paul curreri and adrian orange
I have a couple new reviews out, posted at Seattle.net and The Feminist Review:
Adrian Orange and Her Band: Self-titled
Paul Curreri will be playing at Phinney Ridge Community Center this Saturday with Devon Sproule, promoting the album I reviewed. The man is a gifted musician and storyteller. And together with Devon Sproule? You’d be crazy to miss it.
Filed under As a Writer..., Medium of Sound | Comment (0)two bush appointees
1. EPA APPROVES PESTICIDE KNOWN TO CAUSE CANCER & MISCARRIAGES
On October 5, the EPA approved a new chemical fumigant for use on strawberries and other food crops across the U.S. The pesticide, methyl iodide, vaporizes quickly, causing it to drift far distances. Although the state of California has categorized it as cancer causing, and the EPA admits it causes thyroid tumors, the Bush Administration has been advocating approval of the fumigant for the better part of two years. In a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson on September 25, the nation’s leading chemists asked EPA not to approve methyl iodide without further scientific review. The chemical has been used to induce cancer in laboratory experiments and causes neurological and thyroid problems, as well as miscarriages in studies with laboratory animals. Farmworkers, families, rural workers, and the food supply will now be subjected to exposure to the carcinogen unless the EPA revokes the approval immediately.
Click here to learn more.
WHO ADVISED THE APPROVAL OF NEW CARCINOGENIC PESTICIDE?
James L. Connaughton was appointed by George W. Bush as the Senior Environmental Advisor and Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Before being appointed to this position, Connaughton was one of Capitol Hill’s most successful lobbyists for the mining, chemical, industrial and asbestos industries.
2. USDA APPROVES CHIP IMPLANTS THAT CAUSE CANCER TUMORS
Over the past couple of years, the OCA has reported on the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a set of controversial, mandatory regulations the U.S. federal government claims to have abandoned to the states, but in fact is still pushing, specifically, in the 2007 Farm Bill. NAIS would require that all farmers and farm animal owners implant their animals with a computer chip, even those who just own a single cow, horse, chicken or other farm animal. Last week, the USDA approved the use of two new types of chips for the NAIS program. These same chips have already been planted in millions of pets and marketed to pet owners as an ID device to help find lost pets. Increasingly, these same chips are being marketed and implanted into humans. Evidence has now surfaced that a significant number of studies done in the 1990s revealed that lab animals implanted with the devices developed tumors. When the FDA approved the use of the chips for human implanting, these reports were never made public. In an interview with a retired toxicologic pathologist who studied the chips for Dow Chemical, “The transponders were the cause of the tumors.”
Click here to learn more.
WHO APPROVED TUMOR-CAUSING CHIPS?
The FDA is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, which, at the time of the original RFID chip’s approval, was headed by White House appointee Tommy Thompson. Two weeks after the device’s approval took effect on Jan. 10, 2005, Thompson left his Cabinet post, and within five months was a board member of VeriChip Corporation, the company who designed the RFID chip. He was compensated by VeriChip with cash and stock options. In his public appearances, he continues to claim the chips are completely safe and urges all citizens get the implants for the sake of the health and safety of their families. To date, neither Thompson nor any member of his family has had the chip implanted.
Filed under Feminism & Politics | Comment (0)this still happens
Justice? The rock star who got four years for killing his partner
by Kira Cochrane
Thursday October 18, 2007
The Guardian
Singer Bertrand Cantat hit his partner an estimated 19 times in one attack, causing irreversible brain damage that led, a few days later, to her death. You might think that would make him unpopular with his peers. Not so: since killing Marie Trintignant in 2003 — apparently provoked by an affectionate text message she’d received from her ex-husband — sales of Cantat’s albums have gone through the roof. Sentenced to eight years in prison, he has been released after serving just four.
We probably shouldn’t be surprised by this short sentence — after all, not so long ago, France’s crime passionnel defence could have seen him exonerated completely. Surely such a low tariff for killing your partner couldn’t be handed down in Britain? Well, yes actually, it could. In 2004, Paul Dalton killed his wife, Tae Hui Kang, invested in an electric saw, chopped her cadaver into nine pieces, and stored them in his fridge. Dalton argued in court that his wife had taunted him with the suggestion of an affair. He was given just two years in prison for manslaughter and an extra three for “preventing a burial”.
These tariffs — and, indeed, the increased popularity of Cantat’s music — seem to suggest a deep-rooted sympathy for the idea that a man might kill his partner owing to jealousy, or taunting: what women’s campaigners sometimes call the “nagging and shagging” defence. Would the judicial system be so lenient to a woman who argued the same though?
It’s difficult to tell conclusively, because no statistics are available and the reasons that women generally give in the much rarer cases where they kill their partners tend to centre around their experiences of long-term domestic abuse. And while you might expect this defence to be given more weight than the “she was making eyes at another man” defence, evidence suggests not.
As Sandra McNeill of the campaigning group Justice for Women says, “I’ve heard men claim in court: ‘She was unfaithful, she nagged, she wound me up,’ and the truth of this testimony is never even questioned. Whereas women who say: ‘I was afraid of him’ are asked: ‘Where’s your proof? Had you gone to the police? Why didn’t you just leave him?” I’ve never heard a man asked in court: ‘Why didn’t you just leave if you were jealous?’ There’s an acceptance that a man might kill out of jealousy, because women are still seen as possessions”.
So, what does McNeill think the tariff would be if a woman killed her partner out of jealousy? She laughs. “I think they’d put her in Rampton and throw away the key.”
Filed under Feminism & Politics | Comment (0)postsecret
Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Frank Warren, the creator of the blog Postsecret. The article I wrote from the interview has been published at Seattle.net.
I urge you to check out the Postsecret blog, and if you’re in the Seattle area, catch Frank Warren read at Elliott Bay Books on October 18th. The whole project, and the man behind it, are both quite intriguing.
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