To all those who’ve watched the trailer for Slavery: The Game last week and thought it’s a revolting game idea: Calm down, it’s not a real game. The trailer was created by NTR (the Dutch equivalent of PBS) to raise awareness about the horrors of both old and modern slavery and to promote a TV series on the subject.

Judging by the many reactions their fake trailer has received, it would seem their plan has worked flawlessly.

The purpose of the trailer is firstly to confront people with an important, but often-neglected part of history. Secondly, the trailer aims to increase awareness about the existence of present-day slavery.

 

From Sunday September 18 onwards, Dutch public broadcaster NTR brings a TV series called ‘De Slavernij’ (‘Slavery’ in Dutch). This explicit TV series shows both the obscure past as well as the present situation considering slavery.

But didn’t we end slavery a long time ago? No, we didn’t. In fact, it’s likely that there are more slaves today than there were at any other point in our history.

A Soviet-built plane (Yak 42) carrying a top ice hockey team has crashed earlier today, killing all the members of Lokomotiv Yaroslavl and most of the plane’s crew.

Out of the 45 people on board, 43 died during the crash, one survived the crash but died later in the hospital, and only one flight engineer is still alive, although his condition is critical.

I’m not big into sports and I’ve watched hockey games only a couple of times, but this plane crash is incredibly sad stuff. It would have been sad even if the passengers were just regular people, but the world has lost world-class sportsmen in this tragedy. You can’t replace that kind of talent.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has announced plans to take the aging Yak 42 planes out of service starting next year, but as usual that sort of measure is only taken following a tragedy, at which point it’s sort of a “let’s prevent this from happening again; maybe” kind of thing.

May they rest in peace.

The title is not a sexual innuendo, although I can totally see why you’d think it is. What it means to say is that Iranian authorities hanged three (more) men for having gay sex, and then threw some other charges at them to make the international community less revolted at their executions.

Everyone laughed when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously claimed there were no gay people in his country, but given that he’s hanging as many of them as he can the bastard may have actually been right. And if my math is correct, there are now -3 gay people in Iran. Funny number that one.

What’s worse than staring into bright LED headlights while driving at night? Staring into lasers and having your retinas fried by them! But I’m just messing with you. According to BMW, their laser lights pose no risks to humans, animals or wildlife, so your retinas will be safe. It is not recommended to stare into them, though, as they are 70% brighter than LED lights.

It’s gonna be a few more years until laser lights will be mature enough to equip vehicles, but you’ll probably be able to see them in action earlier than that, on BMW’s i8 concept car.

Below is BMW’s press release on the subject.