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Ads Gone Bad

Chevy, Mountain Dew, Hyundai—they’ve all yanked advertisements in the past week in response to public outcries of bad taste. Watch the commercials and decide for yourself.

After a week like this, one gets nostalgic for the days of a cheesy jingle, a dancing cartoon, and a slogan with a smile.A jarring amount of advertisements in recent days have either been pulled by the companies that commissioned them or incited controversy for offensive content—including glaringly racist lyrics, mockery of suicide, and attempts to make violence against women funny. Here’s a quick tour through the hall of shame.General MotorsGM on Wednesday decided to pull a TV ad for the new Chevy Trax compact SUV after receiving complaints over lyrics in a song used in the commercial that were blatantly offensive to anyone of Chinese ancestry…if not any person with a conscience.

Huh?

Lingerie Company Seeks "MILFs"

Courtesy of True & Co

True&Co, an online lingerie company that fits bras without actual measurements, says it has reappropriated 'MILF' with a "Mom I'd Like To Fit" campaign. But, Misty White Sidell asks, will it actually work?

Whether or not you’d enjoy being called a MILF, it’s unlikely most women would want to mark their bodies with a temporary tattoo baring those four letters.But True&Co, an online lingerie startup that somehow fits women for bras without actually measuring them, is sending that to their customers as part of a Mother’s Day sales promotion they’ve quizzically named: “Are you a MILF?.”For a company whose core clientele consists of post-natal mothers looking for new lingerie, MILF is not in the least bit smutty.

Not Sponsored, Just Cool

Amazing Ad of the Day, Brought to You by IBM

America

Smartphone Apps for the 21st Century Farmer

First tractors with GPS, now farmers coordinating things with an iPhone app? Progress is scary.The app tracks everything needed in a farm’s upkeep, says iCropTrak’s Aaron Hutchinson—from tillage, to planting, to irrigation, to scouting, to spraying, to harvest, to soil sampling. The service also connects labourers, ensuring everyone is aware of completed and uncompleted tasks. Fields are divided up using map data, allowing farm owners to analyse each section of their farm to see whether wheat, for example, is performing better than maize (corn).

Cool

Say Hello to the Solar Powered Airplane

You won't be flying in any of these bad boys any time soon, but "solar powered drones that can fly for days at a time" has a great ring to it, no?

HOLY SEE

Pope Slams Unemployment

Condemns worker conditions in poor countries.

On Wednesday Pope Francis described the situations of workers in factories like the recently collapsed in Bangladesh as “slave labor.” In his homily, he also harshly criticized the unrelenting desire for profits, which he says leave many unemployed or underemployed and without human dignity.

Read it at Business Insider

WHEW!

ECB Cuts Interest Rates

Daniel Roland/AFP/Getty

To spur euro-zone economy.

While expected, the European Central Bank’s move to cut its main interest rate Thursday comes as a welcome step in the right direction for many analysts. The ECB’s governing council cut the refinancing rate to a new low of 0.5 percent. The change in rate affects over €850 billion in ECB loans. While the ECB had planned on a healthier euro zone by springtime, data coming out this month are likely to show the economy contracting for the sixth straight quarter.

Read it at The Wall Street Journal

Sticks and Stones

When Mayors Attack

Richard Drew/AP

The New York Times slammed Mayor Bloomberg. He called the paper racist. The paper called him absurd. David Freedlander on why Gotham’s latest slugfest has gotten so out of hand.

It is one of the first rules of politics: Never get into a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.But if you can buy your own ink, the paper it’s printed on, the barrels themselves, and have a whole newsroom toiling in your name, perhaps the old rules don’t matter.On Tuesday, standing before the brass at the police headquarters in lower Manhattan, New York’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg defended his administration’s policing practices, particularly its stop-and-frisk policy, which gives police officers broad leeway to stop and search people on the street.

It’s the Egyptian Economy, Stupid

Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty

Egypt’s sputtering economy and high unemployment pose serious challenges—and are the same issues that led to the revolution against Mubarak in the first place. Mike Giglio reports.

As Egypt lurches from one crisis to the next, it’s the country’s battered economy, analysts say, that may be President Mohamed Morsi’s greatest challenge yet.The 2011 revolution that toppled Morsi’s predecessor, former dictator Hosni Mubarak, was inspired by—in addition to police abuse and suffocating repression—the dire financial straits most Egyptians faced. Alongside Tahrir Square’s famous anti-Mubarak chants, protesters also rallied around a more basic slogan, in which the first demand went to the needs of the dinner table: “Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice.

Garbage In, Power Out

Richard Elliott/Getty

Oslo burns garbage to produce energy. But with Norwegians producing less trash, the city is now importing junk.

One man's trash is another man's treasure, and in Norway, that’s literally the case. But Oslo, the capital city, seems to be running out of this vital commodity.The New York Times reported Monday that Oslo, which has long burned waste to heat half of the city and almost all its schools, is lacking the materials need for fuel: household trash, commercial and industrial waste, and even hazardous junk from hospitals. With the rise of recyclable and reusable products, Oslo’s volume of trash just isn’t what it used to be.

Colbert Rips 'Spreadsheet Error' in Austerity Supporting Harvard Study

After a University of Massachusetts student found significant errors in a study beloved by budget cutters world over by Harvard economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, Stephen Colbert does what he does best -- leaves them in the dust.

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    See-Through and Scandalous

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    Cyprus Delays Deposit-Tax Vote

Business

Daniel Gross

Asymmetrical Information

Megan McArdle

Those Generic Drugs May Not Have Been What You Thought They Were

Years of abuses at Ranbaxy raise worries about the FDA's oversight of the generics market

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8 Best Music Videos of the Week

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