PUBLIC MARKS with search cuts

In Comuna 13 of Medellin, Colombia's largest city, a recently built 1,260-foot long escalator snakes across the hillside shantytown in six separate divisions. As part of the neighborhood's larger urban regeneration project, this massive outdoor escalator cuts down the time to traverse Comuna 13, reportedly one of Medellin's poorest and most violent neighborhoods, from 35 minutes to six minutes on foot.

Terracotta chandeliers inspired by recurrent power cuts in Senegal, West Africa.

This morning newly elected Governor, Jerry Brown, released his 2011-12 Budget proposal, calling it “painful” and one that “requires sacrifice from every sector of the state, but we have no choice.”  The plan recommends a whopping $12.5 billion in cuts and $12 billion in revenue options in order to address the staggering $25 billion Budget, as well as a “vast and historic restructuring of services,” as part of the Governor’s realignment proposal.

Total health care costs for the Pentagon, which is the nation’s single largest employer, top $50 billion a year, a tenth of its budget and about the same amount that it is spending this year on the war in Iraq.

Lachine residents and friends sing out a protest song to Montreal Westers to help them understand the dangers they are imposing on neighboring families.The battle over a Devil's Hill street -- officially known as Broughton Road in Montreal West and as Des Érables in Lachine -- has raged for almost two decades. But on October 5, 2010, Montreal West erected a raised platform topped by bollards, cutting off emergency evacuation route for the hundreds of people living on the opposite side of the street in Lachine. SIM (Montreal's Fire Services) and the SVPM (Montreal police have publicly stated their opposition to the structure : it slows ambulance and fire services, endangers firefighters and their equipment and cuts off one of only two emergency evacuation routes for residents living near freight train lines. A 2002 independant study found no usual high traffic on the street and recommended against closing it off. Lachine residents appeal to Montreal Westers to "Take the barricade down!"Song composed by Pat Schmidt, ©2010

Mark Thompson is planning wide-ranging cuts at the BBC as part of a “strategic review”, is deeply distressing. According to the leak in the Times (now more or less confirmed), this will include cutting the BBC website by half (in terms of ‘web pages’) and by 25% (in staff numbers),

painstakingly precise laser-cuts made into the pages of a blank sketchbook. As the book is opened and its pages begin to turn, these cuts work together to form a spatial representation of the single, highly choreographed 90-minute shot that is Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark.

Today Ericsson reported a 31 percent drop in its fourth-quarter profits to 3.9 billion kronor ($465 million), announced 5,000 job cuts

"Classic Hong Kong and Japanese action scenes were 'expressionistic' in the sense that their larger-than-life balletics and aerobatics amplified recognizable (if extreme) possibilities of the human body," writes David Bordwell. "The result was a carnal cinema, in which shooting and cutting aimed to enlarge and prolong graceful movement. By contrast, Hollywood action scenes became 'impressionistic,' rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action but suggesting in their flurry a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn't serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it."

that George Oates, a high-profile member of the Flickr team and one of the site's early employees, was told that she was being given the chop too. She's recently been in Australia, so the fact that her bad news has arrived a day late could just be a quirk of travelling - but I'm trying to find out if other members of the Flickr team are also being laid off as well. (Update: I'm told two other members of the Flickr team also got laid off.) Oates - who designed Flickr's interface - is highly-regarded, confirming that this round of job cuts is basically arbitrary - but it also marks a bit of a watershed for Yahoo.