Posts Tagged ‘ voice ’

More Than Half of U.S. Rivers in Trouble – Truthdig

March 27, 2013

More Than Half of U.S. Rivers in Trouble – Truthdig : More than half of the country’s rivers and streams are unable to support healthy populations of aquatic insects and other creatures, a survey of nearly 2,000 locations by the Environmental Protection Agency reported Tuesday.

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Flamenco Is ‘A Bird With Very Long Legs’ (Video) – Truthdig

March 27, 2013

Flamenco Is ‘A Bird With Very Long Legs’ (Video) – Truthdig : Aging Spanish flamenco artist Manuel Molina gives sensitive, forceful expression to the common things of life: singing with the voice one has, learning trust and mistrust, being hungry, and enjoying the company of friends.

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Gabby Giffords Quits Congress

January 22, 2012
Gabby Giffords Quits Congress

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is quitting Congress.

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Occupy SF, LA To Move Indoors?

November 25, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — Los Angeles and San Francisco are seeking long-term solutions to the entrenched encampments by anti-Wall Street protesters, hoping to end the drain on resources and the frayed nerves among police and politicians. Officials in both cities have considered providing protesters with indoor space that would allow the movement to carry out its work in more sanitary, less public facilities. Occupiers are debating among themselves about whether to hold their ground or try to take advantage of possible moves. Talks in both cities mark a distinctly different approach than tactics used elsewhere that have seen police sent in to dislodge Occupy camps. Violence and arrests plagued camps in Oakland and New York, while the use of batons and pepper spray against peaceful protesters on University of California campuses has led to national outrage and derision. San Francisco is negotiating with Occupy SF members about moving their encampment from the heart of the financial district to an empty school in the city’s hip Mission district. That would allow the occupiers to have access to toilets and a room for their daily meetings, while camping out in the parking lot of what was once a small high school. The move also could help them weed out drug addicts and drunks, and those not wholly committed to their cause. Protesters in Los Angeles said officials rescinded a similar deal, in which the city would have leased a 10,000-square-foot space that once housed a bookstore in Los Angeles Mall to the protesters for $1 a year. But after the proposal was made public at an Occupy LA general assembly, it generated outrage from some who saw it as a giveaway of public resources by a city struggling with financial problems, and the offer was withdrawn. Deputy Mayor Matt Szabo told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the encampment around City Hall would be shut down at some point next week. “The encampment as it exists is unsustainable,” Szabo said. Whether the city continues to negotiate with Occupy LA for a new location remains to be seen. Occupy LA camper Alifah Ali said she would pack up her tent at City Hall when the order to leave came down in Los Angeles and welcome the possibility of new digs. “Maybe we need to move,” Ali said. “Maybe this will give us room to organize, make our voice clear.” Los Angeles officials initially endorsed the movement and allowed tents to sprout on City Halls lawns. More than 480 tents have since been erected. But problems arose with sanitation, drug use and homeless people moving into the camp. In San Francisco, several hundred protesters have been hunkered down for some six weeks in about 100 tents at Justin Herman Plaza, at the eastern end of Market Street and across from the tourist-catching Ferry Building on the bay. The city has declared the plaza a public health nuisance, though city officials also credit the campers for their efforts to rid the camp of garbage and keep the grassy area clean. Mayor Ed Lee has met with the occupiers at several heated closed-door meetings at City Hall. He’s repeatedly told them he supports their cause and the right to protest the nation’s confounding inequality between the rich and the poor. But they cannot, he has said, continue to camp out overnight in a public plaza. “The mayor is being patient,” said Christine Falvey, a spokeswoman for Lee. “He wants to see some sort of long-term, sustainable plan because the city cannot sustain overnight camping for any long period of time.” Ken Cleaveland of the Building Owners and Managers Association of San Francisco, which represents the hotels and businesses that have been impacted by the noise, loss of tourism and concerns of violence, said some hotels had to reimburse guests who could not sleep, and small businesses in the tourist hub have lost thousands of dollars. “It’s time to move the camp,” he said. “Nobody’s disagreeing with their right to protest or the inequities in society that they are protesting, but it’s not a place to camp out permanently.” A survey by The Associated Press found that during the first two months of the nationwide Occupy protests, the movement that is demanding more out of the wealthiest Americans cost taxpayers at least $13 million in police overtime and other municipal services. Gentle Blythe, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco public school district, said city officials had approached the district about allowing Occupy SF to relocate to the Mission site that formerly housed Phoenix High School. The School Board is considering a facility permit that would allow the city to lease the property for six months. Occupy SF members say they’re mulling over the proposal. “We’re waiting for whatever caveats the city is going to come back at us with,” said Jerry Selness, a retired Navy medic from Eugene, Ore., who has volunteered for a more than a month at the Occupy SF medical tent. “I do feel that we’re at a crux point here: we are either going to give this movement enough time to be able to make our next move, which will be to not only to move this camp, but move to a new phase in the way that we occupy,” he said. There is debate among the occupiers in San Francisco as to whether it’s better to stay put, move to another long-term location or make quick hit-and-run occupies at symbolic sites such as bank lobbies and foreclosures auctions. “For instance, there’s a neighborhood in San Francisco right now where they’re foreclosing on 11 houses in one street,” Selness said. “What a perfect place for us to occupy.” — Hoag reported from Los Angeles Read more from the original source: Occupy SF, LA To Move Indoors?

