley. Their observations reveal that the dark energy behaves like Einstein's cosmological constant to a precision of 10 per cent. 'The significance is huge,' said Professor Ray Carlberg of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at U of T. 'Our observation is at odds with a number of theoretical ideas about the nature of dark energy that predict that it should change as the universe expands, and as far as we can see, it doesn't.' The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics."