#OccupyPhilly, 15th & Samson, 2:10 AM by CHUCK RAMSEY PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: Occupiers stopped at several points throughout the night—at 16th and Market, between Market and Chestnut on 15th, at 12th and Market, other spots—to mic check and taunt the police. The night wore on and more scuffles between protesters and police erupted in pockets around the general marching area. As they did, all demonstrators around those scuffles raised their hands in the air and began chanting, “This is a nonviolent protest,” which it was. To an extent. Someone poured water on a female officer and a fight broke out around […]

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like Santa Claus and an AK-47 — at least to members of one Arizona gun group. The Scottsdale Gun Club is coming under fire for a holiday offer to patrons and their families to create Christmas cards posing with St. Nick and a cache of weapons. “Santa’s back with his bag of goodies,” the promo on their Website reads. “Get your holiday picture with Santa and his machine guns!” One image shows Santa in a chair with an $80,000 machine gun. Next to him is a man standing behind a boy holding […]

FRESH AIR How the Fourth Amendment — and the other amendments to the Constitution — should extend to quickly changing technologies is unclear. Recently, Jeffrey Rosen and his colleague Benjamin Wittes asked leading legal scholars to imagine technologies that might be developed in the next few decades that would challenge current constitutional laws. Their hypothetical scenarios, collected in Constitution 3.0, address questions about a variety of topics, including security, free speech, privacy and the constitutional right against self-incrimination. Rosen describes one privacy scenario, imagined at a conference by Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin, in which websites like Google and […]

MARKET WATCH: If you follow the headlines, and believe them, you would probably think that defense spending is about to be slashed to the bone following the collapse of the “super committee”. Defense secretary Leon Panetta is warning of a “doomsday” scenario for national security spending. Congressman Buck McKeon, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, warns that automatic cuts will end up “crippling our military.” There’s just one problem. It’s total nonsense. What Washington calls a “cut” is really just a more modest increase than you were expecting. Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason […]

NPR: “And what I did came back to me eventually,” narrator Redford Stephens, transcendently portrayed by Black Thought, posthumously intones in “Sleep,” the first track from The Roots’ 13th album undun. Death pervades undun; it follows Stephens, a poor kid from Philadelphia and victim to the drug trade, from the moment he surrenders himself to the game all the way to his inevitable end. Along the way, no verse is wasted, no optimism is spared; each line is like a shovelful of dirt on Redford’s coffin. At 39 minutes, undun feels like a lifetime, because it is one. […] The […]

[Artwork by LARRY WEST] INQUIRER: Police swarmed around City Hall overnight and rousted Occupy Philadelphia protesters from their encampment more than two days after a deadline passed for them to leave. The occupiers responded by roaming around Center City, scattering and regrouping with police following their every move in a chaotic night of cat-and-mouse that threatened to drag into the morning rush hour. The attempt to disperse the occupiers began about 1 a.m. – 56 hours after the city-imposed deadline to leave came and went. Shortly before 5 a.m., as protesters confronted police in a standoff on 15th Street between […]

DOWNLOAD: The Bigger Lovers “For Christ’s Sake” [MP3] RELATED: As for the origins of this tear-in-yer-eggnog slow jam, here’s how the song’s writer Bret Tobias remembers it: “We were asked to contribute to a Christmas compilation and were riffing off title ideas at rehearsal. Someone came up with “For Christ’s Sake” and we all had a laugh and then quickly moved on to doing “Emmanuelle” for the umpteenth time or something. But the title stuck in my head, and as I started writing it became a little more heartfelt than intended. It was an interesting experiment, even though it’d be […]

FOX NEWS: A former Philadelphia school district superintendent who collected a $905,000 contract buyout from the city has reportedly filed for unemployment benefits. Arlene Ackerman was reportedly paid the hefty buyout by the school district with taxpayer funds after a plan to use $405,000 in private funds to pay her was cancelled amid public outrage. The school district cannot contest the filing due to the separation agreement her lawyers negotiated in August, sources told Fox affiliate WTXF-TV. Ackerman was the highest paid government official in Philadelphia during her three-year stay with the school district, which is run by the state, […]

FRESH AIR Imagine being able to access the Internet through the contact lenses on your eyeballs. Blink, and you’d be online. Meet someone, and you’d have the ability to immediately search their identity. And if your friend happens to be speaking a different language, an instantaneous translation could appear directly in front of you. That might sound farfetched, but it’s something that might very well exist in 30 years or less, says theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. “The first people to buy these contact lenses will be college students studying for final exams,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “They’ll see […]

ABC NEWS: Herman Cain’s chief of staff Mark Block confirmed to ABC News that the candidate told his senior staff this morning he’s reassessing whether to stay in the race, as reported by the National Review. An adviser to Cain said the former businessman told staff he will spend the next two days assessing his candidacy, and that he would base his decision on two factors. One, whether or not he still has enough  support to go on, and two, the toll it is taking on his family. MORE THE ATLANTIC: On a conference call Tuesday morning, Herman Cain told […]

From the Dog’s sixth LP, Be The Void, which hits stores February 7th. You can pre-order it via KINGS ROAD MERCH and immediately receive “The Old Black Hole” as well as “Warrior Man” and “Control Yourself” from the long ago sold out Black Friday 7-incher.

[Illustration by ALEX FINE] THE FINANCIAL TIMES: “I have a lot of plan B, C, D, E, and F in effect,” he adds. What’s plan A, I ask? “Plan A is to make movies. The one thing I can’t do right now.” He finds himself in a cinematic no-man’s land. Hollywood studios look only for blockbusters, while the demise of art-house cinemas makes investors reluctant to finance independent films. The last half-dozen films he made cost between $4m and $8m, he says. “Nowadays, [backers] want it to cost $500,000 to $1m. I can’t do that because I have four employees. […]

USA TODAY: The scene, Olsen said, reminded him of Iraq — the helicopters overhead, the explosions, the smoke. After he was hit, there were frantic curses and cries of “Medic!” “It seemed like a battle, like war,” he said. “It did bring that back to me.” He was standing with an ex-sailor in uniform between the main bodies of police and protesters. Olsen wore his Marines’ camouflage jacket over a Veterans for Peace T-shirt. He was posing for pictures, he said, and trying to use his status as a veteran to keep the peace. After he was hit on the […]