- Fight The Man, prisoners across the state of California, fight The Man. Sure, you’re a bunch of convicted felons, many of whom committed violent and heinous crimes, but you lash out at treatment you believe to be unfair and cruel in any way you can find. For now, the centerpiece of the campaign is a hunger strike now in its ninth day, with as many as 12,000 inmates skipping meals in at least eight California prisons. With prisoners being a notoriously whiny lot, there could be any number of reason for the revolt, but this time many inmates are angry about a practice of keeping them in solitary confinement for too long. Like any supposedly disenfranchised group of kooks fighting any battle anywhere, these prisoners have found support in the form of an activist group for prisoners’ rights. "We are hoping that this widespread participation will push (prison officials) to negotiate and honor the basic demands of the people locked behind those walls," said Isaac Ontiveros, a spokesman for Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity. "You have people in there that have been in solitary confinement for 20 years. They just want to change their conditions." The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation addressed the issue in a statement release last week, saying it is "responding to a hunger strike disturbance by thousands of inmates in several correctional facilities." However, don’t expect prison officials to cave in so easily just because a few unruly inmates are refusing to eat their slop off plastic trays in the cafeteria. Instead, officials have promised to punish inmates who were not eating and remove leaders of the strike "from the general population and be place them in an Administrative Segregation Unit." Ah, Ad-Seg, sounds like a fun place to spend some quality time. In addition to the complaints about time in solitary confinement, the hunger-striking prisoners have a five-point plan demanding changes in the prison system, including a change in the prison policy that makes inmates go through an interrogation process where they have to incriminate themselves and identify other inmates who are involved in breaking rules in order to get out of solitary confinement. They are also seeking an end to group lockdowns and want more privileges for those in solitary confinement, such as winter clothes and nutritious meals. Prison officials have balked at the demands and insist that placing prisoners in solitary confinement makes the facilities safer and reduces gang violence. Those answers appear to be fueling the state’s second hunger strike by prisoners this year, but the current one has a ways to go before it eclipses the four-week effort this summer…………
- Football season is usually the fun part of the year at Ohio State, but the Buckeyes and their fans had to know this season was going to go badly. A fired, disgraced head coach, a star quarterback who hit the eject button and left for the NFL rather than accept the NCAA discipline coming his way and a handful of other starters benched for varying lengths of time to start the season, odds were that OSU was not maneuvering toward a BCS bowl game in 2011. But even with the controversy mostly behind them and the season underway, the Buckeyes can’t get out of their own way and can’t stay on the right side of the NCAA. Just when they were set to get back several starters who were suspended for the first five games of the season for accepting improper benefits, the NCAA is hammering OSU again. Two of the players who have already been sitting out for taking cash and free tattoos will not be back for this week’s conference road opener at Nebraska because they accepted too much money for too little work in their summer jobs. Last year's leading rusher, Dan Herron, and the top returning receiver, DeVier Posey, along with offensive lineman Marcus Hall will not be in uniform in Lincoln on Saturday as OSU seeks to rebound from a hideous 10-7 loss to Michigan State on Saturday. In spite of the suspensions, delusional athletic director Gene Smith insisted at a Monday afternoon news conference that there was no "systemic" problem at Ohio State. Smith has stuck to the script, blaming former coach Jim Tressel and the suspended athletes for all of the wrongdoing. "These failures are individual failures: failures of individual athletes, and as you know unfortunately a previous coach, and a booster," Smith said. Way to step up and own it, Gene-O. For Herron and Posey, this Saturday will be like the first five of the season. Had they merely received proper pay for the summer jobs, which included working at a car wash and picking up scrap metal, they would be suiting up against the Cornhuskers. Instead, they took inflated paychecks from Cleveland-area businessman Bobby DiGeronimo, was dissociated from the program after years of being a major OSU booster. According to Ohio State's self-report, Posey was overpaid $728, Herron $293 and three other players received between $60 and $300 too much. Some pundits have questioned whether the latest violations will lead the NCAA to bring a stronger hammer down on the program as a whole. Just don’t tell Smith that because his head is planted firmly in the sand…..or up his ass, but one or the other…………
