Amy worked in the record business at Enigma, Elektra, Virgin and Sub Pop before she got sucked into the technology vortex. She co-founded the Backwards Beekeepers, a chemical-free urban beekeeping collective in Los Angeles. She runs digital marketing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and The Hollywood Bowl.
I happened upon this mini-library in my neighborhood and am so impressed with the movement that Little Free Library has started that I am getting one together for our street. The concept is simple: put a charming box full of books in a public place, encourage people to share them and to contribute their own.
Carlos De Luna Execution: Texas Put To Death An Innocent Man, Columbia University Team Says
Posted: 05/15/2012 12:00 am Updated: 05/15/2012 11:15 pm
Carlos De Luna (left) and Carlos Hernandez
One of the strongest arguments against the death penalty is the frightening chance of executing an innocent person. Columbia University law professor James Liebman said he and a team of students have proven that Texas gave a lethal injection to the wrong man.
Carlos De Luna was executed in 1989 for stabbing to death a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi six years earlier. It was a ghastly crime. The trial attracted local attention, but not from concern that a guiltless man would be punished while the killer went free.
De Luna, an eighth grade dropout, maintained that he was innocent from the moment cops put him in the back seat of a patrol car until the day he died. Today, 29 years after De Luna was arrested, Liebman and his team published a mammoth report in the Human Rights Law Review that concludes De Luna paid with his life for a crime he likely did not commit. Shoddy police work, the prosecution's failure to pursue another suspect, and a weak defense combined to send De Luna to death row, they argued.
"I would say that across the board, there was nonchalance," Liebman told The Huffington Post. "It looked like a common case, but we found that there was a very serious claim of innocence."
Police and prosecutors treated the killing of Wanda Lopez at the Sigmor Shamrock gas station on February 4, 1983, like a robbery gone bad. A recording of the chilling 911 call from Lopez, a 24-year-old single mom working the night shift, captured her screaming and begging her killer for mercy.
De Luna, then 20, was found hiding under a pickup truck a few blocks from the gory crime scene. A wad of rolled-up bills totaling $149 was in his pocket.
Eyewitness testimony formed the bedrock of the case against him. Now, that testimony is perhaps most contested aspect of his conviction.
Cops brought De Luna back to the Shamrock. A customer filling his tank before the murder told police that De Luna was the man he saw putting a knife in his pocket outside the store. Another customer who rushed to the store's entrance when he heard Lopez struggling identified De Luna as the man who emerged. A married couple saw a man running a few blocks away and later identified De Luna in police photos shown to them.
With De Luna's record of numerous arrests for burglary and public drunkenness, plus a conviction for attempted rape and auto theft, it seemed like police had found the perp. But Liebman said De Luna took the fall in a case of mistaken identity.
Among the key findings in the Columbia team's report:
The eyewitness statements actually conflict with each other. What witnesses said about the appearance and location of the suspect suggest that they were describing more than one person.
Photos of a bloody footprint and blood spatter on the walls suggest the killer would have had blood on his shoes and pant legs, yet De Luna's clothes were clean.
Prosecutors and police ignored tips unearthed in the case files that Carlos Hernandez, an older friend of De Luna, who had a reputation for wielding a blade, had killed Lopez. The defense failed to track down Hernandez, who bore a striking resemblance to De Luna.
"If a new trial was somehow able to be conducted today, a jury would acquit De Luna" said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, who read a draft of Liebman's report. "We don't have a perfect case where can agree that we have an innocent person who's been executed, but by weight of this investigation, I think we can say this is as close as a person is going to come." Story continues below
Carlos DeLuna
Carlos DeLuna booking mug
Carlos Hernandez
Carlos Hernandez
Wanda Vargas Lopez
Wanda Vargas Lopez.
In 1983 and during the appeals process, officials handling De Luna's case saw the opposite -- a slam-dunk conviction. The prosecution and the court-appointed defense lawyer didn't put much stock in De Luna's claim that Hernandez plunged a knife into Lopez's chest. Record-keeping was so lax there's no clear evidence the gas station was robbed during the slaying, Liebman said.
In trying to clear his name, De Luna didn't help himself. For months after his arrest, he refused to reveal the name of the real killer, because he feared Hernandez. His credibility plummeted when other parts of his alibi for the night of the murder were disproven by the prosecutor.
