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Conceptualized and designed by architect and designer, Emmanuelle Moureaux, the Shinjuen Nursing Home near Tokyo, has been turned into a warm and friendly centre that not only welcomes the ailing into a positive ambience, but also nurtures feelings of joy and wellbeing. Read here and leave us your views...

Well, it turned. The police bureau is starting to crack after six weeks of Occupy Portland. And one picture, right here, crystallizes the precise moment when it happened. During a choreographed effort to pull a few dozen protesters out of the Chase bank branch outside Pioneer Square, part of today's hundreds-strong N17 day of action, Portland police officers resorted to a decidedly more muscular show of force in a clash watched by TV cameras and rush-hour commuters earlier this evening. Suddenly all the fun-the dance parties, the union songs, the peaceful arrests earlier on the Steel Bridge and at Wells Fargo-was for naught. Tromping in with mounted officers, they pushed marchers who had gathered on the sidewalks along SW Yamhill into the street-forcing them to block MAX trains, something no one was doing until the heavily armored riot squad showed up-and then poked and, for the first time, pepper-sprayed the marchers. Significantly, some of the spraying came after protesters had clearly retreated to the opposite sidewalk. (In another odd shift, there also was no federal-court-required verbal PA warning that chemical munitions would be deployed-a hallmark of every other mass police action to date.) Meanwhile, at almost the very same moment, Police Chief Mike Reese was on TV blaming Occupy Portland for his officers' inability to respond to a rape victim for three hours today. Consider that tantamount to a declaration of war. Reese's point? Officers are tired and have been too distracted to do their main jobs: responding to actual crimes. It was an attempt to spin sentiment against the movement, which seems to be attracting adherents. Even the O today said the movement is "building momentum" and said the average age of some 34 arrestees earlier today was 50-not a bunch of young, anarchists/punks/hoodlums/hippies/road warriors etc. But that might come back to haunt him, judging by a wave of outrage on Twitter and elsewhere among those who noted that it

Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer from Taiwan with huge factories in China, generates about 40 percent of the global consumer electronics revenue by creating things like iPhones and computer components on giant assembly lines staffed by humans. Until recently, you'd probably never heard of Foxconn, but a series of worker suicides made us all take a hard look at where our electronics were coming from. Foxconn has made some improvements (including nets around tall buildings), but by all accounts, the core of the problem (the work) remains "repetitive, exhausting, and alienating." Yesterday, Foxconn announced (at an employee dance party of all places) that they're planning on buying some robots to replace their human workforce. And by some robots, they mean one million robots over the next three years. So for every one robot Foxconn currently has working at their manufacturing plants, they're going to buy a hundred more.

Rabih Geha Architects design a ground-breaking dance pantheon at the Beirut Waterfront, all set to continue in their design of changing the face of nightlife in the district. Check it out and leave us your views…

Renesa Architecture Studio uses a simple and efficacious façade system to transform an old warehouse into a contemporary industrial office in Haryana. Check out how inspiration works…

Kanchan Fagwani of Kinteriors eclectically picks on Indian Classical as the thematic to endorse this new Bharatnatyam Academy in Mumbai.

The new rehearsal building for the Oper am Rhein ballet company in Düsseldorf blends simple form with experiential ambience. Check it out and leave us your views…

Didzis Jaunzem breaks conventional stereotypes of stage design with his concept for 'Abas Malas' (Both Sides), Latvia's centenary celebration event. Check out the story here…