It’s over! Now for the easy part?
Does Hillary Clinton really believe she can overtake Barack Obama among elected delegates? No way. The math is dead against her and she’s a realist. Even after Pennsylvania, Obama still leads by more than 140 in elected delegates. They’ll likely break even in Indiana and he’ll win North Carolina where one third of the vote is African-American. After that? If she wins Kentucky, West Virginia, and Puerto Rico by 15 points and they break about even in Guam, North Dakota, Montana, and Oregon, she’ll still trail him by at least 130 votes among elected delegates.
Read the Morris blog roll here.
Olympic Prison
Her running shoes are torn and frayed. To train, she has had to dodge sniper fire, sectarian killings and occasional car bombs. But Iraqi sprinter Dana Hussein is undaunted.
The 21-year-old is one of four Iraqis who have qualified for this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing. And she’s the only Iraqi who is currently training for the Olympics inside the war-torn country.
In the searing 105-degree heat, Hussein steps onto the university’s ragged track — parts of which have ankle-twisting cracks and crevices in the asphalt. She puts on her special track-and-field sprinter’s sneakers — one running shoe is badly ripped along the seams — and begins to warm up.
Iraq’s Olympic committee was once run by Saddam Hussein’s sadistic son Uday, who famously abused athletes who didn’t perform well. The committee is no longer a bastion of brutality, but it is broke, sectarian and politicized, and its members are regular targets: The committee’s deputy director was gunned down at a Baghdad bus station just a few weeks ago. The Olympic committee’s director and some 30 employees who were kidnapped in the summer of 2006 are still missing.
The three other Iraqis who have qualified for the Beijing games — all men — are training overseas. The committee promised Hussein a training camp abroad, but so far, it hasn’t materialized. Now, she says, it’s probably too late.
Read Dana Hussein’s incredible story here.
Baby Toss
Muslims in western India have been observing a bizarre ritual – they’ve been throwing their young children off a tall building to improve their health. The faithful have been observing the ritual at a shrine in Solapur, in western India’s Maharastra, for more than five hundred years. They believe it will make their children strong and say no accidents have ever happened.
See the astonishing video here.
The Ambani Residence
The 27-storey skyscraper being built in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani, the richest person in India, could be the world’s largest and costliest home with a price-tag nearing two billion dollars, according to Forbes magazine.
“When the Ambani residence is finished in January, completing a four-year process, it will be 550 feet high with 4,000,000 square feet of interior space,” Forbes said in a report on its website.
Geek Fight Club
Imagine a bunch of guys who are all in high-paying, high-tech jobs and about once a month they get together in a garage and beat each other up.
Watch this week’s top video here.
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Slainte!