LA Weekly

It was a surprise to get another letter from Shayne Allyn Ziska, a former correctional officer at the California Institution for Men in Chino, who has continuously protested his innocence ever since he was found guilty of racketeering, conspiracy and civil rights violations by a federal judge in 2006. The Weekly wrote a lot about his bizarre case, and now it turns out he’s on a hunger strike, at least according to a letter I got from him this week.

Ziska, who is locked up in the Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkil in Pennsylvania, claimed that he has refused his share of prison grub since March 14, and is being forced fed “via a nasogastric tube through my nose, nasal passage, and into my stomach” since April 22.

“I refuse to eat because I am an innocent man that was falsely convicted and imprisoned,” he wrote. 'Soon {Bureau of Prisons] is going to have to water me too.”

Ziska was found guilty in Los Angeles on March of 2006 on one count of violent crime in aid of racketeering, one count of deprivation of civil rights under the color of law, and one count of conspiracy. During the six-day trial, his accusers – a rag-tag group of prisoners - took the stand in federal court, telling Los Angeles District Court Judge Terry Hatter Jr. that Ziska, then 44, became an associate of the Nazi Low Riders, a white supremacist prison gang, and participated in assaults and drug trafficking at the behest of gang members. They said he preached “white power” ideology and referred to black inmates as “rugs,” “porch monkeys” and “niggers.”

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The LA Times probably had its farewell lined up for weeks. Last year, the newspaper went after the California State Assembly Speaker for his sleazy handling of political contributions with a special kind of glee. On Tuesday, the Eastside pol will be termed-out and replaced, and today the Times thoughtfully dedicated several inches of its "California" section for a send-off piece, which recounted Nunez's highs and lows as one of the state's leading legislators. The paper, though, forgot to mention one thing--Nunez, who endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton, will be succeeded by a vocal and active Sen. Barack Obama supporter. Her name is Karen Bass.

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Fresh off a staggering surge of killings of high-profile anti-narco agents and investigators in Mexico, the latest big-time victim in the country's wild drug war is sure to bring even more retaliation bloodshed: the son of El Chapo, Mexico's most notorious narco kingpin, was gunned down on Thursday in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa. Edgar Guzman was hit with a barrage of bullets from AK-47 rifles in a shopping mall parking lot. A top money launderer for the Sinaloa cartel was also killed.

"Psychosis and fear grip Sinaloa" called the headline for the lead story in Sunday's El Universal. The story describes a city that felt like a ghost town on Saturday -- despite it being Mother's Day in Mexico -- as news of Edgar Guzman's murder spread. Several upcoming concerts, including a scheduled show by Los Tigres del Norte, have been canceled. On Sunday, a cousin of El Chapo was captured after a fierce shootout, and, in this piece, the paper notes that narcojunior Edgar Guzman was an open personality on the Internet, using his own name to defend his father on blogs. There's even a corrido about the guy. Here it is:

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Several hours after I heard Robert Nudelman had died at the age of 52 at his father’s home in Tucson, Arizona, I was driving on El Centro Avenue, heading north towards Sunset Boulevard and the Hollywood sign. In front of me, I could see the Palladium and the old CBS TV-and-radio complex—two important buildings that contributed to Los Angeles’s historic culture and funky architecture. I looked at these landmarks and thought of Robert, the now-former director of preservation issues at Hollywood Heritage.

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Berenice Garcia Corral was commander of the sex crimes unit of Chihuahua state's State Investigation Agency before masked men shot her in her driveway in Ciuadad Juarez on Monday night. La Jornada reports that she was shot at least 10 times with AK-47 rifles. On Tuesday in the municipality of Hidalgo del Parral a local police officer was shot and killed, and two more in Juarez were injured in shoot-outs. Authorities in Juarez said the Garcia Corral killing was related to a "case that she was investigating," suggesting a link to the shameful mystery of the Juarez women murders.

This was news on page 18 of the paper, by the way. It's easy to imagine what sort of coverage a killling of a police officer and one high-level female investigator in the span of two days in the same region would get in the U.S. But this is Mexico's internal narco war we're talking about. Killings happen daily in the states where the drug trade is centered. You've heard about the spectacular events, surely. In Tijuana, 15 were killed in a single day last month during a chaotic blast of street combat. In January Tijuana kindergarteners were caught in the ongoing cross-fire. Every day, as they battle the cartels who are battling themselves, civil and federal police casualities are mounting.

The deaths are news but not news. Reports are buried or overlooked. Some papers even keep daily narco-related death counts. Another day, another serving of bloodshed in organized crime in Mexico. On Wednesday, for instance, La Jornada's piece from Juarez noted as a tag-on that six more narco war victims were added in the cities of Nogales and Hermosillo. Their names were Oscar Jaime Valenzuela Valenzuela, his wife Yolanda Lopez Herrera, and police officer Juan Alvaro Gomez Higuera. A fourth victim remained unidentified and, seperately, two unidentified bodies were found near an airstrip.