The fateful night began, according to De Luna, when he went to a skating rink, where he met Hernandez and two sisters. De Luna admitted that he was near the gas station later, but said he was across the street in a bar. While he nursed his drink, Hernandez bought cigarettes in the Shamrock. He said he emerged from the bar to see Hernandez fighting with Lopez. Hearing police sirens, he said he fled, because he didn't want to get into trouble.
The prosecution, however, discredited De Luna's version of events. One of the sisters who was allegedly with him at the rink testified that she was at her baby shower that night.
"I had blown his alibi to bits," said Steve Schiwetz, one of the prosecutors.
A guilty verdict was reached with little delay. The capital murder trial lasted six days in July 1983.
"I'm open to the argument that somebody named Carlos Hernandez really did it," said Schiwetz, "but everything I know confirms the original impression that De Luna did it."
The apparent random targeting of Lopez wasn't Hernandez's style, Schiwetz said. Hernandez's tendency was to unleash violence on the his girlfriends and wife, not strangers, he said. In 1986, Hernandez was accused of murdering another woman with a knife, but the case was dismissed.
Several of Hernandez' family members interviewed for the Columbia University report said pictures of the murder weapon found at the gas station looked like the knife Hernandez habitually kept with him. In all of De Luna's numerous arrests, police never found him carrying a blade, according to the Columbia report.
The relatives' portrait of Hernandez's disheveled appearance gelled with a description of the suspect seen fleeing the convenience store. Witness Kevan Baker said the killer looked like a "derelict," wearing a flannel jacket and gray sweatshirt. Hernandez's relatives said he often wore a flannel coat. De Luna was fastidious with his appearance and always wore black slacks and dress shirts, the report said.
Liebman sought more scientific proof. Fingerprints taken from the knife and cigarette pack found at the crime scene were sent to a former Scotland Yard investigator for comparison with Hernandez's prints. But the evidence had been so poorly collected by police, Liebman said, that the results were inconclusive.
The Columbia University team's report, more than 400 pages long, also is a biography of the central players, emphasizing the troubled upbringings and hard-drinking adulthoods of De Luna and Hernandez.
Liebman learned about De Luna roughly 10 years ago, when he began examining convictions in which a single eyewitness testified. As he and a student delved into the files, they became convinced De Luna wasn't guilty.
They turned over their findings to the Chicago Tribune which published a three-part series in 2006 that found evidence suggesting Hernandez killed Lopez. Multiple people told the Tribune that Hernandez -- who died in 1999 in prison from cirrhosis of the liver -- had confessed to killing her.
Revisiting questions about Lopez's death would be too painful, her nephews said.
"That's something our family has had to deal with," Louis Vargas told The Huffington Post. "We've had closure with it and we don't want to reopen it. We believe the justice system did what it had to do."
One of De Luna's attorneys, James Lawrence, told HuffPost he doesn't count him among the clients who've been wrongfully accused of capital crimes.
"The fact that he wouldn't help us and this was his life on the line -- that's the one thing that kept bothering the living daylights out of me," Lawrence said.
Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, there have been 1,295 executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Texas leads with 482 executions.
The ease with which De Luna was prosecuted and the obscurity of his death are what makes his case so important, said Liebman.
"There are many cases out there that nobody has ever looked at and are probably at risk of innocence," said Liebman. "It's a cautionary tale about the risks we take when we have the death penalty."
Want four minutes of the new Spider-Man? You’re in luck! It’s officially summer blockbuster season, and movie teasers are shooting onto the internet faster than webs from Spidey’s wrists, including this new spot for The Amazing Spider-Man
Artist Carrin Welch's first foray into sculpture is a marvellous set of "Four Rocking Horses of the Apocalypse," made from wood. They're nearly finished, and eminently ridable.
My interpretation of these horsemen from Revelations in the Bible is very loose, it's an artistic idea based mostly on how I want them to look, and less on the many academic and theological interpretations. I want them to appear ominous and imposing, but the catch is that they are giant toys. They are meant to be fantastic and absurd, but also beautiful and magical. You cannot ride one of the mammoths without feeling a little joy. With this world feeling so unstable, and all the theories of its end, the rocking horses bring light to a dark time.
