NEW YORK TIMES: The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials. The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe. An […]
WANTED: Pentagon Hunting For WikiLeaks Founder
DAILY BEAST: Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast. The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers. MORE […]
CINEMA: Uneasy Rider
ROAD GAMES (1981, directed by Richard Franklin, 101 minutes, Australia) BY DAN BUSIKIRK FILM CRITIC A great psychological thriller, intelligent, tense and scary, is a real rarity; I’d hate to let one come to town unnoticed, even if it is 29-years-old. Director Richard Franklin’s Road Games is one of the most entertaining examples of a long string of homages to the acknowledged master of the genre, Alfred Hitchcock, showing just enough originality to escape that sort of airless mimicry foisted upon us by so many others who approached the throne. Exhumed Films is hosting a rare screening of this cult […]
KITCHEN BITCH: Time To Make The Donuts
BY MAVIS LINNEMANN When I was in middle school, my dad used to drive me to St. Ursula Villa School in Cincinnati every morning before he turned around and went to work in Northern Kentucky. Sometimes, on Fridays, we would leave home a little early and stop by Remke’s, our local grocery store, to pick up fresh donuts on our way to school. This early-morning Friday pit stop was my dad’s way of saying: We made it through the workweek, and we deserve a treat. In my mind, donuts, my dad, and well-deserved rewards will always go hand in hand. […]
250 MILLION YEARS AGO TODAY: The Great Dying
RELATED: Roughly a quarter of a billion years ago, 90-95 percent of all life on Earth died out. It took 30 million years for the planet to recover. Most people are familiar with the extinction event 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. But the Great Dying was much more devastating. It left almost nothing alive. So what happened? Nobody is completely sure, but there is evidence to support two major catastrophes, both of which would have led to devastating climate change. At the end-Permian, giant mega-volcanoes began to erupt in the Siberian region. At the same time, […]
SCRAPPLE NEWS: Piggie Of The Week
With your bacon-maker, AP Ticker.
STINKTASTIC: Welcome To The Tea Farty
Brilliant. A web site that re-Tweets the bile coming from Tea Party-affiliated Twitter streams in the form of a noxious cloud emanating from a the butt of a faceless patriot, complete with flatulent sound effects. Check it out HERE. PREVIOUSLY: Last Night I Sneaked Into The Tea Party
PAPERBOY: Slow-Jamming The Alt-Weeklies
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 […]
SPORTO: About Last Night
BY MIKE WOLVERTON SPORTS GUY Oy. Oof. Ugh. Has there ever been a worse goal to end a Stanley Cup Final? Has there ever been a worse goal? I’m not here to kill Michael Leighton, but you can’t win a Stanley Cup when you give up soft goals in four separate games. Yes, the Flyers wouldn’t have gotten as far as they did without Leighton, but in the Finals they needed him to at least be solid, not putrid. It’s the same old story for the last twenty years, outplayed between the pipes. And the Flyers have tried to address […]
HELL TO PAY: AT&T’s New Pricing Plan & You
HUFFINGTON POST: Yay, the iPhone 4 is here. But today, instead of thinking about the latest version of the game-changing smartphone, I’m mourning the end of the era of the unlimited data plan. Last week AT&T announced a new tiered pricing model for data services for Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices, which charges users $15 for 200 MB of data and $25 for 2 GB, plus an additional charge for tethering (more on that in a bit). While some think the new model will ultimately be good for consumers, others disagree. David Pogue, while having issues about the tethering, thinks […]
BLACKHAWK FROWN: The Agony Of Defeat
The Chicago Blackhawks have won the Cup, beating the Philadelphia Flyers 4-3 in overtime in Game 6 for their first championship since 1961. RELATED: Indeed, the Flyers have won over the town – a remarkable feat considering all the snags the team and its fans endured this season. The franchise yanked one goalie out of the Russian hinterlands, another out of the lost-and-found bin and pulled a third from obscurity. Mike Richards battled the media and, later on, Jeff Carter and Ian Laperriere battled injuries. John Stevens was fired and replaced with Peter Laviolette, whose system didn’t reap rewards as […]
TONITE: Go Lightly
Holly Golightly and The Broke Offs “Holly started her musical career as a co-founder member of all girl garage band Thee Headcoatees, who were Thee Headcoats splinter group in 1991. Holly made her first solo album, The Good Things, in 1995. Although often connected with garage rock, Holly’s music is more a mixture of pre-rock electric country blues, folk and less frantic rock & roll. It brings to mind a bourbon soaked honky tonk bar, evenings on a dusty front porch with your faithful hound, cracked hearts and foot stomping good times. She creates a world all of her own, […]