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Friday, October 20th, 2006
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1:19 pm - On the less-than-adequate coverage news front...
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| Monday, May 22nd, 2006
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10:25 pm
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http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/22/katrina.shotinback/index.html
One teen-ager, still unidentified, was killed near the base of the bridge. Another was critically wounded. Three other people with them were also shot and were hospitalized.
Lance Madison said a policeman pointed a rifle at Ronald and shot him as the two of them were running up the bridge. Lance said he helped carry his wounded brother to a motel on the other side of the canal and left him there as Lance kept running to seek help.
The Police Department said in a press release last fall that Ronald Madison, whom it called a second unidentified gunman, "was confronted by a New Orleans Police Officer. The suspect reached into his waist and turned toward the officer who fired one shot fatally wounding him."
Testifying in a preliminary hearing last fall, Police Sgt. Arthur Kaufman said much the same thing: "One subject turned, reached in his waistband, turned on the officers."
Autopsy results, made available to CNN by a source involved in the investigation, directly contradict that police account.
The findings list five separate gunshot wounds in Ronald Madison's back. Three went through the body and exited in front. There were two other wounds in his right shoulder. None of the shots entered his body from the front...
No weapon was found on or near Ronald Madison's body.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 4th, 2006
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11:27 pm - How Mexico Almost Got it Right
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http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1755.html
And from the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/world/americas/04mexico.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
In a statement issued late Wednesday, Mr. Fox said the law should be changed "to make it absolutely clear that in our country the possession of drugs and their consumption are and continue to be crimes."
Officials from the State Department and the White House's drug control office met with the Mexican ambassador in Washington Monday and expressed grave reservations about the law, saying it would draw tourists to Mexico who want to take drugs and would lead to more consumption, said Tom Riley, a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, April 20th, 2006
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8:18 am - fuck.
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| Sunday, April 9th, 2006
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11:51 pm - Some updates on Bolivia's first indigenous president:
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http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/243/1/
Morales has announced plans to nationalize the country's gas reserves, rewrite the constitution in a popular assembly, redistribute land to poor farmers, and change the rules of the U.S.-led war on drugs in Bolivia. If he helps spur on the radical change that his social movement base demands, he will face pressure from corporate investors and from the White House. If he chooses a more moderate path, Bolivia's social movements have pledged to organize the same type of strikes and protests that have ousted two previous presidents in the past two years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4878466.stm
The trillion-cubic-metre gas field was discovered in the late 1990s and, originally, leased at what Mr Morales sees as knock-down prices to the oil and gas corporations.
He has got a judge beavering away at declaring the original contracts illegal, and plans to nationalise the gas and oil industries.
But here is the problem. Most of the gas is in the Chaco region, administered from the city of Santa Cruz, which represents 33% of the country's GDP and 25% of the population.
Santa Cruz is the traditional base of the Christian right-wing parties - it is the centre from which the US anti-drug operation is run, it is where Repsol, Petrobras and British Gas are headquartered.
Now Santa Cruz wants autonomy and the right to all but 10% of the hydrocarbon revenues.
President Morales appears unfazed by veiled threats of disinvestment.
"Of course, there could still be sabotage - we've just heard the news that some transnational companies are putting $2m into a campaign to boycott my government. It doesn't matter - we're monitoring the problem," he says.
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, August 6th, 2005
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1:32 pm - Q&A
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Recommend an mp3 player that isn't an ipod. It isn't the cost so much as the dislike of apple, ipods, and ipod ads. I looked at a bunch online and they are all trying to look like ipods. Hm.
Those of you with ipods- How are they working out for you?
current music: Blind Willie McTell- Salty Dog
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(8 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, April 5th, 2005
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10:48 pm - PSA: They're doing it.
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| Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005
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3:18 pm - It's been awhile
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Link of the day:
Disguised as Journalists: Malice in the Bolivian Media
...On Sunday, March 6, just after Carlos Mesa announced his supposed intention to resign from the office of President of the Republic, came a good example of how the media operate in Bolivia. That night, after giving his speech live on television, Mesa met with a group of supporters in front of the Palace of Government. All of the media showed a fervent “multitude” with Mesa, and almost no photo, no image, showed the size, the space that those representatives of the middle class giving their “strong support” to the president, occupied. Here we show you some of the images that Noah Friedsky took that night…
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005
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1:05 pm
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Links of the day:
New Coca Fumigation Program Drives Poor Colombians Off Lands
Since early January, pilots from DynCorp, working under contract to the U.S. State Department and under the supervision of the Colombian National Police, have been spraying glyphosate over indigenous and Afro-Colombian villages in the fragile rainforests of Chocó on Colombia’s Pacific Coast. Ostensibly they are working to eradicate the coca crops that have sprung up in the region in recent years, as fumigations to the south in Putumayo, Guaviare, and Narino have pushed coca cultivation into new areas, and the utter destruction of local communities and economies has forced more and more people into the lower rungs of the cocaine economy. Rain recently forced a temporary halt to the fumigations, but they are slated to resume once the rain stops.