All four horses are expected to be completed by end of May 2012, when they will travel to Burning Flipside for their collective debut. After that I will be collaborating with fellow artists to produce some fun, fantasy images of the rocking horses, and seeking opportunities to show them and let people interact with them.
Welch completed the horses during a period of unemployment, thanks to funding provided by her fans on Kickstarter
Artist Carrin Welch's first foray into sculpture is a marvellous set of "Four Rocking Horses of the Apocalypse," made from wood. They're nearly finished, and eminently ridable.
My interpretation of these horsemen from Revelations in the Bible is very loose, it's an artistic idea based mostly on how I want them to look, and less on the many academic and theological interpretations. I want them to appear ominous and imposing, but the catch is that they are giant toys. They are meant to be fantastic and absurd, but also beautiful and magical. You cannot ride one of the mammoths without feeling a little joy. With this world feeling so unstable, and all the theories of its end, the rocking horses bring light to a dark time.
All four horses are expected to be completed by end of May 2012, when they will travel to Burning Flipside for their collective debut. After that I will be collaborating with fellow artists to produce some fun, fantasy images of the rocking horses, and seeking opportunities to show them and let people interact with them.
Welch completed the horses during a period of unemployment, thanks to funding provided by her fans on Kickstarter
The Chork is a utensil set that cleverly combines chopsticks with a fork. The Chork can be used in three ways: as a standard fork, as a trainer set of chopsticks, or as chopsticks. They are made of food grade hi impact polystyrene and come in either red or black. Currently, they are available to purchase at Fab.
Tron: Legacy might have failed to live up to its technopathic promise, but the same may not be true about forthcoming animated series Tron: Uprising, booting up June 7 on Disney XD
Saipancakes, who normally makes astounding pancakes like the ones above, had a rather spectacular pancakefail (right), prompting him to inaugurate an ugly pancake contest: "Rules: 1. It must be mostly pancake batter, and cooked like a pancake; 2. You (or someone) must eat it. You have until Saturday, May 19, to send me a photo of your creation. Winner will be chosen by my 4-year-old son. Honorable mentions will also be included on the site. Send your photo(s), title, and explanation to
REUTERS: Romney speaks at a campaign event in Wilmington, DE.
In the Washington Post, testimonials by prep school classmates of U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney paint the former Governor of Massachusetts as a homophobic bully. So, basically— he hasn't changed much. Snip:
John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenage son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
With help from other bullies, the story goes, Romney then tackled Lauber, pinned him to the ground, and while the young man was weeping, cut off his hair with scissors.
Put all the water on this planet into a single sphere and it would have a diameter of about 860 miles, says the United States Geological Survey. For reference, that's roughly the distance between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Topeka, Kansas.
When Dekalb County, Ga., police officer Jerad Wheeler tased her brother, Raven Dozie started crying and demanding to know why. Wheeler kicked the heavily-pregnant woman in the stomach. While he is now under criminal investigation, his superiors on the force squelched an internal affairs complaint and explicitly approve of his conduct.
"What kind of a human being kicks a pregnant woman? I mean, forget whether or not it is a police officer that is supposedly protecting people," Dozier's attorney Mark Bullman said. Dozier filed a complaint with the DeKalb police department's internal affairs unit, but it was never investigated. Instead, four supervisors and an internal affairs detective signed off that Wheeler's use of force met policy. ... Fleischer filed an open records request and found two more use-of-force complaints against Wheeler within the last nine months. In all three cases, the victims were not the focus of the original police incident
She plans to use the Gates Foundation's billions to revolutionize contraception worldwide. The Catholic right is pushing back. Is she ready for the political firestorm ahead?
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In the 12 years since Melinda Gates and her husband, Bill, created the Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization, she has done a lot of traveling. A reserved woman who has long been wary of the public glare attached to the Gates name, she comes alive, her associates say, when she’s visiting the foundation’s projects in remote corners of the world. “You get her out in the field with a group of women, sitting on a mat or under a tree or in a hut, she is totally in her element, totally comfortable,” says Gary Darmstadt, director of family health at the foundation’s global health program.
