BY JEFF DEENEY FOR THE NATION CeaseFire works through aggressive peer-led street outreach by ex-offenders with deep ties to the community, who gather intelligence on gangs in order to spot potential conflicts. Such conflicts are then mediated by the program’s famed violence “Interrupters.” At its peak, CeaseFire Chicago employed fifty outreach workers and fifty Interrupters, chosen from pools of candidates screened by professional and community panels to ensure they’d left the hustling life. Statisticians analyze the data gathered by outreach teams alongside data tracking violence collected by law enforcement, identifying up-to-the-moment crime hot spots, and focusing the program’s resources […]
EARLY WORD: Still Sicko After All These Years
Join filmmaker Michael Moore, whistleblower and Deadly Spin author Wendell Potter, and American SiCKO’s Donna and Larry Smith, Reggie Cervantes, Billy Maher, Julie Pierce, Lee Einer, Dawnelle Keys, Adrian Campbell Montgomery, and others. Celebrate how SiCKO changed the conversation on health care reform in America and hear the latest on the movement for health care justice from leaders around the country. Minimum donation $40.00. All proceeds to benefit the health care reform efforts of Vermont’s Public Assets Institute and Healthcare-NOW. Questions? 802-223-6677 or sarah@publicassets.org. MORE Saturday, June 30, 2012 Plays and Players Theater 1714 Delancey Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 7:00pm […]
CINEMA: This Time It’s Personal
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER (2012, directed by Timur Bekmambetov, 105 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I guess we all had a chuckle back in 2010, when we heard the title Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame-Smith’s follow-up to his previous literary re-fashioning, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Sustaining that chuckle through a summer blockbuster is a tall order, even for the statuesque rail-splitter from Illinois. While the great man was able to heal the nation, sadly Lincoln can’t bring together this surprisingly straight-faced mash-up of historical fact and fantasy fiction. We all know part of the story: […]
OUT ON ASSIGNMENT: Redacted
I’ll be out of the office all day on assignment. Something crazy f*cking cool is going down, but I can’t talk about it yet because I promised Dan Gross an exclusive. You’ll find out on Monday.
CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: Uruguay Legalizes Marijuana To Fight Crime And Fund Rehabs
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Uruguay is planning a novel approach to fighting rising crime: having its government sell marijuana to take drug profits out of the hands of dealers. Under the plan backed by President Jose Mujica’s leftist administration, only the government would be allowed to sell marijuana and only to adults who register on a government database, letting officials keep track of their purchases over time. Profits would reportedly go toward rehabilitating drug addicts. MORE LATINO FOX NEWS: Uruguay’s government has opted for the “regulated and controled legalization” of marijuana in the South American country as a crime-fighting measure […]
HOT DOC: Statement From Radiohead
>STATEMENT FROM RADIOHEAD Hello everyone, As you will probably have heard the roof over the stage collapsed at our show in Toronto killing crew member Scott Johnson and injuring three other crew members. The collapse also destroyed the light show – this show was unique and will take many weeks to replace. The collapse also caused serious damage to our backline, some elements of which are decades old and therefore hard to replace. Whilst we all are dealing with the grief and shock ensuing from this terrible accident there are also many practical considerations to deal with & consequently we […]
OK, Who Broke Twitter? You Are In BIG Trouble!
Just realized that Tweeting about Twitter being down is like the sound of one hand clapping. Weird, innit? MERCURY NEWS: Twitter, the popular microblogging service, experienced technical difficulties Thursday morning that kept users from posting or accessing the site. The San Francisco company posted a message on its Status blog around 9:30 a.m. Pacific time that read “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.” The site began having issues about 9 a.m. Pacific time Thursday morning, timing out for those attempting to access the website. Just after 10 a.m., users in […]
CONCERT REVIEW: The Hives @ The E-Factory
BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE INQUIRER The Hives aren’t an arena rock band, they just play one on stage. All faux-bluster, comic petulance and winking self-aggrandizement, they evoke the high dudgeon of Diver Down-era Van Halen upon having learned that the brown M&Ms have not been exiled from the backstage banquet. But unlike Van Halen, they play it strictly for laughs. The prime driver of these immensely entertaining delusions of grandeur is the band’s sassy, boyish front man, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, a born entertainer with lungs of leather, a certain Jagger-ian grace, and large expressive eyes that could have […]
Win Tix To See Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy @ The Troc
Will Oldham remains an elusive figure, but the show is a gentle reminder of why he is often cited as one of the finest singer-songwriters in contemporary American music. Oldham was a student of music history, clearly, but he never sounded studious. He had an eerie, strangulated voice, half wild and half broken. And he sang vivid and peculiar songs, which sometimes sounded like old standards rewritten as fever dreams or, occasionally, as inscrutable dirty jokes. These days, he calls himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and his music is a little bit easier to love and a lot harder to […]
TONIGHT: The Boys Who Kicked The Hornets Nest
It literally does not get any more rock n’ roll than this. They rock the Electric Factory TONIGHT! You have been warned.
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: New Study Declares The U.S.A. Is The Greatest Fattest Nation On Earth!
A new study published in the BMC Public Health says global obesity represents the biomass equivalent of an extra billion people on the planet. The United States Of America represents only 5% of the global population but takes up one third of the global biomass. Asia, on the other hand, contains 61% of the world’s population, but only 13% of its biomass. Woo-Hoo! USA! USA! USA! Worth watching if only for the scenes of a psychotic, blood-spattered Ronald McDonald slaughtering a barn full of cows with a submachine gun. I’m lovin’ it!
BREAKING: Man Man To Headline 2nd Street Fest
2ND Street Festival today announced they will again partner with the Philadelphia Folksong Society (PFS), the nonprofit parent of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, for the 2nd Street Festival in Northern Liberties on August 5th. With the help of the PFS and the increased support of area businesses and sponsors, festival attendance nearly doubled last year to over 16,000. The festival will expand even beyond last year’s footprint, but will again offer art and craft vendors, kids programs, on-street beer gardens, and four stages of roots, hip-hop, indie folk and rock, reggae, world music, DJs, and more. The initial lineup announced […]
SIDEWALKING: Stand By Your Man
Pedobear outside the Sandusky trial, Bellefonte, PA, 10:21 AM by @BillWadell CNN: The defense team for Jerry Sandusky, accused of sexually abusing 10 boys over a 15-year period, rested on Wednesday without the former coach taking the stand. Defense attorney Joe Amendola had told reporters earlier to “stay tuned” to see if the former Penn State defensive coordinator would testify. It was thought his testimony could provide the opening that prosecutors needed to introduce new evidence against the former coach. In a segment that wasn’t included in NBC’s November 2011 broadcast of an interview with Sandusky, he told Bob Costas […]