If you are a student looking to add tens of thousands of dollars of long term debt, care little about the environment, and want pay through the nose for insurance, gas, and parking…GM has got a perfect deal for you. Bonus: it’ll make you fat and unhealthy! All you have to do is give up that dorky bicycle that’s easy to use, practically free, gets you some exercise and is actually fun to ride.
In case you were wondering, GM has a fine-sounding corporate responsibility statement: “As a responsible corporate citizen, General Motors is dedicated to protecting human health, natural resources and the global environment.”
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A shiv is a weapon crafted from the limited resources of a prisoner’s closed world. Crudely constructed from such things as spoons, shoelaces and upholstery tacks, shivs lie somewhere between the graceful and the grotesque. They’re primitive, too — like outsider art, but produced deep on the inside.
The individual parts that make up a shiv tend to be everyday objects, innocent things furtively reconstituted as lethal weapons. Each design choice is essential, but what’s particularly notable is that shivs, at their core, are not so much evocations of minimalism as they are symbols of survivalism. A shiv is all about masked utility: it’s an innocuous object with improbably toxic intent (whether used to attack others or to protect oneself…)
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The hefty last meal ordered but not eaten by an executed Texas inmate brought a complaint from a state senator and the end Thursday to the practice of special menus.
Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, wrote Thursday that he opposed the practice of providing a last meal of choice to the condemned.
“It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege. One which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim,” Whitmire wrote.
The Democrat, who represents Houston and parts of north Harris County, said “enough is enough” after Lawrence Russell Brewer ordered two chicken fried steaks smothered in gravy with sliced onions, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelet with other ingredients, a large bowl of fried okra with ketchup, three fajitas, a pint of Blue Bell ice cream and a pound of barbecue with a half-loaf of white bread.
The meal request also included a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts, a pizza and three root beers.
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Bonk on the head from behind, and then one good shove over the railing. Adios, chum!
When a person disappears from a cruise ship does their home country investigate? Nope! Police from the country where the ship is registered do the investigation, if one is even performed. Do you think that cop from the Bahamas is going to fly around the world interviewing passengers and collecting evidence? Yeah, me neither.
Potential murderers:
1. The most likely killer is always the spouse. Guess who will also have the easiest time luring you onto the floating abattoir?
2. Serial killers. I bet it isn’t hard to cruise using a fake identity, not that investigators are ever likely to question you anyway.
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The “Simpsons” voice actors have commissioned a study estimating the show has made $1 billion in profits as ammunition in their negotiations with 20th Century Fox TV over its demand that they agree to have their salaries cut nearly in half. The study projected that the studio will eventually make about $2.8 billion from the show through 23 seasons.
The six actors have been asked to decide by noon Friday whether they will accept a demand from Fox that they cut their payment per episode from $440,000 to $250,000 per episode, according to people familiar with the talks. The actors offered last week to accept cuts to $300,000 per episode, in exchange for back-end payments they don’t currently receive, but the studio rejected the offer.
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Human rights lawyers often refer to it as “the other Guantanamo,” “Guantanamo’s evil twin” or “Obama’s Gitmo” — an attempt to raise the profile of the U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan that few know about.
It’s official name is the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. And even though it was recently rebuilt and renamed the Detention Facility in Parwan, after the province, most continue to refer to it simply as Bagram.
Run by American troops, the prison is located on the Bagram Air Base, about 80 kilometres north of Kabul, in a cavernous aircraft hangar built in the 1980s following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
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