Month: November 2021

Despite multiple investigations and a string of alleged retaliation murders that left three more people dead, very little is known about the actual circumstances surrounding the death of Mac Dre, Vallejo’s hometown hero, the larger than life orchestrator of the Thizzle Dance and a key player in the Hyphy movement that still influences hip-hop culture to this day.

Last fall Caeleb Dressel, the world’s fastest swimmer, sat in a hotel coffee shop on an island in the Danube in Budapest, sipping water from a bottle and trying not to think about a world without the Olympics. This was not easy. The 24-year-old from Florida was in Hungary’s fairy-tale capital of castles and grand hotels, along with 300 other Olympians, for the second season of a new competition, the International Swimming League (ISL), whose regard for the Games and their domination over watersports was summed up by its slogan: “This. Is. The. Revolution.”

But by March 1932, hundreds of thousands of people were already starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the breadbasket of the country. Rapid industrialization was financed by destroying traditional agrarian life. The five-year plan had brought “dekulakization,” the deportation of peasants deemed more prosperous than others, and “collectivization,” the appropriation of agrarian land by the state. A result was mass famine: first in Kazakhstan, then in southern Russia and especially in Soviet Ukraine. Soviet leaders were aware in 1932 of what was happening but insisted on requisitions in Ukraine anyway. Grain that people needed to survive was forcibly confiscated and exported. The writer Arthur Koestler, who was living in Soviet Ukraine at the time, recalled propaganda that presented the starving as provocateurs who preferred to see their own bellies bloat rather than accept Soviet achievement.

According to Garner, her sister has so far handed over about $200,000 to the group, and is being forced to drink a hydrogen peroxide solution and take “bio pellets” to ward off COVID-19 and stay healthy. Her phone calls and messages are also being monitored, according to Garner, who believes her sister will never return.

In the days of Quiz Wiz, Kahn says, he traveled the world hunting for new ideas as head of product development for a toy conglomerate called Coleco. He had one of those all-inclusive Pan Am tickets of jet-age lore, where you could fly anywhere in the world in first class: Just show up at the airport, flash your ticket, and walk right onto the 747, destination London, Vienna, Hong Kong, Tokyo. Then you ascended the spiral staircase and started drinking scotch and sodas at the bar outside the cockpit.

Within days, however, detectives discovered that Candace had been leading a clandestine life of her own. For nearly two years, she’d been carrying on an affair with her nephew, a 22-year-old mobile home salesman named Melvin Powers. Mel was six foot four and built like a linebacker. He had high cheekbones, dark eyes, and a head of coal-black hair. He and Candace had written each other impassioned love letters. They’d had trysts at the mansion, the family’s ranch just southwest of Houston, and the Mosslers’ Galveston beach house.

In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.

In Los Angeles, the district attorney’s office focuses on whether a young person would be amenable to the services available to juveniles. “We have no evidence to suggest that he’s a sociopath,” Alisa Blair says of Cachu, “or that he’s going to be a serial killer, or that this was anything other than the response of a teenager, experiencing adolescent brain development.”