Aside

I made this squash soup on Sunday night, except with a few modifications: I replaced chorizo with whiskey fennel chicken sausage from Ver Brugge. I replaced cayenne sauce with Tapatio and tripled it, and added a few dashes of cayenne powder. I replaced oregano with basil and added kale. And, I didn’t bother with the croutons. It was probably the best soup I’ve ever made.

LAT: ASMARA, Eritrea — This struggling, low-profile nation is doing something virtually unheard of in Africa. It’s turning down foreign aid. With a president who vows not to lead another “spoon-fed” African country “enslaved” by international donors, Eritrea, a small, secretive nation on the Horn of Africa, has walked away from more than $200 million in aid in the last year alone, including food from the United Nations, development loans from the World Bank and grants from international charities to…

The French business magazine Challenges is reporting that Orange will be selling the world’s first legally unlocked iPhone for somewhere around €999 (that’s about $1,400) later this year. Or €399 with a subscription, of which Apple gets a 30 percent revenue share. The iPhone apparently is going for $680 in grey markets in Thailand and about $400 – $600 on Craigslist. I unlocked my own for free.

Caspian Sea countries say “no way.” But guv’ment spooks say “Please?” Uh oh. [Source: FP Passport]

My wonderfully food nerdy friends on Chowhound have put together a Google Maps edition of Oakland taco trucks. Oh man, I want a burrito right about now.

The New Yorker has an awesome piece this week on “The Wire,” the best TV show ever. In addition to detailing why the show is generally awesome, there’s these two fantastic bits from the show’s creator, David Simon. The New Yorker: “The Wire,” [David] Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We…

I came across these delights on Paleo-Future: The Electric Train from Paris to Beijing Flying police Hearing the newspaper (aka “radio”) Cars of war (aka “tanks)

It’s often been said that half the population of Iran is under 30. However, according to the new census data, 50.23 percent of the population is under 25. Damn.

The most interesting thing that I learned from Karim‘s talk last week, which was also mentioned in Afshin Molavi’s The Soul of Iran , which I’m reading now, is the following: As opposed to other developing nations whose per capita incomes have always been low but have steadily increased, the majority of Iranians have experienced a marked decrease in their standard of living since the 1979 revolution; average Iranians’ real per capita income is about a quarter of what it…

After the $100 laptop project, the fact that India’s building a $2,500 car got me interested. So I pinged Atanu Dey to see what his thoughts were on the subject, and here’s what he said: Cyrus: It scares me witless. Today oil touched $84 a barrel. India imports most of its fossil fuel requirements. It is a poor country and cannot afford high priced oil — and oil is going to become increasingly costly because the demand will continue to…