Where children sleep

Pictures of children and the places they sleep, from all over the world.  The images do most of the talking, right?  Worth clicking to the source article to see more from this series. 

Stuff we should all know by now: Who's paying for your gas?

For this week's set-O-facts, a couple of different breakdowns of the subsidies that the US government gives the petroleum industry, compared with how much it helps solar and other forms of alternative energy.

First, this chart, showing the comparative amount spent on each sector:

And then this one, showing a couple of "what if" situations:

But solar isn't efficient yet!  The subsidies are smaller because the solar industry is much smaller!  Let's wait and give solar a chance to prove itself before we give them the money that they need to become more efficient.  Ummm, anyone else sense a catch-22 here?

Stuff we all should know by now - Prisoners in the US

What are approximately 1 out of every 100 Americans doing right now?  Why, sitting in jail, of course!  Young black men?  That jumps to 1 in 10.  Per capita, that's higher than most places in the world by an order of magnitude, and even higher that places with less-than-stellar human rights records such as Iran and, um, the country that I'm currently living in.

People in the US aren't terribly aware of this, but many other parts of the world are, as in, for example, this clip from a UK game show.  Probably no wonder that other governments often don't take the US very seriously when it comes to accusations of human rights abuses...

For more information, and links to some of the facts in the video, click here.