- So, who’s down for some positive environmental news? It would be great to hear a positive story about the world’s ecosystem in the midst of nonstop Debbie Downer reports, right? That would be awesome, but this is not one of those positive tales. Not unless you count destruction of the ozone layer over the Arctic in early 2011 matching destruction of the ozone layer in the Antarctic ozone for the first time since record-keeping began. In fact, the huge hole that appeared in the Earth's protective ozone layer above the Arctic in 2011 is the largest recorded in the northern hemisphere. Even though scientists said the sudden appearance of the hole was not due to man-made causes, the hole is there all the same. In previous years, the holes have been so large that they covered the entire continent and stretched to parts of South America. Extreme climate events can destroy as much as 70 percent of the ozone layer before it ultimately recovers. The hole over the Arctic has always been much smaller than its Antarctic cousin, but that changed in March thanks to a combination of powerful wind patterns and intense cold temperatures high up in the atmosphere created the right conditions for already-present, ozone-eating chlorine chemicals to inflict heavy damage. A disturbing report on the problem appeared on Monday in the journal Nature, explaining how the hole opened over northern Russia, parts of Greenland, and Norway. Because of that, people in these areas were likely to have been exposed to high levels of UV radiation. "The chemical ozone destruction over the Arctic in early 2011 was, for the first time in the observational record, comparable to that in the Antarctic ozone hole," said lead researcher Gloria Manney of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Why? Atmospheric conditions high above the Arctic normally do not cause a large decline in ozone levels, but a high-altitude wind pattern called the polar vortex reached unusual strength last winter, creating extremely cold conditions in the stratosphere over the course of a few months. That set the stage perfectly for the ozone-destroying forms of chlorine to erode ozone levels over a long period. Worse still, Manny and her team warned that there is a legitimate risk that the spread of the Arctic hole could become an annual event. Now, who has a happy enviro-story to share………….
- Fans of adult cartoons, the main constant in life for more than two decades could be coming to an end. Just because The Simpsons are fictional characters living in an animated world doesn’t mean they are immune to the harsh realities of life as us flesh-and-blood humans know it and a money dispute is threatening to bring the popular Fox series to and end after its 23rd season wraps next spring. The standoff between the studio and the six principal actors who voice the show’s colorful cast of characters has reached a point of no return, with studio executives insisting that the show will end unless all of its actors agree to a 45-percent pay cut. Difficult contract negotiations between show runners and actors are a common phenomenon in Hollywood, but this is the first time The Simpsons has reached such a critical junction in the process. Dan Castellaneta (Homer, Grampa Simpson, Krusty the Clown, and others), Julie Kavner (Marge and others), Nancy Cartwright (Bart and others), Yeardley Smith (Lisa), Hank Azaria (Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon), and Harry Shearer (Mr. Burns, Principal Skinner, Ned Flanders, and others) are certainly well-paid at $8 million annually for about 22 weeks' work, but they do not receive any of the ancillary money from the show’s merchandising and other sources of income. According to sources close to the negotiations, Fox delivered its contract ultimatum Monday in response to the actors' proposal to take around a 30 percent pay cut in exchange for a tiny percentage of the show's huge back-end profits - believed to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars - and merchandising of Simpsons paraphernalia. Based on what Fox came back with, it seems safe to say that they didn’t like that idea…………
- Could it be…….the first step toward reviving the good ol’ U.S.S.R.? Vladimir Putin may insist it’s not so, but he has called for the creation of a Eurasian economic union in an article published Tuesday as he prepares for a return to (official) power in Russia after its March presidential elections. Putin’s article calls for Russia to lead the construction of the “Eurasian Union” on the base of the existing Customs Union, a trade group that includes Kazakhstan and Belarus. Russia rebuilding economic ties between former Soviet republics could definitely be construed as a reason for concern amongst those terrified of the Iron Curtain going up again, but Putin was adamant that the creation of the Eurasian Union is not about "the recreation of the USSR" but of building a connection between Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Maybe Putin is envious of the European Union and wants to be the leader of a rival group, but he did open the doors for new members to seek entry into his newly minted idea for a group. "We are not going to stop there and are setting an ambitious goal -- to achieve an even higher integration level in the Eurasian Union," Putin wrote in his piece. He stated the goal as establishing closer coordination of members states’ economic and currency policies. Russia’s economic plans have been a persistent thorn in the side of its World Trade Organization accession talks, which have dragged on for two decades and which Russia hopes to finalize this year. The process of creating the Eurasian economic union will come Jan 1., when the Customs Union members are planning to create the so-called Common Economic Space to coordinate their macroeconomic policies, competition rules and agriculture subsidies. Putin laid the foundation for all of this two years ago by informing the WTO that his country would apply to join the trade body as a group with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Even though that plan was later abandoned, Putin apparently held onto that dream and now is poised to make it reality…………
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