After Comedy Central cut a portion of a South Park episode following a death threat from a radical Muslim group, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris wanted to counter the fear. She has declared May 20th ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.’ Norris told KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross that cartoonists are meant to challenge the lines of political correctness. ‘That’s a cartoonist’s job, to be non-PC.’ Producers of South Park said Thursday that Comedy Central removed a speech about intimidation and fear from their show after a radical Muslim group warned that they could be killed for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. The group said it wasn’t threatening South Park producers Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but it included a gruesome picture of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker killed by a Muslim extremist in 2004, and said the producers could meet the same fate. The website posted the addresses of Comedy Central’s New York office and the California production studio where South Park is made. ‘As a cartoonist I just felt so much passion about what had happened I wanted to kind of counter Comedy Central’s message they sent about feeling afraid,’ Norris said. Norris has asked other artists […]
WASHINGTON — In one of the proudest moments of his long legislative career, Senator John F. Kerry was poised to unveil a long-awaited climate change bill tomorrow that would put a price on carbon emissions and provide billions of dollars in incentives to industry to drastically cut greenhouse gases. Kerry had brought business on board, and even forged something rare in Washington, a bipartisan compromise with a key Republican leader. Then his effort ran headlong into the Senate’s partisan snarl, and last night the release of the bill was postponed indefinitely. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who had allied himself with Kerry on the issue, abruptly abandoned the effort last night, saying he was irate that the Senate’s Democratic leadership might proceed with a controversial immigration bill first. ‘Moving forward on immigration – in this hurried, panicked manner – is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,” Graham said. ‘I know from my own personal experience the tremendous amounts of time, energy, and effort that must be devoted to this issue to make even limited progress.” The sudden switch of priorities began late last week when Senate majority leader Harry Reid suggested to […]
COLORADO SPRINGS — A year ago, Specialist Michael Crawford wanted nothing more than to get into Fort Carson’s Warrior Transition Battalion, a special unit created to provide closely managed care for soldiers with physical wounds and severe psychological trauma. A strapping Army sniper who once brimmed with confidence, he had returned emotionally broken from Iraq, where he suffered two concussions from roadside bombs and watched several platoon mates burn to death. The transition unit at Fort Carson, outside Colorado Springs, seemed the surest way to keep suicidal thoughts at bay, his mother thought. It did not work. He was prescribed a laundry list of medications for anxiety, nightmares, depression and headaches that made him feel listless and disoriented. His once-a-week session with a nurse case manager seemed grossly inadequate to him. And noncommissioned officers - soldiers supervising the unit - harangued or disciplined him when he arrived late to formation or violated rules. Last August, Specialist Crawford attempted suicide with a bottle of whiskey and an overdose of painkillers. By the end of last year, he was begging to get out of the unit. ‘It is just a dark place, said the soldier, who is waiting […]
NEW ORLEANS — The Coast Guard discovered Saturday that oil is leaking from the damaged well that fed a massive rig that exploded this week off Louisiana’s coast, while bad weather halted efforts to clean up the mess that threatens the area’s fragile marine ecosystem. As recently as Friday, the Coast Guard said no oil appeared to escaping from the well head on the ocean floor. Rear Adm. Mary Landry said the leak was a new discovery but could have begun when the rig sank on Thursday, two days after the initial explosion. ‘This is a very serious spill, absolutely,’ Landry said. Coast Guard and company officials estimate that as much as 1,000 barrels of oil is escaping each day after studying information from remotely operated vehicles and the size of the oil slick surrounding the blast site. The rainbow-colored sheen of oil stretched 20 miles by 20 miles on Saturday – about 25 times larger than it appeared to be a day earlier, Landry said. Eleven workers are still missing from the Deepwater Horizon rig that sank Thursday about 50 miles from Louisiana’s coast. They are presumed dead, and the search for them was called […]
NEW YORK — The big white pill was brought to her in an earthenware chalice. She’d already held hands with her two therapists and expressed her wishes for what it would help her do. She swallowed it, lay on the couch with her eyes covered, and waited. And then it came. ‘The world was made up of jewels and I was in a dome,’ she recalled. Surrounded by brilliant, kaleidoscopic colors, she saw the dome open up to admit ‘this most incredible luminescence that made everything even more beautiful.’ Tears trickled down her face as she saw ‘how beautiful the world could actually be.’ That’s how Nicky Edlich, 67, began her first-ever trip on a psychedelic drug last year. She says it has greatly helped her psychotherapeutic treatment for anxiety from her advanced ovarian cancer. And for researchers, it was another small step toward showing that hallucinogenic drugs, famous but condemned in the 1960s, can one day help doctors treat conditions like cancer anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. The New York University study Edlich participated in is among a handful now going on in the United States and elsewhere with drugs like LSD, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