Visiting vaccine programs in sub-Saharan Africa, Gates would often ask women at remote clinics what else they needed. Very often, she says, they would speak urgently about birth control. “Women sitting on a bench, 20 of them, immediately they’ll start speaking out and saying, ‘I wish I had that injection I used to get,’” says Gates. “‘I came to this clinic three months ago, and I got my injection. I came last week, and I couldn’t get it, and I’m here again.’”
They were talking about Depo-Provera, which is popular in many poor countries because women need to take it only four times a year, and because they can hide it, if necessary, from unsupportive husbands. As Gates discovered, injectable contraceptives, like many other forms of birth control, are frequently out of stock in clinics in the developing world, a result of both funding shortages and supply-chain problems.
Women would tell her that they’d left their farms and walked for hours, sometimes with children in tow, often without the knowledge of their husbands, in their fruitless search for the shot. “I was just stunned by how vociferous women were about what they wanted,” she says.
Because of those women, Gates made a decision that’s likely to change lives all over the world. As she revealed in an exclusive interview with Newsweek, she has decided to make family planning her signature issue and primary public health a priority. “My goal is to get this back on the global agenda,” she says. She is sitting in an office in the Gates Foundation’s 900,000-square-foot headquarters in downtown Seattle, a pair of airy boomerang-shaped buildings flooded with natural light. It was here at headquarters late last year that she announced her new emphasis on contraception at an all-staff meeting, to thrilled applause.
Nigel Parry for Newsweek
Now the foundation, which is worth almost $34 billion, is putting her agenda into practice. In July it’s teaming up with the British government to cosponsor a summit of world leaders in London, to start raising the $4 billion the foundation says it will cost to get 120 million more women access to contraceptives by 2020. And in a move that could be hugely significant for American women, it is pouring money into the long-neglected field of contraceptive research, seeking entirely new methods of birth control. Ultimately Gates hopes to galvanize a global movement. “When I started to realize that that needed to get done in family planning, I finally said, OK, I’m the person that’s going to do that,” she says.
Despite Gates’s passion, stepping forward wasn’t an easy decision. For one thing, the former Microsoft manager has always shunned the spotlight. The first time she agreed to a magazine profile was in 2008, 14 years after her marriage, when she spoke to Fortune about the foundation’s work. “I was reluctant to speak out on behalf of any foundation issues early on, because I had little kids, and I wanted some privacy in my family life,” she says.
Perhaps more importantly, there’s her Catholic faith, which has always informed her work. “From the very beginning, we said that as a foundation we will not support abortion, because we don’t believe in funding it,” she says. She’s long disagreed with the church’s position on contraception, and the Gates Foundation did some family-planning funding early in its history. Still, she went through a lot of soul-searching before she was ready to champion the issue publicly. “I had to wrestle with which pieces of religion do I use and believe in my life, what would I counsel my daughters to do,” she says. Defying church teachings was difficult, she adds, but also came to seem morally necessary. Otherwise, she says, “we’re not serving the other piece of the Catholic mission, which is social justice.”
Gates believes that by focusing on the lives of women and children, and by making it clear that the agenda is neither coercive population control nor abortion, the controversy over international family-planning programs can be defused. Right now, she points out, 100,000 women annually die in childbirth after unintended pregnancies. Six hundred thousand babies born to women who didn’t want to be pregnant die in the first month of life. “She is somebody who really sees this as a public-health necessity,” says Melanne Verveer, the United States ambassador at large for global women’s issues. “I think she believes, and I hope she is right, that people of different political persuasions can come together on this issue
A monthly newsletter published by the Greene County Republican Committee in Virginia is raising eyebrows for including a column in its March edition that calls for an "armed revolution" if President Barack Obama is elected to a second term in November.
Among articles denouncing a University of Virginia initiative to implement a living wage for employees of the institution, questioning if Obama is "America’s Most Biblically-Hostile U. S. President?" and an op-ed slamming the GOP establishment with generous use of capital letters, RightWingWatch picks out a column from the newsletter's editor, Ponch McPhee.
In it, McPhee urges readers to encourage other conservatives to vote in November. He goes on to warn that the consequences of not defeating Obama, a so-called "ideologue unlike anything world history has ever witnessed or recognized," would be dire.
"[W]e shall not have any coarse [sic] but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November," McPhee writes. "This Republic cannot survive for 4 more years underneath this political socialist ideologue."