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Christina Patterson: It Wasn’t Just One Man Who Killed the King of Pop

November 10, 2011

When the verdict was announced, his sister shrieked. She sent a tweet to her 125,000 followers saying “VICTORY,” and ended it with seven exclamation marks. His fans waved their banners praising Jesus, and screamed, and wept, and blew horns. People said, while crying in front of cameras, that there had, at long last, been what their banners had demanded: “Justice for Michael!” His mother agreed. “I feel,” she told reporters, “better now.” Everyone seemed to. Everyone — apart, perhaps, from Conrad Murray, and his defense lawyers, and maybe some of the women who claimed to be his girlfriend, and maybe some of the mothers of some of his children — seemed to feel an awful lot better now. They seemed to think that although nothing could bring back the man they claimed to love so much, this was a very, very happy day. They seemed to feel like Michael Jackson’s mother, who couldn’t wait “to go home and share this day” with his children, and “couldn’t hold back tears of joy.” Everyone seemed to think that what had been a tragedy wasn’t any more. Because a man who was paid nearly £100,000 a month to give him the kind of drugs you can’t just pick up at Boots, had given him an awful lot of the kind of drugs you can’t pick up at Boots, and been so careless about it that he’d been chatting on the phone to a cocktail waitress while the man he was meant to be looking after was having a bad reaction to a drug you definitely can’t pick up at Boots, had been found guilty of killing him by accident. Or it wasn’t as much of a tragedy as it had been, because the person who caused it had been found and would be punished. Perhaps when these people heard that the most successful pop star in world history, who was not only a brilliant singer and songwriter, but also did some of the most athletic and original dancing ever done by a rock star, and who cared so much about his appearance that he made improving it into a life’s quest, was crippled with arthritis, and nearly blind, and had a toenail fungus so bad that doctors thought his flesh was rotting away, they thought this was a normal thing for a 50-year-old man. Maybe when they heard a recording of his voice, which was so weak and slurred that you could hardly make out the words, but which had sounded pretty good on the albums that almost everyone in the Western world had bought, they thought this was normal, too. And maybe not a single one of these people wondered what on earth had happened to his family, and the people he called his friends. Perhaps they thought it was normal to watch your brother, or son, or friend, have so many operations on his face that some people said some of the bones in it were in danger of collapsing, and that what you should say, when he came out of hospital from the latest one, was that he definitely looked better than before. Maybe they thought, when they heard he was paying someone nearly £100,000 a month, to give him drugs almost every doctor in the world would say he didn’t need, that this sounded like excellent value. And maybe when they heard another recording of the pop star in court, telling that doctor that he wanted to use the proceeds of the tour he was planning to help sick children, because he himself “didn’t have a childhood,” they just shrugged and thought “so what?” Maybe they thought that it didn’t really matter whether you had a childhood. That a childhood was a small thing to give up to produce the kind of music that the King of Pop produced, and a small price to pay for the fame he had. It isn’t all that easy to know what Michael Jackson’s family, friends and fans thought about any of these things, because, when they talk about him, they tend to talk as if he wasn’t a human being, but a god. His sister, La Toya, said on Monday that “victory was served” because her brother was, though technically dead, “in that courtroom.” She didn’t say what, if anything, she’d done when she’d watched her brother being flogged by their father for making mistakes in rehearsals throughout his childhood, and from the start of his singing career at the age of six. Nor did his mother. And nor, of course, did his father, who used, according to his son, to watch his sons rehearsing with a belt in his hand, and often told him that his nose was “too fat.” You’d have thought that sisters, and brothers, and parents, and friends, might think it wasn’t usually a good sign when someone built themselves a giant fun fair, and zoo, and named it after a fantasy land in a children’s book about a boy who never grows up. And that they might be a little bit worried when their best friends seemed to be prepubescent boys and a chimpanzee called Bubbles. But sisters, and brothers, and parents, and friends, didn’t seem too worried by any of this, or, if they were, they didn’t say so. They seemed to think that nothing could be strange in the life, and lifestyle, of someone who was very, very talented, and very, very successful, and very, very, very rich. They seemed to think that someone who was very talented, and very successful, and very rich should always do exactly what they wanted, even if what they wanted was to wreck their once-handsome face and body with plastic surgery and drugs. Michael Jackson called the drug that killed him “milk.” He never stopped seeking the props of the childhood he had lost. Perhaps when he looked at photos of that brown-skinned boy, with his big nose, big lips, and big smile, he saw a shadow of the person he once was, the person he’d paid doctors to wipe out. Perhaps he remembered a time before his life became a giant freak show. “Wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy,” Al Sharpton told Jackson’s children at his funeral. That, of course, was a lie, but what he said next was true. “It was strange,” he said, “what your daddy had to deal with. But he dealt with it anyway.” Yes, he dealt with it anyway: the parents who cared more about money and fame than that their son had a childhood, the brothers and sisters who were nearly as damaged as him, the people who said they were friends, but who only seemed to want to be sprinkled with his star dust, and the people — so many people — who just wanted his money. And a press poised for every new twist in the crazy carnival his life became. It was Conrad Murray’s defense lawyer who reminded jurors that “this is not a reality show, it’s reality.” Unfortunately, no one in Jackson’s sad, strange and shockingly friendless life, seemed to know the difference. Originally posted here: Christina Patterson: It Wasn’t Just One Man Who Killed the King of Pop

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