Twelve Mexico Murders, Thirty-Four Drug Cartel Arrests
After he was elected president of Mexico in 2006, Felipe Calderon declared his own war on drugs, with an emphasis on battling drug cartels. There have been more than 10,000 drug-related killings since then, and the cartels don’t seem to be going anywhere. One of the more grisly recent events was the torture and murder…
Town Hall Turmoil
Corporate-funded “tea-party” birther types (a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll shows that 58% of all Republicans are either don’t believe Obama was born in the USA or are undecided on the issue) have codified their intent to disrupt this month’s nationwide town-hall events focusing on health-insurance reform – as when the woman locally known as “Crazy…
‘The Union: The Business Of Getting High’
Enjoy this trailer for The Union: The Business of Getting High, an award-winning documentary about British Columbia’s marijuana trade, the province’s most profitable industry.
Berlin’s War On Luxury Cars
Radical leftists are blowing up luxury cars in Berlin at the rate of one a night, according to this report. The strategy, which resembles an urban version of eco-terrorism, is documented on the Burning Cars of Berlin website, which Google-maps the arson sites and details the car makes involved. Young German anarchists – anti-materialists, anti-imperialists,…
‘New Yorker’ On Live Music’s Secondary Markets And Ticket Bastards
As the concert business follows the record industry into the toilet, with tickets for Coldplay and Springsteen shows currently going for as little as a buck, John Seabrook reports on how it got there in this week’s New Yorker magazine. You won’t find much you don’t already know in his lengthy analysis, unfortunately; and it’s…
Food Becoming The New Oil
Investors have been quietly buying up chunks of fertile African and Indonesian farmland in hopes of turning a tidy profit as the world’s population increases by another 2 billion food consumers over the next forty years to 9.1 billion. German news magazine Der Spiegel, in this eye-opening article translated in Salon, reports that the governments…
House Committee Favors Ending Wack Sentencing Disparity
Yesterday, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee voted 16-9 in favor of a bill that would eliminate the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. The disparity in mandatory sentences has resulted in a disproportionate number of African-Americans being sentenced to lengthy prison stays for crack offenses, despite most cocaine users being white, without…
You Enjoy Myspace: Phish And Social Networking
“When we look at bands and artists that foster community (and sometimes endless jams), we can see parallels to the rise of social networks,” writes Phish fan and strategic-communications specialist Josh Sternberg in “What Twitter and Facebook Can Learn From Phish,” an intriguing post for Mashable: The Social Media Guide. Sternberg makes the often repeated…
Barack Obama’s Health-Care Dilemma
Last month Bill Clinton urged President Obama not to give in to Republican demands for a weakening of the public option. At the time, it seemed like the only support Obama would have to struggle to gain would be from the right. But now, as budget talks intensify in the Senate and House, there’s clearly…
Al Schnier On Gathering Of The Vibes Death
As you’ve probably heard by now, an apparently grisly death marred last weekend’s Gathering of the Vibes. It was the first time anybody has died at a Vibes since the annual event’s 1996 debut. I attended the festival and can attest that this unpleasantness was in no way representative of the festival as a whole….