A new line of customizable Swedish furniture designed to last If there’s any upside to the financial crisis, it’s the enduring emphasis on craft and artisanal production in the design industry. The “new austerity” has buyers looking to quality—of narrative in the design process, options and manufacture—as a selling point. As companies continue to lure buyers with the added value of well-made products, there’s no better example of the way forward than Stockholm company Zweed . Founded this year by H

Does this mean female condoms have the seal of papal approval? A spokesman for Pope Benedict XVI has confirmed that the pope’s remarks that a male prostitute would be justified in using a condom to protect his client from contracting AIDS was meant to…

Continued here:
Pope: Ladies Can Use Condoms, Too

In 2002, my client, Kuwaiti citizen Fayiz Al-Kandari, was captured by Pakistani forces and sold to the United States military. Since that time, he has been confined without charge at America’s notorious island prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for almost nine years. read more

Read the rest here:
Nine Years Too Long

A lawyer for the jailed Russian ex-oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky says he expects his client to be sentenced to another long period in prison for embezzlement.

See the original post here:
Khodorkovsky ‘set for jail term’

Banks like JPMorgan Chase offer to help big investors like pension funds earn a little extra. When it works, both win. When it doesn’t, only the client loses.

Originally posted here:
House Advantage: Banks Shared Clients’ Profits, but Not Losses

Joran van der Sloot admitted in an interview with a Dutch newspaper that he extorted money from the family of Natalee Holloway, but his attorney in a Peruvian murder case suggested Monday that his client’s comments may have been mistranslated.

Excerpt from:
Paper: Van der Sloot admits extortion

An Israeli court approves the detention of a man who broke into the Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv, while the man’s lawyer says this client was an Israeli informer.

Original post:
Turkish embassy man stays in jail

Metropolis Creative Director and RISD alum Criswell Lappin on redesigning his alma mater’s new magazine When RISD President John Maeda decided to reinvent their alumni magazine, he decided to do it from the ground up. Renaming it RISD XYZ and shifting from a more traditional focus on the school to instead celebrate the accomplishments of its graduates, he knew he had to do something about the design too. While previous versions typically tasked three alumni with a section each, the resulting layout felt disjointed and made it tough to read. As a solution, Maeda turned to RISD alum Criswell Lappin to realize the vision of the new concept. Lappin—who in addition to running his own design consultancy Wellnow , has art directed the award-winning magazine Metropolis for the past decade —recently answered a few of our questions on how he and his crack team of fellow alums pulled off the fresh new design in just 10 weeks. Read on to learn more about some of his favorite designers, the project’s reality TV potential, and the beers it took to unwind when he was done. How did your experience attending RISD influence your work on the magazine? I learned just as much, if not more, from my fellow classmates while in Providence. We knew that the school’s talents that were not being utilized well in the previous incarnation could provide invaluable assets to this project. What other alumni were involved with the project? Dungjai Pungauthaikan, also Metropolis’ Art Director was on the Wellnow design team (with non-alum but nevertheless important Nancy Nowacek). One of the big ideas for the new publication was to turn to the alumni to help shape it. We asked Kate Johnson of Dresser Johnson to help with the headers and the logo. We used typefaces by Cyrus Highsmith and Tobias Frere-Jones. We asked Nicholas Felton to distill all of the information in the “Class Notes” section into an infographic. We also crafted areas for commissioned illustration on the Editor’s Letter and Opinion page. So Jessica Walsh and Lauren Nassef helped out with those. Lisa Maione helped style the contributors page. We laid the framework and directed these other contributors, but this magazine is meant to be a voice for the artist and designers who went to RISD. We hope it fosters more interest in alumni to contribute their visual ideas to subsequent issues. Was it difficult working with a team of alums, or did you all have similar ideas on how you envisioned the redesign? It would have not made good reality television because there was very little drama. Everyone we engaged was enthusiastic and collaborated well, each adding their expertise to the magazine and making it stronger. Who was the client for the project? The initial invitation came from John Maeda , but the client was RISD’s Media + Partners department. Editor Liisa Silander was our primary point person. How long did it take you to complete the redesign? What was the feedback and edit process like? From start to finish it was a ten-week project. Fortunately we were on the same page as RISD in wanting to turn this from a magazine that seemed to come from the administration into one centered on the alumni. Four weeks after being awarded the job, we showed RISD two design directions and they essentially signed off on one. Over the course of the next five weeks we designed and produced each section, which would circulate back to RISD for design approval. The last week or two was spent fine-tuning the cover and finishing up production. Then I think I had a beer…or six. Were there any major obstacles? The timing was tight—especially given that we were designing Metropolis at the same time—but not insurmountable. There were two or three breakdowns in communication but we were able to resolve them because Liisa and I were in constant dialogue. A critical moment came about two weeks prior to printing where thought we almost had final sign-off on the cover, but it completely fell apart. So we basically had to rethink that from scratch over a weekend. Fortunately, overcoming all of those obstacles made the magazine stronger. Did I just become a politician? Who did you have in mind as the reader and what do you hope they take away from it? All alumni and possibly potential students. We hope it creates a culture of creative contribution where alumni want to be a part of it—either as an editorial subject or generating visual content. Are there any RISD alums or up-and-coming designers that you think our readers should know about? Start with the list of contributors to the first issue. Seriously, look at Nick Felton’s work. He does sexy things with information. Paul Loebach ‘s furniture is getting noticed. She’s pretty well established, but Katie Salen has to be mentioned because her “Institute of Play” is going to be a significant force in educational circles. Christopher Ro, Morgan Blair and Sloan Kulper are all certainly worth watching too.

Excerpt from:
RISD XYZ Magazine