Category Archives: Uncategorized

Policing smarter Inside descriptions of the Metro Gang Strike Force make it sound like part of the problem rather than a possible solution, with officers meting out punishment-via-forfeiture. In other big cities, a multi-faceted policing approach called Ceasefire successfully targets gang violence and drug-dealing. Why not here?
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Murder mysteries are my usual summer reading fare, but this vacation was different. I had a stack of books on my table, some waiting for months, and memoirs won out.
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BBC reports reliable allegations of prisoner mistreatment at the U.S. detention center at Bagram air base in Afghanistan from 2002-2008. The indicia of reliability seem high – interviews with 27 released prisoners, who are not facing any charges; each interviewed in isolation from the others; similar reports of “physical abuse, the use of stress positions, excessive heat or cold, unbearably loud noise, being forced to remove clothes in front of female soldiers.”
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‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty told Alice in Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.'” In a similar manner, Governor Pawlenty casts himself as a heroic defender of education, promising no cuts to K-12 funding, while at the same time making “shifts” in funding that, in fact, will decrease the total amount that all schools have to spend on education.
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Thursday, June 18, 2009 – Reposted at the poet’s request
For The Homeland (A Poem for Bagua)
by Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria

With my hands I write these words for the homeland

Today my heart stopped
My blood spilled
On land that will be given
To oil companies that will rape it
Brand it, and sell it with my name on it
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Two examples from today’s headlines illustrate important issues in the heated debates about what journalism is, could be, and should be.

1) Iran and Twitter and Facebook and all of that — Of course, much of our information is coming from these social media, new media and non-traditional sources, but how do we know what is accurate? What tools can we use to sort through a mountain of reports that includes, by my last count, dozens of tweets per minute on just one hashtag, #iranelections.
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The White House sent out the prepared text of President Obama’s speech (read it after the jump), and BBC has a generous video segment. If the medium is the message, then in this instance the speaker was the message, as the NYT concluded, “it boiled down to simply this: Barack Hussein Obama was standing at the podium as the American president.”

One soundbite:

I consider it part of my responsibility, as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.

Text of the speech after the jump.
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