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Related:
-"Throwing Away The Key," from In These Times magazine.
-Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries
-The plight of African American men in America, from the Atlantic Monthly.
-"The Falling Crime Rate" from the Koch Crime Institute
-Graphs of New York City's 1990s plunge in crime rates
-Earlier in this weblog: Is the world as violent as it looks on TV?
PLACES & CULTUREFrom the Washington Post:
NORILSK, Russia—For decades, this frigid arctic city was Joseph Stalin's secret, a closed metropolis built on the bones of slave labor to tap and smelt the rich nickel ore that lay beneath its permafrost surface. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Norilsk was thrown open to outsiders, many presumed that the city's residents would rejoice at finally being linked to the rest of the world. They didn't. Almost overnight, residents here say, immigrants from Azerbaijan, Armenia and Ukraine poured in. An estimated 30,000 of them set up ramshackle stands to peddle clothes and food and competed for high-paying jobs at city plants and mines, bringing with them a measure of crime and drug addiction. Residents raised such a fuss that by the fall of 2001, city and regional officials had persuaded the Kremlin to once again restrict entry to the city of roughly 230,000 and three satellite towns. Now foreigners are allowed in only by invitation of an immediate family member or a commercial enterprise … To [union leader Valeri] Melnikov, the new rules simply reinforce the power of Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest nickel producer, and by extension the power of its main investor. full story
It was not a fair fight. The wolverine may have been as nasty as any predator in the mountains, but it weighed only 27 pounds. The black bear had arisen from a long winter's sleep and was almost certainly very hungry. The slain elk, carrying as much as 550 pounds of meat, was a prize worth fighting for. "We don't know how it unfolded, except that the wolverine lost," said wolverine expert Kristine Inman, of the Wildlife Conservation Society … This encounter [was] an unusual example of predator killing predator in the remote reaches of greater Yellowstone Park, a 40,600-square-mile tract of wilderness spreading like an ink blot across the junction of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. But while the wolverine may have chosen a mismatch bordering on madness, scientists say that predators killing one another is probably part of the natural order of things, and greater Yellowstone is offering an unprecedented opportunity to test the theory. With the reintroduction of the gray wolf in 1995, the park and its suburbs now have a full complement of North America's great carnivores: wolves, grizzly bears, black bears, cougars, coyotes and wolverines. Nowhere else on the continent can boast such variety. full story
CITY SCENEConversations collide in a coffee shop on a Friday afternoon. Suddenly a voice parts them: "Fifth period!" A man rises out of his seat and starts talking to himself about cutting class, his eyes on the floor as he navigates a path through the tables and chairs. At one of the tables he passes, a woman is incredulous (though somewhat confused—he seems too well-dressed and self-assured to be crazy). "Excuse me. I'm trying to talk to my friend here!" For a second, a hint of sheepishness registers on the man's face, but he avoids her glare and continues with his monologue. The woman must not have seen the announcement in the paper: today actors from the Chicago Dramatists Theatre are appearing at ten area Starbucks (a benefactor of CDT), and, as the clock hits 5:15, launching into monologues written by middle schoolers in the city. This monologue is rather pedestrian (no pun intended), about a speaker at a school assembly who motivated the young writer to "quit cutting class and hit the books." But for a strange few minutes during Friday rush hour, it turns a Starbucks into a stage.
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