A disclaimer at the bottom of the publication apparently attempts to account for this type of rhetoric, noting that the contributors do "not reflect the opinion of the Republican Party whole or in part" and are only representative of the "individual" -- in this case, the editor himself.
According to the newsletter, McPhee also hosts a public radio show that airs every Saturday morning at 5:30 a.m on Charlottesville's WTJU
The Volkswagen hover car concept depicted in this Chinese VW commercial was the result of the People’s Car Project, an online initiative by Volkswagen Group China to crowdsource new vehicle concepts and technologies
For a long time, photographic evidence was the gold standard in court. But those newfangled moving pictures—or movies—have a different relationship to the truth.
A lifetime of exposure to cinema has trained us to suspend our disbelief whenever we see film. Its 24-frame-per-second strobe lulls and prepares us to be transported, fooled, and entranced, and it’s all OK because it’s not real.
Video is different. Its wide depth of field and faster frame rate—29.9 or 30 fps—along with a steady stream of news clips and disaster shows, have trained our lizard brains to accept things on video as the unalloyed truth.
Film is the fantasy; video is the reality. Film is Avatar; video is Cops. And that would be fine, except that the combination of cheap videocams, easy-to-use editing software, and YouTube has created the perfect storm for a whole new genre of movie fakery: the “I can do an amazing thing repeatedly” stunt.
So you dip into YouTube and watch a guy who apparently can coax basketballs into hoops any way he pleases: kicked, bounced off the seventh row of the bleachers, thrown over his head without looking. It seems incredible. But the cheapness of video has allowed him simply to play the law of averages: a day spent on a basketball court trying thousands of baskets from hundreds of positions yields 10 amazing swish shots (a not unreasonable ratio) and a video that makes him look like the next Michael Jordan
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
A couple weeks ago, Peter Mark of British Columbia found this Harley-Davidson buried in the sand on one of the islands of British Columbia. Tracking the license plate led Mark back to the bike's owner. In Miyagi, Japan. Apparently, the March 2011 tsunami, which destroyed Ikio Yokoyam's home and took the lives of three family members, washed the motorcycle out to sea. From BBC News:
The shop that sold the motorcycle to Mr Yokoyama is now hoping to ship the Harley-Davidson back to Japan and restore it.
The motorcycle is among the first items in a wave of debris heading to the west coast of North America. Most of the debris is expected to arrive in 2013...
Lighter items, such as buoys and bottles, have been among the first to wash ashore on the continent.
In March, an Alaska man found a football and later a volleyball from Japan.
Ellen Kushner, co-editor of the multiple-award-nominated new Borderlands anthology Welcome to Bordertown, writes, "Have you dreamed of a Danceland T-shirt? Some Dancing Ferret beer mugs? A Khandroma (Tibetan girl skater gang) charm? Thanks to the many Bordertown authors who gave their kind permission to allow us to create logos for B-town places they invented! Designer Tara O'Shea has come up with some fabulous designs now up on CafePress for sale to the general public. Click on each design & scroll down to see not only T-shirts in many styles, but coffeemugs, sippy cups, postcards, tote bags, puzzles & more! With luck, high school students all over the country will be baffling their classmates with geekish glee."
ORIGINAL: By Obama for America. We won't dignify the original attack ad by linking to it directly, but here's a link to someone who will for the curious.
Self-taught Dutch street artist Max Zorn creates beautiful illustrations by cutting and layering brown packing tape. Because the tape is semi-translucent, the tape art is best experienced with a backlight (Zorn prefers street lamps.) In order to spread his art around, Zorn is offering to send free tape art to individuals around world—provided they promise to post it publicly
My interpretation of these horsemen from Revelations in the Bible is very loose, it's an artistic idea based mostly on how I want them to look, and less on the many academic and theological interpretations. I want them to appear ominous and imposing, but the catch is that they are giant toys. They are meant to be fantastic and absurd, but also beautiful and magical. You cannot ride one of the mammoths without feeling a little joy. With this world feeling so unstable, and all the theories of its end, the rocking horses bring light to a dark time. 
Saipancakes, who normally makes 
The shop that sold the motorcycle to Mr Yokoyama is now hoping to ship the Harley-Davidson back to Japan and restore it. 
Ellen Kushner, co-editor of the multiple-award-nominated new Borderlands anthology 
