INQUIRER: What Hines wants most are answers – and the confidence that one day she would be able to support a family. Hines, the Drexel Hill camper, graduated from high school in June and now works in a pizza parlor, hoping she can get enough financial aid to attend Delaware County Community College. She turns over half her earnings to her family – two working parents, and two brothers, 20 and 13. The 20-year-old was laid off from a job in a lumber yard. Her father, a news junkie, earned a journalism degree in college and drives a truck. Her […]

NY DAILY NEWS: A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas. The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup. Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as “flaking,” on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop […]

LAWRENCE LESSIG: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil” — Thoreau, 1846, On Walden — “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root.” There could be no better place to name that root than on Wall Street, New York. For no place in America better symbolizes the sickness that is our government than Wall Street, New York. For it is there that the largest amount of campaign cash of any industry in America was collected; and it was there that that campaign cash was used to buy the policies […]

INQUIRER: The Maple Shade zoning board Wednesday night voted against a proposal to open a medical-marijuana dispensary at an outlet on Route 73. The company seeking to operate the facility, Compassionate Sciences, said it would assess other options. At a meeting attended by about 50 people, the proposal drew tough questioning from the board. Representatives of Compassionate Sciences, one of six nonprofits approved by the state Health Department in March, were asked questions ranging what traffic the store would generate to whether patients would be driving through the town under the influence. “My wife has cancer, so I know what […]

THINK PROGRESS: Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum re-engineered a chart from the New York State Comptroller’s office showing how, in the last three decades, salaries in New York City’s securities industry have far outstripped those in the city’s other sectors. “Wall Street salaries have risen 11.2% per year, while all other salaries have risen 1.8% per year,” Drum found. In 2010, the average salary for someone in the securities industry was $366,000 while the average private sector salary in another industry was $66,000. MORE MOTHER JONES: Note also that after nearly destroying the world in 2008 and seeing their average salaries […]

CBS NEWS: The Obama administration was taking its case against Iran to the world Wednesday, trying to stir up an international response to charges that the Islamic republic plotted to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. “It’s critically important that we unite the world in the isolation of and dealing with the Iranians,” Vice President Joe Biden said on “The Early Show” Wednesday. […] The State Department sent a cable to all American embassies and consulates around the world telling them to put the Iran case before their host governments. The officials said the cable, sent late Tuesday […]

[Illustrations by ALEX FINE] BY MAYA REDWOOD Are you a Mac or a PC? It seems that most folks feel they are one or the other. They either love Apple or they hate it. They believe that Steve Jobs was a god or the devil. Sides must be chosen. Last week when Steve (yes we are on a first name basis though we’ve never met) passed away I shed a few tears because I am NOT a Mac, nor a PC. I’m not a lover nor a hater nor even a believer. I cried for the loss of a life […]

VANITY FAIR: Millions of Americans hoped President Obama would nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the consumer financial watchdog agency she had created. Instead, she was pushed aside. As Warren kicks off her run for Scott Brown’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, Suzanna Andrews charts the Harvard professor’s emergence as a champion of the beleaguered middle class, and her fight against a powerful alliance of bankers, lobbyists, and politicians. MORE RELATED: When the C.F.P.B. was first proposed to Congress, in early 2009, the Chamber of Commerce, the leading business lobbying group in the country, announced that it would “spend whatever it takes” […]

NBC PHILADELPHIA:  The folks outside City Hall protesting corporate greed and political systems that support it could actually be costing taxpayers thousands. The Occupy Philadelphia demonstration against corporate influence on politics has a growing cost to the city. In the first five days since Occupy Philly began last week the Philadelphia Police Department spent $164,000 in overtime costs and $237,000 in regular time, according to Mayor Michael Nutter’s Press Office. The protests use about $80,000 total in police costs daily — of which about $33,000 a day is being paid towards police overtime. MORE MYFOXPHILLY: The section of City Hall taken over by the […]

Ex-Black Flag human cannonball/author/publisher/lifter-of-weights/caller-of-bullshit Henry Rollins was promoting his new book Occupants at Repo Records last night and offered strong words of encouragement for #OccupyPhilly. RELATED: That Henry Rollins, the burly, tattooed ballistic behind Black Flag, has attempted to distill a decade worth of experiences wandering through the worst parts of the developing world into a photo-heavy coffee table book doesn’t undermine his rebel credibility as much as the new book’s contents, which show that, in extremis, the aging punk is less than extreme. Occupants is collection of disconcertingly concrete images paired with impressionistic passages of writing in which Rollins […]