Wherever fumigations have occurred in Colombia, they have had a devastating impact on the land and the people. Glyphosate is a “broad spectrum” herbicide – it will kill anything with leaves. Sprayed from crop-dusting planes it becomes an indiscriminate weapon, wiping out food crops and severely damaging the forest. There is growing evidence that it damages soil microbes and promotes the growth of toxic fungi. It is persistent in water where it can poison fish, birds, amphibians, and livestock. In humans it causes rashes, respiratory problems, nausea, and temporary blindness. Long-term exposure has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There is strong circumstantial evidence that fumigation has been used as a strategy to force people off land coveted by oil companies in southern Colombia...
And an update on the Peruvian coca energy drinks I posted about a long time ago
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, January 14th, 2005
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1:10 pm
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Link of the day:
Bolivian Bill to Nationalize Gas Feared by Foreign Interests
The subhead of the December 20 Miami Herald article "Bolivia approves natural gas law" is enough to know that the proposed law is a victory, of sorts, for the social movements: "Law may stop investment in the sector, cause massive lawsuits."
In November, Herald reporter Tyler Bridges wrote, the House gave preliminary approval to a Movement Toward Socialism measure to have the state unilaterally seize control of the natural gas reserves and impose an immediate and much higher tax than President Carlos Mesa proposed.
As Alex Contreras Baspineiro reported for Narco News on July 19, new hydrocarbons legislation was inevitable after more than ninety percent of participants in Mesa's referendum voted for the government to reclaim all hydrocarbons "at the mouth of the well."
As hoped by many of those voting and also those abstaining, Mesa lost control of his referendum proposal. The often vague language, instead of being used by Mesa to nationalize in name but not in fact, is being interpreted by the Bolivian Congress in accordance with the population's wishes. One of Mesa's questions approved by voters called for nationalizing the gas reserves...
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, December 19th, 2004
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5:25 pm
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Link of the day:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/12/17/124459/55
PUERTO ASIS, JANUARY, 2001 -- The man from the Kofan reservation in the Guamues Valley had walked all day along stretches of dirt road controlled by the guerillas into a city controlled by the paramilitaries to tell our small group of gringo human rights workers huddled in a church hall what had happened on the reservation just a few weeks earlier. The tribe had kept a few small plots of coca on its land for use in traditional ceremonies. They had never sold the plants to drug traffickers. But that didn’t stop the U.S. from bringing in crop dusters, escorted by helicopter gunships, to fumigate the reservation. All of the plants had died – the healing herbs, the food crops, the sacred ayahuasca. The cattle had been poisoned. The fish died off and the wild animals left. The children and the old people developed strange rashes. Most of the people in his village had fled to Ecuador. But a few of the elders remained. They believed the Earth was dying.
Later that afternoon, in hushed tones, the women from PLANTE, the regional alternative development authority, explained that there was oil underneath the Kofan reservation. The Colombian Constitution protected the tribe’s title to the land. The fumigation had been designed to force the tribe to “voluntarily” abandon their villages.
The destruction of the Kofan’s crops was a devastating blow. The conquistadors had brought war, slavery, and disease to Putumayo, reducing the tribe to a population of twenty thousand by 1602. By 1899, the population had dropped to less than two thousand. When Harvard enthobotanist came to Putmayo in 1941 to investigate the secrets of yage, a hallucinogenic ayahuasca brew, a measles epidemic had reduced the population to five hundred. Describing the state of the Kofan tribe at the time of Shultes’ expedition, Wade Davis wrote:
“Those who survived were a riverine people, living in scattered households and small communities, and entering the forest only to hunt and seek medicinal plants. They oriented themselves in space by the flow of the rivers, in time by the fruiting cycle of certain trees, which formed the basis of their calendar year. There were four villages in Ecaudor on the Rio Aguarico, a like number along the Sucumbios, and two on the river Guamues, the next drainage to the north in Colombia. Their territory ran only seventy-five miles east to west along the rivers and had a width of no more than fifty miles. It was as it the entire tradition had come down to a string of small settlements clinging to the banks of forgotten rivers.” (Wade Davis. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rainforest. New York: Touchstone, 1996.)
