“According to a tally by El Universal, the country’s top-selling newspaper, 12 reporters, photographers, editors and radio hosts have been slain this year — two more than in the previous worst year of 2006. The deaths — all of Mexicans working for local media — make the country the most dangerous for the trade in the Western hemisphere.
There have also been dozens of cases of journalists being threatened, beaten and having offices attacked with gunfire and grenades.”
“In an apparently cold-blooded attempt at smuggling, a Lomita man was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport this week with more than a dozen wriggling lizards strapped to his chest.
Michael Plank, 40, was detained by U.S. Customs agents after they discovered 15 live lizards stuffed into his money belt, officials with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said Friday.”
Although he comes down a bit too hard on the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl, David Sirota’s piece on America turning into an “idiocracy” deserves consideration. Here’s a bit of it-
“The trend is deeply disturbing. It’s one thing for talk-show-host wannabe Sarah Palin or carnival-barking provocateur Glenn Beck to glamorize willful ignorance—that’s been the narcissistic act of celebrity court jesters since the dawn of history. But it’s an entirely different thing when hostility to intelligence and to the basic process of thinking itself emanates from the very professional thinkers who lead the nation’s intelligentsia.”
The New York Times reports that one of the last great broadcast journalists standing, Bill Moyers, is leaving weekly tv.
According to the paper Moyers will “…end his Friday night public affairs show, “Bill Moyers Journal,” on April 30, 2010. That date will also be the last for “Now on PBS,” which has been canceled.
“I am 75 years old,” he said of the decision to end the series, which began in April 2007. The program has recently been having a “good run of it,” he added in a telephone interview on Friday, “so I feel it’s time.” He said he was not quitting television work, although he has no new projects planned.”
Here’s Moyers on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” posing an argument for single-payer health care.
Sarah Palin got on her bus and left without signing the books of a number of her admirers in Nobelsville, Indiana. Her fans, who had been standing in line for hours to see the woman they so admire, were not amused. Here’s the video-
