Good Reads: From Google?s secret lab, to Japan?s economy, to the end of alimony

This week's round-up of Good Reads includes Google's lab, a reporter's tale of kidnapping, Japan's plan for revitalization, an undercover meat inspector, and a challenge to alimony.

By David T. Cook,?Staff writer / June 4, 2013

Google cofounder Sergey Brin gestures after riding in a driverless car.

Eric Risberg/AP/File

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Google's secret lab

Google X, the search firm?s secretive research lab, is like Willy Wonka?s chocolate factory ? a workshop that needs to be protected from critical eyes ? or the technology equivalent of ?taking moonshots.? So says Astro Teller, the lab?s director, in the May 22 cover story for Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Senior Editor and Washington Bureau Chief

Cook is senior editor and Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor and host of the Monitor's newsmaker breakfasts.

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?The world is not limited by IQ. We are all limited by bravery and creativity,? Mr. Teller says. Getting around those limits is made a bit easier by the fact that Google had an R&D budget of $6.8 billion in 2012.

So far Google X has produced a driverless Lexus, capable of cruising unaided on Silicon Valley?s crowded 101 freeway. Another product: Internet-connected eyeglasses dubbed Google Glass. Future projects, Businessweek says, include an airborne turbine that sends electrical power down to a base station and a project to bring Internet access to undeveloped parts of the world. ?We are serious ... about making the world a better place,? Teller says.?

On being kidnapped in Syria

NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel recounts the harrowing story of being kidnapped with five colleagues while covering the conflict in Syria between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in April?s?Vanity Fair.

Shortly after Mr. Engel and his crew crossed into Syria from Turkey, they were captured by 15 heavily armed men who loaded them into a container truck where they were bound, gagged, and blindfolded. Engel says his captors were from ?the most ruthless and lethal of Assad?s militias, the shabiha.?

For the next five days, the NBC team was moved constantly, threatened with death, and subjected to psychological torture. On the fifth night, the vehicle in which they were being moved ran into a checkpoint set up by rebels from a Sunni religious group that had been searching for them. In the ensuing gun battle, the journalists escaped.

This riveting tale is a reminder of the risks foreign correspondents take. ?Kidnapping is always a threat in this life,? Engel says.?

Revitalizing Japan?s economy

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe flies, Superman-like, above Tokyo?s skyline on the cover of the May 18-24 issue of The Economist as the magazine probes the action-packed first months of Mr. Abe?s return to an office he left in 2007.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/DkqbvDtWKcU/Good-Reads-From-Google-s-secret-lab-to-Japan-s-economy-to-the-end-of-alimony

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