SLOW NEWS DAY: Smooshed Turtle Triggers Mayhem

UPPER TOWNSHIP, N.J. – Why did the turtle cross the road? We’ll never know, but it sure causedĀ one heck of an accident. A woman who swerved to avoid hitting the reptile as it crawled across the northbound lanes of the Garden State Parkway Tuesday afternoon lost control of her car, crashed through a guardrail and tumbled down an embankment before the car flipped over onto its roof. Saranne Goldinger, 65, of Cape May, was wearing a seat belt and was not critically injured, State Police said. Her car, however, was heavily damaged. The turtle fared even worse. A vehicle that […]

JUNK SCIENCE: Think Globally, Eat Locally

BY ELIZABETH FIEND LIVING EDITOR This is a special season of wondrous fruits and the freshest of vegetables. It only comes once a year and lasts only a few short but tasty months. Right now, this very minute, is the time to jump on board and get with the program of buying your produce from neighborhood farmers markets.There are basically three types of places that grow our produce: big agribusiness factory-type farms, organic farms and recently, a growing movement of small local farms. It used to be a no brainier that if you wanted the best, most healthful food, and […]

BILLARY: It Just Goes On And On And On And On

? BY ANNE ALTHOUSEĀ Bill says “No onion rings?” and Hillary responds “I’m looking out for ya.” Now, the script says onion rings, because that’s what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the “O” of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She’s “looking out” all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather […]

BONNAROO: When The Music’s Over

[Click image for slideshow] EDITOR’S NOTE: All weekend long, assistant editor EVA LIAO and her trusty sidekick, book critic MAVIS LINNEMANN, hung out with guys named Dude and That Other Dude, consumed mind-bending substances and blogged photos and scene reports straight from the primeval muck of Bonnaroo to your mind’s eye. Hope you appreciated that these chicks were sweating their tits off in Vietnam-like conditions so you didn’t have to. I sure did. BY EVA LIAO AND MAVIS LINNEMANN LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY — We’re here at the airport, waiting to catch our flight back to Philadelphia. Frankly we don’t have the […]

TODAY I SAW…

[Photo by RACHAEL SHIRLEY] BY JEFF DEENEY “Today I saw…” is a series of nonfiction shorts based on my experiences as a caseworker serving formerly homeless families now living in North and West Philadelphia. I decided not long after starting the job that I was seeing so many fascinating and disturbing things in the city’s poorest neighborhoods that I needed to start cataloging them. I hope this bi-weekly column serves as a record of a side of the city that many Philadelphians don’t come in contact with on a daily basis. I want to capture moments not frequently covered by […]

PBS FOR THE BLIND: We See It Even When You Can’t

BY AMY Z. QUINN The common misconception about the Iraq War seems to be that military leadership inserted American troops into a conflict without an exit strategy. In fact, the opposite is true. From the moment American generals — all retired now, by the way — set foot on the sands of Iraq, the mission was to get out as quickly as possible. For Rumsfeld and the Neocons, the Endgame was the whole game. The problem is that the light military footprint game plan didn’t include a strategy for actually winning the war, and in the resulting lawless vacuum a […]

We Need A Pitcher Not An Underwear Stitcher

The Phillies, not that surprisingly, followed their recent stretch of good play by losing two of three to the Tigers over the weekend, and packed their bags as a third-place team once again for the road trip that began last night in Cleveland with Cole Hamels on the mound. As always with the Phils, things could be better, things could be worse. INQUIRER: Always Keep Your Eye On The Ball Not The Other Way Around

KILLADELPHIA: Stop & Frisk? You’re Soaking In It

What nobody mentioned is that stop-and-frisk — in which police stop people suspected of criminal activity and pat them down for illegal weapons — is already used by police in Philadelphia. “The idea of giving officers training to recognize [illegal] guns? That’s already in place,” said Lt. Fran Healy, a lawyer for the Police Department. Last year, Philly cops stopped 132,765 pedestrians, according to department data. Some of those stops would have involved a pat-down or an arrest. A rough analysis shows that Philadelphia averaged nine stops per 100 residents last year. New York City averaged six stops per 100, […]

NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

FRESH AIR Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks — author of the bestseller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq ? talks about his latest trip to that country and the latest strategies the Pentagon is employing there. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Wall Street Journal staffer, is also author of Making the Corps and A Soldier’s Duty. ALSO, former Navy petty officer Stephen Benjamin, trained as an Arabic translator, was headed to Iraq when he was dismissed from the Navy under the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Benjamin is gay; his supervisors knew he was gay, and […]

KILLADELPHIA: Shooting The Messenger

It’s true, says Christopher Pearo. When you think you’re about to die, your life really does flash before your eyes. Pearo, 36, a newspaper-delivery driver for the Daily News and Inquirer, had just been robbed of $15 by two assailants and shot in the neck as he deposited papers yesterday in a locked drop-box at a deli at 64th Street and Buist Avenue, Southwest Philadelphia. DAILY NEWS: Stand And Deliver! RELATED: A 27-year-old man, who police said was one of the group, was beaten to death sometime early yesterday and left for someone else to find. Police found his body […]

FORT DIX SIX: 3 Surefire Ways To Get Bail Denied

Agron Abdullahu, one of the Fort Dix Six, scratched graffiti into the door of his jail cell that included an AK-47 assault rifle firing bullets at the letters “FBI,” prosecutors charged yesterday. They said he also etched the name of a town in Kosovo, his homeland, along with an Albanian acronym for the Kosovo Liberation Army, which prosecutors called a paramilitary organization with a history of war crimes. “The subject matter of the etchings alone is disturbing at best, and at worst demonstrates the volition of an individual predisposed to violence,” prosecutors wrote in a brief filed in federal court […]