In Pictures: The World’s 25 Dirtiest Cities

Unless you’re in the oil business, there’s little reason to brave the choking pollution of Baku, Azerbaijan. Fetid water, oil ponds and life-threatening levels of air pollution emitted from drilling and shipping land the former Soviet manufacturing center at the bottom of this year’s list as the world’s dirtiest city.

Baku is bad, but far from alone. For residents of the 25 cities on this year’s list, black plumes of smoke, acid rain and free-flowing sewage are part of everyday life. Not as immediately visible: the impact on the population’s health and life expectancy.

To see which cities in the world were dirtiest, we turned to Mercer Human Resource Consulting’s 2007 Health and Sanitation Rankings. As part of their 2007 Quality of Life Report, they ranked 215 cities worldwide based on levels of air pollution, waste management, water potability, hospital services, medical supplies and the presence of infectious disease.

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In Pictures: The World’s 25 Dirtiest Cities

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America’s Most Sinful Cities

We have unveiled the American city that has fallen the farthest from grace in each of the seven deadly sins ( lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy and pride). For each sin we stretched our imagination to find a workable proxy–murder rates for wrath, per capita billionaires for avarice–then culled the available data sources to rank the cities. Some of the results were surprising: Salt Lake City as America’s Vainest City. Some were not: Detroit as America’s Most Murderous.

To view them on our interactive map, simply click on a cardinal sin, and the 10 worst (or best, depending on your point of view) cities for that particular vice will be displayed.

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Achin’ for bacon: Cambridge bar hosts annual bacon-eating contest

Cambridge – Football, hockey, baseball: noble sports all, but only one contest truly tests the very fabric of the human spirit.

That, of course, is the annual bacon-eating contest at Atwood’s Tavern in Inman Square.

Ten contestants, against their better judgment, took to the stage at Atwood’s Saturday morning to see who among them could pile down the most bacon in five minutes.

Watch the video below to see who won this gastronomic gauntlet.

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An interesting quote I found at the Dallas Morning News Religion Blog

“For too many westerners, the face of Islam is a suicide terrorist. For too many people living in the Middle East, the face of Judaism is a West Bank settler or an Israeli soldier. And for too many people across the globe, the face of Christianity since the beginning of the Iraq War has been George W. Bush.”

–David Domke and Kevin Coe, “The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America”

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