Mallory Knodel

Photography near the Old Port of Montreal.

It's pretty surprising how many awesome movies are all about pregnancy and parenting. To celebrate our baby girl, due in August, Amit and I put together a unique list of the best baby movies:

• Baby Mama (2008)

The hilarious Tina Fey and Amy Poehler star in a film about a working woman trying to have a baby with a surrogate mother. It's sick how we're both in so love with Liz Lemon from 30 Rock.

• Babies (2010)

Growing up with my father prepared me for being asked today to keep the chips out of half of my batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies! Apparently there are some people who willingly deny themselves chocolate. The following is adapted from Sara Musil Townsend's "Best Chocolate Chip Cookies" recipe from the Lippert Family Cookbook:

Originally posted at a blog dedicated to air travel storytelling

See more: http://www.censorship-paradise.com/en/

Reporters Without Borders has begun a strong and creative campaign aimed at tourists to Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam, three countries with severe human rights violations. The campaign urges consumers of vacation packages that drive these countries' tourism industries to "get the real low-down on your holiday destination."

• Thailand: Where law misuse is king

Federated Media has just announced a partnership with WordPress.com. "The deal will include all of the blogs that are hosted under the company which comes to around 25 million." WordPress.com users will now be subjected to a big re-vamp of corporate-sponsored advertizing.

Perhaps it's time you considered taking more control over your blog?

It's very easy, and not expensive, to leave Wordpress.com's (Federated Media's) generally irresponsible Software as a Service practices to instead host your own website. After all, Wordpress is Free Software (unlike Blogger), so you're nearly there already! You just need to follow these steps*:

The Mesopotamia Social Forum in Kurdistan: A Report and Photo Gallery

The forum's message was “Freedom Will Prevail” and its program contained around 80 activities that gathered 2,000 participants from 170 organizations. (According to the local organizing committee). The opening march was met with strong state police presence, although the local governments were supportive of the forum. Also, a march against violence on women, highlighting that Kurdistan is a place where honor crimes are a reality, was also faced with control and confrontations by riot police. Both confrontations with the Turkish state enforcements were without incident. And these confrontations highlight the tension between the local Kurdish government, who were supportive of the forum events, and the Turkish state government, which regarded the forum with suspicion.

Published today at the Guardian, Pakistan Bans Encryption Software

Hundreds of people in Washington to protect communities and water have been arrested for civil disobedience aimed at highlighting the detrimental impacts of the Keystone XL Tar Sands Oil Pipeline. The demonstration won't end for another week and neither will the repression. This mass-mobilization against the Tar Sands Oil projects comes from intense, international organizing work led by Indigenous groups in North America and supported by the larger environmental movement in the western hemisphere.

67756 covers half of of Cheyenne County, Kansas if you aren't hip to the scene in the NWKS.

M12 Art Studio in Yuma
"M12 is organized and operated by a collective of artists and creative professionals and is based in Denver and Yuma, Colorado. M12 creates interdisciplinary site-based art works, research projects, and education and outreach programs."

Make some coffee and watch this with your kids this morning. Hopefully they will get to see beauty like this in an increasingly post-industrial world, which is the backdrop for this film featuring Danny Macaskill and directed by Stu Thomson. Music by Ben Howard.

On the 50th Anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, it's important to reawaken ourselves to two Walls currently under construction today.

Berlin Wall (124 mi): to prevent massive emigration from the communist Eastern Bloc.

CC BY-2.0 Attribution

Published at the Daily Yonder

Recently, I had the opportunity to travel abroad to support a grassroots organization that is struggling to preserve local heritage and way of life. As I boarded the plane that would be taking me thousands of miles from my rural Kansas home to another isolated community in the West Bank of Palestine, I spied an HSBC bank advertisement on the jetway. Beside a picture of an old VW Beetle piled with a family's possessions and traversing gorgeous mountain terrain, a message says, "Every day 200,000 people leave the countryside for the city."

A post about the fantasy of working abroad by Paul Karl Lukacs is titled Five Hard Truths About Being A Digital Nomad.

Basically:

1. It’s lonely.
2. After a while, travel becomes a repetitive hassle.
3. Your friends and family don’t care about your adventures.
4. It will have a negative effect on your employability.
5. It’s more expensive than people say.

June 24/25/26/27: JOIN THE MEDIA MARATHON TO PROMOTE ‘FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE’ SINGLE

Stop the Wall calls on you join the global Media Marathon to promote the song ‘Freedom for Palestine’ by OneWorld: Our goals are to get the song into the UK charts and show that 1 million people have watched the music video.

Solidarity for Palestine worldwide is growing. International activists from 50 countries prepare to break the siege on Gaza with the Freedom Flotilla 2 …

Don't miss this week's Community Bridge radio show with Christopher Renner this Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 5:00 pm.

http://communitybridge.blogspot.com/

I'll be talking about the World Social Forum from Dakar in February 2011 as well as what's happening next. Another World Is Possible!