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 […]

[Photo by BRIAN FERGUSON] GRUBB STREET: Before Fergie’s there was nothing. Okay, maybe that’s a little bit of stretch, but when Fergus “Fergie” Carey opened his eponymous pub on Sansom Street near 13th Street back in 1994, editors from Food & Wine and Bon Appetit weren’t exactly lining up to check out the likes of Barbuzzo, El Vez or Sampan. In fact much of what’s now called Midtown Village was dotted with empty store fronts, strip joints, sex shops and adult cinemas. And Fergie was seen as something of a madman for opening a bar and restaurant in the middle […]

BY LANCE DOILY I had just gotten through my first route without a near total collapse into debauchery in a couple months, so I gave my man Royce a call to celebrate over a couple cold ones at the Husker. Slunt Huskers, that is. Stone was at the helm, so it goes without saying that the tap was locked in the pour position and Uriah Heap’s “Easy Livin’” was runnin’ repeat on the juke before my asscheeks even touched the barstool. He was in rare form that night, barely getting to the second round before telling us a story about […]

CBS NEWS: Of his treatment by Egyptian authorities during his detention, Sweeney said, “The first night, we weren’t really told anything as to what was going to happen to us for a long time, for several days. “But the first night, we were hit several times in the face, in the back of the neck, and we were forced to sit on the ground in the dark with our hands cuffed behind our backs, and there were a number of Egyptian policemen behind us with guns telling us that if we moved, we would be shot. We were there for […]

RELATED: Snowmine, a Brooklyn-based five-piece, is keyboardist Grayson Sanders, guitarists Calvin Pia and Austin Mendenhall, bassist Jay Goodman, and drummer Alex Beckmann. The band’s lush indie-pop songs are generated largely by Sanders, who recently turned his attention from composing in the New York classical music scene to become the principle singer and songwriter for the group. For the session, Snowmine chose to record the song “Curfews.” Sanders said: “It’s a song about being a slave to your work. The first line is: I might not earn it but its what I deserve […] It’s the relationship you have being validated […]

[Photo by ROBIN ODLAND] PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: An Occupier named Dan, waiting at the edges of the Occupy camp on Monday night for the GA to begin, says that his patience quickly wore thin—he says he camped at Dilworth for the first two weeks of Occupy Philly until homeless people made things “sketchy.” “I feel bad for people who are homeless, but nobody really wants to admit what happened,” he says. “The homeless basically ruined Occupy Philly. They took it over and brought a lot of negativity down on us, and they pushed out a lot of the original Occupy Philly […]

ROLLING STONE: When David Bowie appeared on Bing Crosby’s 42nd and final Christmas special, it was his attempt to make his arty career more mainstream, more normal. Instead, the glam-rocker’s duet with the legendary crooner Crosby resulted in one of the strangest moments of both of their careers. In September of 1977, Bowie taped his only appearance on Crosby’s family-friendly Christmas variety show; the pair sang two songs, “Little Drummer Boy” and “Peace on Earth.” They reportedly spent less than an hour rehearsing both songs – during which Bowie reportedly begged in vain to sing anything besides “Little Drummer Boy” – […]