NEW YORK TIMES: President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic officials said Monday. Mr. Panetta has a reputation in Washington as a competent manager with strong background in budget issues, but has little hands-on intelligence experience. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take control of the agency most directly responsible for hunting senior Al Qaeda leaders around the globe, but one that has been […]
EYELESS IN GAZA: Death From Above
[Photo slideshow at: BOSTON GLOBE] [WARNING: Graphic content.] EDITOR’S NOTE: Let the record show that Phawker has no dog in this fight. We are posting these pictures [CLICK TO ENLARGE] as neutral observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because we believe that sanitized reportage of conflict is a gross distortion of reality that only serves to enable conflict to persist. Setting aside for a a moment the convoluted tit-for-tat that stretches all the way back to 1947 and serves as the bloody preamble to what is happening right now, the chain of recent events goes something like this: enraged by Israel’s […]
MEDIA: The Curious Case Of The Man Shot For Talking At A Brad Pitt Movie That Became A Global Headline, And The 3 Men Shot Dead In One Day That Did Not
INQUIRER: Three shootings yesterday in Grays Ferry, Kensington and West Oak Lane left three dead and three in critical condition, police said. All the victims were male, and all were shot on the street. No arrests had been made as of last night. Just before 6 p.m. in the 1300 block of Harmony Street in Grays Ferry, two men in their 50s were shot. One, age 56, was shot once in the head, the other on the right side of his body. Both were pronounced dead at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. About 6:30 p.m. on the 800 […]
CH-CH-CHANGES: RIAA To Stop Suing Customers, Warner Music To Take The Led Out Of YouTube
WASHINGTON POST: The Recording Industry Association of America is taking a dangerous step with its decision to stop suing suspected music sharers and start cutting off their Internet access instead. While the discontinuation of the lawsuit practice has its merits, the move opens up a whole new can of worms — one that could have serious implications for our future rights as consumers of information. On the one hand, the shift — revealed Friday, initially in a story published in The Wall Street Journal — does mark the end of a troubling and generally ineffective process. RIAA’s past practice of […]
WEEKEND UPDATE: The Good News Flower Hour
The Good News Flower Hour #4 Folks, here’s the latest installment of The Good News Flower Hour, wherein I provide the voice for a flower that reads the news. The debut is HERE and the last couple episodes are HERE and HERE. We are still tweaking the concept and streamlining the production schedule on these — it takes a LONG-ass time to make these little three-minute suckers — but we hope to make this a weekly feature in the very near future. Enjoy.
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward talks about FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt — a.k.a. “Deep Throat,” the secret source who helped Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Felt died Dec. 18 at the age of 95. A long-kept secret, Felt’s identity as Woodward’s source was revealed in the July 2005 issue of Vanity Fair magazine. Woodward later detailed his clandestine meetings with Felt in the book The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. Woodward’s latest book is The War Within: A […]
ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN: ‘Deepthroat’ Dead At 95
NEW YORK TIMES: W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the F.B.I. when he helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, Calif. In 2005, Mr. Felt revealed that he was the one who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had […]
ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING: Papers Declare Al Franken ‘Projected Winner’ Of Minnesota Senate Seat
HUFFINGTON POST: Democratic challenger Al Franken finds himself on the cusp of winning a seat in the United States Senate after Minnesota’s canvassing board awarded him a host of challenged votes during deliberations on Thursday. As of 8PM ET, the Minneapolis Star Tribune projected that Franken would finish the recount process with a lead of 89 votes, positioning him to become the 59th senator caucusing with Democrats in the upcoming Congress. The gains came as the canvassing board sifted through hundreds of ballots that Coleman had contested during the recount process. On Friday, the canvassing board will consider another 400 […]
MUST SEE: The Three Stooges As Iraqi Journalists
[TheFlickeringWindow: At a news conference with President Bush, three knuckleheads are caught in a custard conspiracy involving pies and cream puffs. The three men are identified as Howard, Fine, and Howard.] * ASSOCIATED PRESS: The investigating judge in the case of the Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at President George W. Bush says the man shows signs of being beaten. Judge Dhia al-Kinani said Friday that the journalist had bruises on his face and around his eyes.The journalist, Muntadhar al-Zeidi, was wrestled to the ground after throwing the shoes during a Sunday news conference with Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister […]
NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006
FRESH AIR Composer Erran Baron Cohen‘s latest CD Songs in the Key of Hanukkah offers a new take on traditional sounds. He talks about the album — and about collaborating with his brother Sacha Baron Cohen on the movie Borat. Recorded in London, Berlin and Tel Aviv, the compilation of songs combines klezmer, reggae, electronica and hip hop as it reinterprets classics. The album even features New York rapper Y-Love rhyming in Yiddish. Erran is a founding member of ZOHAR Sound System and DJ’s internationally and in London clubs. ALSO, you have to be pretty dedicated to your work to set […]
PAPERBOY: ‘Assorted Inconvenient Truths’ Edition
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
WORTH REPEATING: Man Bites Blog
BY KELLIE C. MURPHY Rebelling against the machine comes naturally to Skwire. Born in Newport, R.I., he grew up during the Reagan years and became an early frequenter of the local punk rock music scene, learning how to rage with political groups like the Dead Kennedys and MDC. He moved to Philly in 1999 to pursue his musical ambitions and settled in Kingsessing, one of the oldest settlements in the city. He says the area was the perfect fit, because he wanted homeownership and a yard—without going broke. Skwire realizes how out of place he looks in his predominately black […]