The Kofan settlements to the south had already faced displacement and ecological destruction because of Texaco’s oil exploration in northern Ecuador. Now the fumigations were driving the Kofan of the Rio Guamues off their land to make room for another generation of conquistadors searching for oil. ...
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Thursday, December 9th, 2004
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2:11 pm - As we bust our asses during finals...
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| Friday, November 19th, 2004
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7:26 pm
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Link of the day:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/11/15/94326/676
According to a report in today's Folha de São Paulo (subscription only), the government of Brazilian President Lula da Silva has reached a "consensus" to step forward into a bold new era of drug policy: decriminalizing the drug user, and opening 250 safe drug use centers across the country during the year 2005.
Lula is expected to sign an executive decree on November 24, taking drug enforcement responsibilities away from police agencies, and placing the problems of drug use under the jurisdiction of the Health Ministry, which will be charged with supporting the safe drug-use centers and make Harm Reduction - a policy to reduce the harms associated with drug use - the law of the land...
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, November 16th, 2004
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1:18 pm
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| Thursday, November 11th, 2004
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3:30 pm
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Announcement of the day:
Iris Chang dead, apparent suicide
Iris Chang did the type of science writing that I most admire- clear, well-researched, humanitarian, and with great concern and passion for the real story. She was a graduate of the M.A. program at JHU in science writing. Her first book, Thread of the Silkworm, written when she was 25, was my first introduction to her work. At thrirty-six she really was an up-and-coming young historian, researcher, and author. Her chronicles of the Japanese occupation of China and the history of Chinese immigrants in the United States are well worth your time.
current mood: reflective
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, November 10th, 2004
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7:51 am - Plea
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Hey, anyone who knows anything about digital cameras, help me out.
What does everyone think of this camera? -
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?j=1&id=1077628263277&skuId=6464587&type=product
Basically, I'm just looking for a digital camera that doesn't suck and I can use to take pictures that vaguely resemble reality. And then transfer them on a computer. I don't understand the difference between this camera and a $300 or $500 camera.
So, who can tell me exactly what these specs mean?
current mood: incompetent
current music: the chirping birds of 7 AM
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, October 21st, 2004
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7:37 pm - walmart is so moral, or, clearance guns, ma!
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| Thursday, October 14th, 2004
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1:23 pm - I hate walmart (part 2)
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| Friday, October 8th, 2004
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8:56 pm
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Link of the day:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/nyregion/08cats.html
The two cloned cats are named Tabouli and Baba Ganoush. They are 4 months old. They are genetic duplicates of Tahini, a female Bengal cat who made the trip with them, but in a separate carrier. The two clones were carried by different mothers - one a tortoiseshell, the other a Lynx Point (a breed many cat lovers call a color point Siamese).
Lou Hawthorne, the chief executive of Genetic Savings, said Tabouli had "this health issue" - conjunctivitis, a malady also known as pinkeye, which is being treated with antibiotics. He did not want Tabouli's face photographed, even though, from across a crowded hotel room, Tabouli's eye did not look as bad as if, say, Baba Ganoush had taken a hard swipe at her...
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, September 28th, 2004
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11:52 pm
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Link of the day:
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?content=4047
"In those cases where a visa is issued by the Department of State, biometrics such as digital, inkless fingerscans and digital photographs allow the Department of Homeland Security to determine whether the person applying for entry to the United States is the same person who was issued the visa by the Department of State. Additionally, the biometric and biographic data is checked against watch lists, improving the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to make admissibility decisions as well as the Department of State’s ability to make visa determinations..."
Yeah.
Lyrics of the day:
At midnight in a flaming angry town
I saw my country's flag lying torn upon the ground.
I ran in and dodged among the crowd,
And scooped it up, and scampered out.
And then I took this striped old piece of cloth
And tried my best to wash the garbage off.
But I found it had been used for wrapping lies.
It stank and attracted all the flies.
While I was working crazy at my task,
I heard a husky voice that seemed to ask:
"Do you think that you could change it just a bit?
Betsy Ross did good, but she made some mistakes.
"The Torn Flag" off of Dan Bern's latest albumn, My Country II
current mood: thinking
current music: Dan Bern- I need you
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(comment on this)
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