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From Marc Cooper's blog:

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Tuesday night Barack Obama effectively clinched the Democratic nomination -- again. He did it the first time when weeks ago he racked up a dozen primary victories and built his insurmountable delegate lead.

We've spent the last half-dozen weeks or so indulging in a Second Life fantasy that granted Hillary Clinton some sort of real viability.

That game ended tonight in North Carolina and Indiana. Obama has won a smashing victory in North Carolina and, as we write, will finish close behind in Indiana. When all the votes are tallied, Obama will finish the evening with a net gain in pledged delegates i.e. he will increase his lead as front-runner. Whatever remote, if not impossible, shot Clinton had of snatching away the nomination went up in smoke tonight when she failed to win NC and failed to stage a blow-out in Indiana.

Click here to read the rest of the post.

And in an interesting bit of left-wing / right-wing group-think:

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It's got to come under the category of "what was City Hall thinking?' that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa kept insisting his plan to funnel commuters onto Pico and Olympic boulevards by making them one-way streets would have no effect on the local environment.

A judge sounded almost incredulous in a five-page ruling that halted the project today, stating that "the very purpose of the project is to expand the use of the existing streets" -- which typically means more fine particulate matter from car exhaust, more noise, and a lower quality of life for anyone who has to live or work nearby.

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By Pandora Young

I have loved Arianna Huffington since she was the voice of the right wing on KCRW's Left, Right & Center. I loved her before I knew she was a gorgeous red-headed Amazon with some serious junk in the trunk. I fell in love with her shrill, heavily accented voice as she berated her helpless, liberal, weenie-boy co-hosts.

I would have fallen in love with that voice if it had belonged to a cockroach sitting atop a pile of dung. But when I learned she was hot, that she was getting a divorce from her homosexual, would-be-governor husband, that she was becoming a liberal, that she was super-wealthy, that she was a power-hungry bitch intent on world domination, well... I loved her more.

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May Day, Dia Internacional del los Trabajadores, is a national holiday here. On Thursday most stores and shops were closed and people didn't work, giving Mexico's huge network of unions, or "sindicatos," an opportunity to march through the city center and hold a rally at the Zocalo -- while another set of workers busied themselves with (finally!) dismantling the "Ashes & Snow" temporary museum (eyesore) that has dominated the square for six months.

It was a somewhat ordinary rally. The Zocalo was not packed, as it has been recently, and the speakers were mostly sindicato bigwigs repeating the familiar lines against the conservative federal government and against the privatization of Mexico's industries and resources. Curiously, even as thousands of Mexican and Latin American immigrants marched in Los Angeles and across the United States on May Day, there was hardly a mention of the immigrant rights movement in the U.S. at the Zocalo on Thursday. No effort to tie the struggles of their countrymen to the north to the struggles of workers here in the patria.

So I went and had a long lunch at El Generalito on Filomeno Mata. Cauliflower soup, a green salad, then tortitas de espinaca, essentially an empanada made out of spinach stuffed with cheese and drenched with a nice jitomate sauce, with beans on the side. And a tall dark beer from the tap. As I ate, taxi drivers from Ecatepec marched by on Madero street.

Well, anyway, the real resistance on May Day, I would soon find out, wasn't going to be in the Centro Historico. It would be at a ska-punk-psychobilly fest just a few miles to the northwest, where hordes of young people in Mexico City gathered to do what they do best: dance, do drugs, make out, and fight.

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The fate of the Pellicano Gang of Five rests with the jury, now that closing arguments have concluded. Attorney Mona Soo Hoo began the morning by announcing that “This case is about dualities.” She then enumerated a list of dialectical opposites that described perceptions of her client, former phone company field technician Ray Turner. He stands accused of applying wire taps and channeling billing data to private eye Anthony Pellicano – who allegedly charged clients a flat $25,000 fee for this information and other services. It was an intriguing inventory (“Phone guy versus phone-tap guy, presumption of innocence versus assumption of guilt”) that promised court watchers a new side of Soo Hoo, whose habit of signing on to other defense attorneys’ initiatives had earlier earned her the nickname Mona Me Too.

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Pellicano Trial’s Restless Defense Apr 30, 2008
Molasky Pacific Leaves Columbia Square Apr 30, 2008
RICO Suave: Closing Arguments at Pellicano Trial Apr 29, 2008
Braving 'New Worlds' at the Jumex Collection Apr 28, 2008
Mistakes Were Made Apr 28, 2008
Pellicano Trial Bombshell Apr 25, 2008
Jesus Made Matt Taibbi Puke Apr 25, 2008
What I'll Miss About Hollywood Apr 25, 2008
Pellicano Rebooted Apr 23, 2008
Phone Talk at Pellicano Trial Apr 22, 2008
Zero Hour in Pennsylvania Apr 22, 2008
Fashion Week, Take 2: Marvin & Quetzal line dazzles Apr 22, 2008
Earth Day Events Around L.A. Apr 22, 2008
AMLO and the battle over Mexico's oil Apr 20, 2008
Pellicano Trial's Freaky Friday Apr 19, 2008