Reading Sarah Allen’s piece on Starbucks in Tuesday’s CiF, I was impressed with her style but angry about the content. On first glimpse, it seemed to be more promotion of Starbucks rather than being critical of it, although the main point, that a coffee shop worker can not be trained in three hours, is indisputable. However, there are so many other negative points to be made about coffee [ A brain on caffeine ], its production [ Mini Black Gold ] and Starbucks [ Wikipedia]: from the now historic lack of recycling to lack of support for Fairtrade [ commondream ] to the lack of workers rights and trade union sabotage [ Starbucksunion ] as well as its coffee outlet in Guantanamo’s Camp Delta – it seems startling that the quality of training would be the only point of criticism in this article [ Starbucks gossip ].

Wikileaks, the anonymous whistle-blower website, has been faced with a legal injunction to be taken down by orders of US District Judge Jeffrey White. The website, which is devoted to the battle against web censorship and for anonymity, published documents proving that a Swiss Bank – the Julius Baer Bank and Trust – engaged somehow in money laundering and tax evasion via the Cayman Islands – or something like that. [ Slashdot | Wired | The Register ] Well, if the bank tried to protect its reputati0n, it certainly backfired: Newsoutlets from all over the world from the Guardian to the Taz report on the attempt to shut down the site, which recently leaked documents related to prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

Fluffy died this morning at about 11 o’clock at the vets. He had developed some rapidly growing tumours in his belly, and in the end, he was hardly able to leave his house and couldn’t climb anymore. Fluffy touched the hearts of everybody who knew him, he was a very polite, curious, adventurous and good-looking Syrian hamster. He was about 800 days old when he went to his final sleep. Fluffy He can be remembered in pictures and in his star movie: “How to catch a lost hamster“. https://fempages.org/videos/hamstervideo.wmv He will be buried in a nice sunflower box in our allotment.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Sebastian Haffner’s – pardon, Raimund Pretzel’s birthday. The pseudonym was created to protect relatives still living in Nazi-Germany, after the lawyer managed to emigrate to Britain and started to write. Now, a lot of people will wonder why the former Observer journalist is still relevant and exciting us today; especially since his obituary [link] has already been published. But since his death in 1999, a bundle of memoirs from the Thirties have been discovered and when posthumously published in 2002 in the English translation as “Defying Hitler”, the nearly forgotten author topped the reading charts once again.

I just love Charlie Brooker’s column in The Guardian. His latest take on the media lists is spot on. And is so impressive, that it clearly lightened up my day when I was nailing together a bookshelf, just by wondering if it would make it into his list of “908 Items of Flat-Pack Furniture to Assemble Before You Die”. Definitely, I would NOT put the ARGOS bookshelf into this list, but the small animal wooden log cabin should easily be able to make it into the Top Ten. Because the little hut is made of untreated wood for the guinea pigs to eat, consists just of 4 walls and a roof, and has got three windows and a door and has a beautifully rustic and simple architecture and looks pretty snug, too.