Photo Flash: Deadly Flooding on Madeira

photo by: Duarte Sa/Reuters

People look on as a street with vehicles is engulfed by heavy flooding in downtown Funchal, Madeira February 20, 2010. Over forty confirmed deaths have been reported so far on the tiny Portuguese island.

See the entire Reuters photo slide show here

posted by: Brent Carter

Teller’s Family Night Presents a Spring Fashion Event

From Teller’s Family Night:
“Join us as we transform the beautiful dining room of Teller’s Restaurant into a high fashion catwalk featuring clothing from local stores and designers! And the best thing is: all proceeds from this event go towards a disaster relief fund for Haiti’s earthquake victims.

“Believe it or not, even during times of devastation, there are groups and individuals that exclude the LGBT community or discriminate in providing help. The Rainbow World Fund (RWF), established in San Francisco in 2000, is one organization that makes sure that charitable donations do not go to bigoted associations. Partnered with CARE, the RWF has been providing emergency food, safe water, plastic for shelter, blankets, and basic medicines to Haitians since the disastrous earthquake of magnitude 7.0 struck the country on 12 January 2010. With the credo “One Human Family,” the RWF is the world’s first and only LGBT based humanitarian aid organization, which has distributed millions of dollars in emergency supplies and grants for survivors of disasters, including the South East Asia earthquake and tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. From the RWF website:

‘Rainbow World Fund has three primary goals – to provide humanitarian aid to communities in need around the world; to create awareness within the LGBT community of the need for these relief efforts; and to change perceptions of the LGBT community by putting our highest beliefs and values into action demonstrating our compassion and caring for the world. RWF’s projects affect social change at home and abroad through education, networking, developing solidarity, fostering understanding and building community.’

“Stores include Wildman Vintage, Arizona Trading Co., Miss Fortune’s Creation Station, Goldmakers, GAP, and Social Service League. Local designers include David Goodwin and Jane Hansen.”

Event Details:
Teller’s (746 Massachusetts in Lawrence, KS)
Monday, March 1 from 8pm – 11pm
$7 to enter, $10 for preferred seating
$5 glasses of wine, $5 double Most Wanted vodka

posted by: Tricia Rock

Brand/Rebrand: Starbucks Becomes 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea

In an effort to fake “community personality” amid plummeting sales, some of Starbucks 16,000+ stores are being transformed into faux-independent coffee shops they’ve renamed 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.

According to the Chicago Tribune (published July 2009):

“In the continued failings of the Starbucks chain, here’s a new one: the stealth Starbucks store.

“A Seattle outlet of the 16,000-store coffee behemoth is being rebranded without visible Starbucks identifiers, as 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.

“Two other stores in Starbucks’ native Seattle will follow suit, each getting its own name to make it sound more like a neighborhood hangout, less like Big Coffee, a Starbucks official told The Seattle Times on Thursday.

“‘The Goliath is coming at me under a new name,’ said Dan Ollis, owner of Victrola Coffee Roasters, a coffee shop on 15th Avenue in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, about a block-and-a-half from the made-over Starbucks set to open next week.

“Ollis had noticed teams of Starbucks employees in his shop, making notes and actually placing them in folders marked ‘Observations.’ The new store will echo the Victrola policy, for instance, of serving wine and beer alongside its beans.”

Read the the entire article here

Read about Daily Finance’s journey into a 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea here

When will multi-national corporations realize they can’t manufacture authenticity?

posted by: Harold Johns III

Style: Central Saint Martins at London Fashion Week

Joanna Green

The Central Saint Martins annual M.A. graduation show featured 22 collections and 207 looks from an inspiring group of graduates. The London school, which has produced world-class designers by the likes of John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen, Matthew Williamson, Stella McCartney and Gareth Pugh, has yet again given us a highlight of London fashion week. The collections were chic yet silly, and structured yet casual. Stand-out collections for me came from Joanna Green and Matthew Harding.

Check out photos of the entire show at Style.com

Matthew Harding

Tamara Chung, Rok Hwang

Yuseke Maegawa, Josefina Larsson

posted by: Tricia Rock

Photo Flash: The Tax Revolt Files

“Nobody likes taxes. But some people really don’t like taxes. Joseph Stack, a software engineer in a long-running feud with the Internal Revenue Service, crashed his small airplane into an Austin, Texas, office building that housed nearly 200 IRS workers on Feb. 18, 2010. Stack and a man believed to be an IRS employee were killed in the crash. The Austin attack is just the latest in a long history of protests against the government’s power to tax. Before the United States even existed, patriots staged the Boston Tea Party in protest of the British crown’s taxation of the Colonies.” (source: Newsweek)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was among suffragist leaders who questioned why women should pay taxes to a government that denied them a vote.
(source: Library of Congress)

The Vietnam War reignited “war tax” protests originated by Henry David Thoreau. Protesters specifically targeted the telephone excise tax enacted by the Johnson administration to raise money for the war. The War Resisters League began a national campaign to refuse to pay the tax and persuaded an estimated half million people not to pay up. Here, Jane Fonda and other protesters begin a fast to demonstrate against the war tax at the United Nations in 1970. (source: Bettman-Corbis)

See the rest of the photos from Newsweek’s slide show for “The Tax Revolt Files” here

posted by: Harold Johns III