FRESH AIR The New Republic senior editor Jonathan Cohn discusses power players of health care reform, including the insurance lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby, the American Medical Association and Congress. Cohn is the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price, in which he makes a case for universal health care coverage through a government-regulated, single-payer system. He writes about health care for The New Republic’s blog The Treatment. RADIO TIMES Hour One A behind the scenes look at how the case against Former State Senator Vince Fumo was built […]

DAILY NEWS: Olivia Cotton, 18, said that she and her sister were on South Street with friends when cops began clearing the crowd. […] “I got punched, kicked; they stomped my head, and they Maced me two times,” she said. “And they Tasered me on my leg.” Her 14-year-old sister was punched in the head and blacked out, said Jonathan James, the pair’s attorney. Cotton’s sister also sustained two long scratches on her breast after her shirt was pulled down during the arrest, James said. Police also sprayed pepper-spray in her mouth and throat, zapped her with a Taser in […]

LOS ANGELES TIMES: n 1965, Jenkins was a U.S. Army sergeant assigned to the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula, a skinny 24-year-old who was terrified of being sent to what he considered a sure death in Vietnam. One night, after guzzling 10 beers for courage, he abandoned his sense of duty and freedom as he knew it to stumble across the border into North Korea, a desperate midnight maneuver that led to four lost decades in communist captivity. Jenkins quickly became the Pyongyang government’s most prized Cold War pawn. He starred in propaganda movies and memorized the inflated […]

[via RECOMBINANT RECORDS] WIKIPEDIA: The book originated with Postman’s delivering a talk to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell’s 1984 and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book Postman said that reality was reflected more by Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World where the public was oppressed by pleasure than Orwell’s 1984 where they were oppressed by pain. Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from the vision offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss and […]

BY DAVE ALLEN Cucu Diamantes — the Cuban glamazon singer/composer who performs Thursday night at the Kimmel Center —  spoke with me from New York, but she was really reporting live from Cuculand. As one who aggressively stirs the melting pot in her work as a singer-songwriter, Diamantes speaks about “Cuculand” not just as her first solo record, but as her homeland, the place from which she operates. It doesn’t seem to have any borders, which makes sense — she’s of Chinese, French, Spanish and African heritage, though Cuban by birth. Diamantes first struck out for this borderless territory with […]

ALTER NET:  Thanks to the Pentagon and a Maryland Robotics Company, the robots who inherit the Earth when humanity is wiped out will be able to survive by feasting on the flesh of human corpses! Robotic Technology Inc. has been contracted by the Pentagon to build robots that use biomass fuel; organic material such as “grass, broken wood, furniture, dead bodies”, according to Popular Science. MORE RELATED: The purpose of the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR)™ project is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling, […]

JOE JACKSON: “I never beat him,” Joe is quoted as saying. “I whipped him with a stick and a belt. I never beat him. You beat someone with a stick.” MORE JOE JACKSON:  “I thought [Michael] was a great father.” MORE JOE JACKSON:“The kids want to be with [Katherine and I] over here,” Jackson told Connelly about Prince Michael, Paris and Prince Michael II (Blanket). “Yes, there’s no else who can do what we can do for them.” MORE JOE JACKSON:  “I don’t know — I keep watching Paris,” he said, referring to Jackson’s middle child, who spoke memorably at […]

Sarah Stolfa: The Regulars Revisited Tuesday, July 14, 2009 6:00pm – 8:00pm Gallery 339 339 South 21st St. Philadelphia , PA 19103 215-731-1530 INQUIRER: Place the book in front of McGlinchey’s comically nonchalant owner, Ron Sokol, and bartender Alia Burton, and the missing details are quickly filled in, in eccentrically McGlinchey’s style un-de-referencing: “Look at Artie, ha-ha.” “Trevor, he died.” “Sheldon, that’s my brother.” “Mike’s a trombone player. Meghan, she goes to Temple.” “This one was murdered two months ago.” “This guy was here when Anne Marie worked, he was in love with the Irish girls.” “This guy is a […]

THE ARTIST: This is Chuck Brown.  He is real and I guess, a monster. For a show at Copro Gallery in Santa Monica, I was invited by Travis Louie to offer a piece for a show titled, ‘MONSTERS?’ I looked at the list of invites and then imagined all of the usual takes on what a monster is thought to be.  Perhaps some will be cute, some ugly.  I went in another direction.  What if I were to paint a realistic version of something usually thought of as cute and benign?  For no particular reason and maybe several, I chose […]