Welcome to The Faster Times update. In today's edition, we bring you Charlie Sheen, the Lybian-Tunisian border, an internet-starved Cambodia, unemployment benefits, and kitchen wisdom. Enjoy!

When I arrived in Detroit to intern at the Free Press many years ago, I saw a local character dressed in a bright yellow rain slicker, no matter the weather, theatrically directing traffic in front of the Cadillac hotel. He was there every day. My troop of interns suggested to our editors that he’d be a story. Apparently every group of interns had the same idea. And the editor sternly admonished us that we shouldn’t exploit the man’s insanity. Nuts aren’t news.

Descriptions of the border crossing between violence-saturated Libya and Tunisia paint a desperate, chaotic picture. Accounts by journalists and humanitarian workers on both sides of the border cite a number refugees, attempting to flee Libya’s tumultuous protests, as high as 140,000. The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees says 75,000 people have already crossed into Tunisia in the nine days since violent demonstrations against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi broke out.

Internet access is not a given in Cambodia. This is hard to fathom for those of us from new-media, online shopping, and iPad obsessed countries, but it is a reality of life here in Cambodia—and Cambodia’s lack of affordable and accessible Internet services is in my estimation, one of the primary obstacles Cambodia faces in its quest to become a developed and prosperous nation. Cambodia’s Internet use statistics are depressing.

I’m going to put the moral of the story first, because if you’re anywhere near as thick as I was, you will need to hear it more than once.

The moral: If you lose your job, file for unemployment immediately. I had Unemployment mixed up with Welfare in my head in a soup of Armageddon-type options that I would never be pathetic enough to need. I was wrong.

A good cooking class leaves you fired up and full of recipes. But a great cooking class sends you home with the chef’s best secrets of the kitchen.

I am one lucky gal. I have a cabinet full of aprons splattered with the wisdom of cooks across Southeast Asia. I’ve studied from well-known chefs and village mothers, scribbling notes amid flurries of chopping and pounding. For years, their insights lay scattered across pages and pixels, in my office and on my laptop, in no discernible order. But now—finally—I’m scratching one big to-do off my list with this index of cooking tips amassed through a dozen years of mixing, mashing and tasting. Every little tidbit below is a morsel of expertise, straight from the teachers* I have met around burners and flames.