Working closely with a former detective, James still goes out with Brighton police to gather material for his work about an English city with a rich criminal history.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/06/157798379/author-peter-james-and-sidekick-track-seaside-crime
Tim Franks looks at the case of two prison inmates who have been held in solitary confinement in Louisiana for 40 years - believed to be the longest period of time in US history.
Tagged with prison angola incarceration crime punishment torture solitary louisiana supermax
Robert Wittman founded the FBI’s Art Crime Team and tracked down more than $225 million worth of stolen art and cultural property â including a $36 million self-portrait by Rembrandt. He describes the heists in his memoir, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures.
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/24/137393980/robert-wittmans-priceless-pursuit-of-stolen-art
Witnesses to the riots in Salford, Greater Manchester, and Hackney, east London, tell Shiv Malik what happened this week and speak of their anger at a lack of job prospects.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/audio/2011/aug/12/salford-hackney-riots-audio
Brazil’s musical group AfroReggae was born of the streets of Rio de Janiero’s hard-life shanytowns, or favelas.
Now, AfroReggae is trying to give back — to give inspiration, hope, pride and a path to youth surrounded by too much violence, drugs, and poverty.
It’s culture versus violence in the tough streets of Rio. We hear AfroReggae and explore Rio’s favelas.
http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/12/favelas-afroreggae-brazil
Tagged with book:author=damian platt music favelas brazil poverty crime culture money afroreggae
We commonly use the language of body ownership as a way of claiming personal rights, though we do not normally mean it literally. Most people feel uneasy about markets in sexual or reproductive services, and though there is a substantial global trade in body tissues, the illicit trade in live human organs is widely condemned. But what, if any, is the problem with treating bodies as resources and/or possessions? Is there something about the body that makes it particularly inappropriate to apply to it the language of property, commodities, and things? Or is thinking the body special a kind of sentimentalism that blocks clear thinking about matters such as prostitution, surrogate motherhood, or the sale of spare kidneys?
Nils Gilman describes deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration."
There’s nice tourism, and then sex tourism, such as in Thailand and Switzerland. The vast pharmacology industry is matched by a vast traffic in illegal drugs. The underside of waste disposal is the criminal dumping in the developing world of toxic wastes from the developed world. Military activities worldwide are fed by a huge gray market in weapons. Internet communications are undermined by floods of malware doubling every year. Among the commodities shipped around the world are exotic hardwoods, endangered species, blood diamonds, and stolen art worth billions in ransom. Illegitimate health care includes the provision of human organs from poor people — you can get a new kidney with no waiting for $150,000 in places like Brazil, the Philippines, Istanbul, and South Africa. Far overwhelming legal immigration are torrents of illegal immigrants who pay large sums to get across borders. And money laundering accounts for 4-12% of world GDP — $1.5 to 5 trillion dollars a year.
These are not marginal, "informal" activities. These are enormous, complex businesses straight out of the Harvard Business Review. The drug business in Mexico, for example, employs 400,000 people. A thousand-dollar kilo of cocaine grows in value by 1400-percent when it crosses into the U.S. — nice profit margin there.
The determinants of happiness are remarkably similar around the world, in countries as different as Afghanistan, the U.S, and Chile. Income matters to happiness but only so much; friends, freedom, and employment are good for happiness, while crime, poor health, and divorce are bad. Paradoxically, however, people in places like Afghanistan can be as happy as those in much wealthier and safer ones like Chile. One explanation is the remarkable human capacity to adapt to adversity and hardship. While adaptation may be a good thing for individual wellbeing, it can also result in collective tolerance for bad equilibrium which are difficult for societies to escape from.
Author and journalist Jason Kersten joins us to discuss his new book, "The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter."
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R907081000?itemMD5=4b530e9d8cb37674e775a028a97ddbfc
New surveys are out on the world’s most livable cities. The places you’d really like to be to raise a family, enjoy life, start a business, savor days and nights and, well, there’s hardly an American city in sight.
The top 25 from the Economist’s Intelligence Unit finds Vancouver, Canada at the top of the list with Vienna, Melbourne, Helsinki, Osaka close behind.
And not a single American city. Pittsburgh sneaks in at 29. Monocle magazine gives Zurich top honors. And Copenhagen, Tokyo. Only Honolulu makes it from the USA. What’s up?
http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/06/whats-a-liveable-city-now
Page 1 of 2Older