| A dance crew from Boston chases a shot at stardom on MTV
They grew up in some of Boston's roughest neighborhoods and found salvation in hip-hop dance. Now members of the troupe Status Quo are trying to survive their toughest professional challenge yet: capturing first place in MTV's "Randy Jackson Presents America's Best Dance Crew" competition, a reality show pitting nine of the country's best, most energetic young dance crews in a can-you-top-this showdown offering a top prize of $100,000 and a shot at showbiz stardom. Episodes of "Dance Crew" are taped Tuesdays in Los Angeles for broadcast Thursdays at 10 p.m. on MTV. Status Quo has already made it through two rounds and will compete again tonight. They could be dancing on thin ice this time, though, as the field shrinks and the show's three judges - rapper Lil Mama, singer-producer JC Chasez, and hip-hop choreographer Shane Sparks - grow stingier with their praise and start channeling their inner Simon Cowell.
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KSM, the Victim
On Monday, some six years after 9/11, military prosecutors filed charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's foreign-operations chief, along with five of his conspirators. They will stand before a military tribunal, and if convicted they could face execution. And as if to prove that the U.S. has lost its seriousness and every sense of proportion, now we are told not that KSM is a killer, but a victim. The victim, supposedly, of President Bush. Opponents of military commissions (including Barack Obama) want KSM & Co. turned over to the regular civilian courts, or at least to military courts-martial; anything else is said to abridge American freedoms. This attitude is either disingenuous or naïve, or both, because it is tenable only by discounting the nature of the attacks and the enemies who carried them out.
VUSD officials recommend waiting to open high schools
She said failing to open the new campus on time is a disservice to the students and teachers who are now crammed into Vista Unified's two overcrowded high schools, Vista High and Rancho Buena Vista High."We sent the message to the community that we were going to build this school," she said. "As a board, it's our responsibility to get it opened."The sooner the district opens the schools, the better, Herrera said, because it doesn't appear the state's budget problems are going to clear up anytime soon.Gibson and Herrera agree that the district needs to do something to ease overcrowding at its two large high schools, which each have more than 3,000 students. However, they disagree about how to do it.For years, Gibson has pushed for the district to use existing facilities for the magnet schools instead of building a campus on the 66-acre site in eastern Oceanside.
May 2006
(The Euston group formally launched on May 26 in London. Several members have also written op-eds -- see here -- as part of the roll out. Norman Geras, a government professor at the University of Manchester, has been particularly insightful, including this piece in the Guardian: Within the large "middle" sector of left-liberal opinion opposed to the war there has been, from the start, a differentiating subdivision - between those who opposed the war without being in denial about the considerations on the other side of the argument, and those who precisely have been in denial about them. This latter group extends well beyond the far left. The signs of denial are abundant in the recent public life of the western democracies: in the banners and slogans for that Saturday on February 15 2003, from which one would never have known that Saddam's Iraq was a foul tyranny; in the numbers of those on the left unwilling to allow, many indeed unable to comprehend, why others of us supported a regime-change war; in a constant stream of comment in liberal daily papers and weeklies of the left; in the excommunications issued and more recent calls for apology or recantation; and, most seriously, in the perceptible lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise given its origins in a war led by George Bush.) Posted on April 17, 2006: Though it hasn't garnered much media attention, there has been an interesting fight brewing within the political Left.
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