Author: Source

A century and a half ago it was at the centre of the Californian gold rush, with hopeful prospectors pitching their tents along the banks of the American River. Today, tents are once again springing up in the city of Sacramento. But this time it is for people with no hope and no prospects. With America’s economy in freefall and its housing market in crisis, California’s state capital has become home to a tented city for the dispossessed.

You old hippies from the sixties and seventies remember the Furry Freak Brothers, right? And the crazy things they used to do with their cat, Freddy. Well, one of the brothers is alive and well in the body of a 20-year old dude, Acea Schomaker of Lincoln, Nebraska. Schomaker – in order to calm down an abused cat that he and his girlfriend took in – placed the 6-month old feline into a large, make-shift bong.

Schomaker said that when he smoked marijuana through it, it calmed the cat down.

A military jet crash that killed four civilians in University City last fall was a preventable accident caused by mechanical problems and a series of poor decisions, Marine Corps officials said today. The pilot of the disabled F/A-18D Hornet that went down near Nobel Drive and Interstate 805 on Dec. 8 should have made an emergency landing at Naval Air Station North Island, which was closer and involved an approach over water, USMC authorities said during a briefing this afternoon.

The Capitol Power Plant’s days of coal are over. It’s been the waiting game here: Since 2 pm, over 2,000 activists have blockaded the three main gates to the Capitol Power Plant. The rather larger police turnout is impressive; clad in their best stocking caps, they dot the chain fence like lamp-posts, taking in the gregarious march with a bit of interest and fascination. No attempt at any arrests have been made. The crowd is controlled and peaceful; there is a festive atmosphere, young and old, all bundled up and dancing to keep warm on this crystal clear but chilly afternoon.

Hi. I’m your neighbor, the guy in the front apartment that opens to the parking lot. And I’m a (hopefully) soon to be former homeowner. Why hopefully? Because the bank still hasn’t filed a Notice of Default, the document sent to the county recorder that starts the foreclosure process, even though I haven’t paid my mortgage since I moved out about six months ago and I told them even before that that they’d seen the last of my money. Why former homeowner? Longer story…

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced today that he is lifting a 1991 ban on news coverage of the return of the remains of fallen service members to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, although he will leave the decision about press coverage up to the family of the dead.

The controversial ban on photography and other media coverage of the solemn return of flag-draped coffins — upheld by both Republican and Democratic administrations — has generated lawsuits as well as conflicting emotions on the part of military familiies.

On the corner of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and Santa Monica Avenue resides a historic landmark, one that has served the Ocean Beach community and surrounding areas as both a valuable storehouse of knowledge and a tranquil study haven for over 80 years. This unique site is the home of the Ocean Beach branch of the San Diego Public Library, and today, it faces threats of possible closure.

On November 6th, 2008, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders announced the tentative closure of the Ocean Beach branch due to budget cuts, along with 6 other libraries, 9 recreation centers and a gym. An astounding response from the community has led to the mayor’s decision to forego the issue and revisit it this spring.

A higher-than-normal rate of cancer diagnoses in the building that houses UCSD’s literature department has been the subject of near-constant discussion in recent months, but it’s an issue that’s been on the department’s radar for years.

“We’ve been talking about this in the hallways for almost as long as I’ve been here,” said Anna Joy Springer, a creative-writing professor who’s been teaching at UCSD for six years.

Between 2000 and 2006, faculty and staff who work in the building reported at least eight individual cases of breast cancer. Of these people, two have died.

BORDER AGENTS BLOCK MARCHERS
In the end, immigration activists never made it to the site of yesterday’s planned demonstration, a plaza dubbed Friendship Park that sits on a bluff overlooking the ocean at Border Field State Park. For the first time, Border Patrol agents formally sealed off access on the U.S. side to the plaza, for years a popular meeting place on the U.S.-Mexico border for families to visit through the fence.
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POWERLINK CAUSES OUTRAGE
Jody Morgan cherishes his 100-acre property in El Monte Valley, where El Cajon Mountain rises above the rural community that’s home to a dairy and horse farms. At a Lakeside planning group meeting Wednesday night, Morgan held up a photo he created of what the valley would look like if the proposed Sunrise Powerlink transmission line were built there.

By Paul Krugman

By now everyone knows the sad tale of Bernard Madoff’s duped investors. They looked at their statements and thought they were rich. But then, one day, they discovered to their horror that their supposed wealth was a figment of someone else’s imagination.

Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened to America as a whole in the first decade of the 21st century.

Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households. The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium …

Blackwater Worldwide is abandoning its tarnished brand name as it tries to shake a reputation battered by oft-criticised work in Iraq, renaming its family of two dozen businesses under the name Xe. The parent company’s new name is pronounced like the letter z.

Blackwater Lodge & Training Centre – the subsidiary that conducts much of the company’s overseas operations and domestic training – has been renamed US Training Centre Inc., the company said today.

It is now a commonplace — as a lead article in the New York Times’s Week in Review pointed out recently — that Afghanistan is “the graveyard of empires.” Given Barack Obama’s call for a greater focus on the Afghan War (“we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq…”), and given indications that a “surge” of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan’s dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation, and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration’s policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into “Obama’s War.”