INQUIRER: Philadelphia police this morning said they are looking for a 33-year-old city man in connection with the fatal shooting Saturday of Philadelphia police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski. Police identified the suspect at large as Eric Floyd, 33, currently of Clearfield Street, Philadelphia. Police said Floyd had escaped from a halfway house in Reading, and is considered to be armed and dangerous. Police said at least three men were involved in the robbery and shooting of Sgt. Liczbinski, 39, on Saturday just before noon. Liczbinski was responding to the robbery of a bank inside a grocery store around 11:30 a.m. Saturday. […]
WARNING: Graphic Reality & Inconvenient Truth
UPDATE: “The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University contains ten photographs purportedly showing the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. Mr. Capp was assigned to the occupation forces outside Hiroshima after World War II. According to to Mr. Capp’s oral history (available along with the photographs in the Robert L. Capp collection), he found these photos among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside of Hiroshima. Since making these photographs publicly available, I have received reliable proof that at least two of these photos are actually of the 1923 Kanto earthquake. While I […]
GUAM: Yes We Can
HAGATNA, Guam – Barack Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton by seven votes in the Democratic presidential caucuses Saturday. The count of more than 4,500 ballots took all night. Neither candidate campaigned in the U.S. island territory in person, but both did long-distance media interviews and bought campaign ads for the caucuses. Results of the count completed Sunday morning Guam time show delegates pledged to Obama with 2,264 votes to 2,257 for Clinton’s slate. That means they’ll split the pledged delegate votes. Obama’s slate won in 14 of 21 districts. Eight pledged delegates will attend the convention, each with one-half vote. […]
Eight Belles Euthanized After 2nd Place Derby Finish
ASSOCIATED PRESS: LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Eight Belles was euthanized after breaking both front ankles following a second-place finish in the Kentucky Derby. WASHINGTON POST: The camera cut away from her, but it should have stayed on her. Eight Belles had run herself half to death yesterday, and now the vets were finishing the job as she lay on her side, her beautiful figure a black hump on the track. Horses don’t just fall down like that, you thought, as NBC flitted away, cowardlike, from the sickening picture to the more appealing image of the Kentucky Derby victor, Big Brown. There […]
KILLADELPHIA: Bank Robber Dead, Cop Slain
INQUIRER: A Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed with a military assault rifle late this morning when he confronted at least two robbers who had just held up a Bank of America branch at a Shoprite supermarket in Port Richmond. At 11:26 a.m., police received a report of a robbery at the American Bank at 3547 Aramingo Avenue. Another officer, responding to a “flash” that had been broadcast on police radio, ran into the robbers at Schiller and Almond streets and shot one of them dead, officials said. One, perhaps two, of the robbers remained at large late this […]
DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENT: The Sincerest Flattery?
The header banner on the Inquirer’s new bidness blawg looks, um, familiar. Oh, and we meant to say something about this weeks ago: Blinq‘s new header is winktastic! And while we are cutting and pasting, we would like to FYI you to the fact in the last week there has been a curiously high level of interest in our primary debate coverage from the Russkie Internets. Smells like KGB. Well, good luck with that, Boris & Natasha.
WORTH REPEATING: As It Was Written…
The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved by Hunter S. Thompson The following essay was originally published in Scanlan’s Monthly, vol. 1, no. 4, June 1970. The text of this essay was taken from the book The Great Shark Hunt, Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1, Strange Tales from a Strange Time by Hunter S. Thompson (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979). I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside, people hugged each other and shook hands…big grins […]
MANSCAPE: Digital Bro Hang & Geator’s Heater
Gadabout, the Details mag blog for the modern man-about-town, says Facebook is for pansies in general, but if you’re “pokin’” you’re dead to them: In a few short years, Facebook has leaked out of the college dormitory like some rare tropical disease and has begun infecting grown men in disturbingly vast numbers. The fastest-growing demographic among Facebook’s 64 million users is those over 25. More than half of MySpace’s 110 million users are older than 35. The hosts, once infected, exhibit a tendency to “superpoke” each other, hyperventilate over friend counts, and share their thoughts about the latest episode of […]
CAUSE CELEBRE: Free Burma!
NEW YORK TIMES: “HITLER is alive in Burma” reads the words scrawled on a cardboard sign, held aloft by a sweet-faced Ellen Page, the “Juno” star, in a 90-second human-rights public awareness message that began showing on video-sharing Web sites last week. The spot is one of 30 produced for U.S. Campaign for Burma, starring celebrities like Will Ferrell and Jennifer Aniston. They will be distributed on Fanista.com, a social-networking and entertainment retail site, then passed along to sites like YouTube and Google Video every day for the next month. The goal of the campaign is to thrust the cause […]
HOT FOR TEACHER: Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Teacher’s Aide Cops To Affair With 16-Year-Old Student
DAILY NEWS: It was a “secret love” within the confines of North Penn High School in Lansdale. She told him she wanted to have sex with him this summer, according to the affidavit of probable cause. He already began making his moves on her in a darkened classroom while a movie played for students, the document read. But Michelle Zulkowsky, 28, a teacher’s aide with the North Penn School District, grew fearful of her “emotional connection” with a 16-year-old student in the English as a Second Language program. Zulkowsky’s internal alarm prompted her to blow the whistle – on herself, […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Author Junot Diaz won a Pulitzer Prize this year for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Set in both the United States and the Dominican Republic, the novel explores the complexities of living in two cultures at once, with prose that frequently mixes Spanish and English. Diaz previously published Drown, a collection of short stories about a growing up in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. He struggled with writer’s block following that debut; writing and publishing Oscar Wao took 11 years. Diaz is a professor of creative writing at MIT. ALSO, rock historian […]
JOHN MCCAIN: 100 Years
DNC Ad on John McCain and Iraq: “100”
Dolphin Spotted Near Art Museum, Could Be Kahlo Fan
DAILY NEWS: The dolphin was following the fish and the police were following the dolphin – until they lost it near Philadelphia International Airport. Authorities think that the dolphin is not hurt, just hungry. It apparently followed a school of herring that was swimming up the Delaware to spawn and veered off into the Schuylkill, where it was spotted yesterday by the police Marine Unit near the Art Museum, said marine unit officer Anthony Kowalski. The falls at the Art Museum proved too much for the dolphin, so it turned around and headed back downstream, Kowalski said. The cops figure […]