Xavier Mascareñas

Trinity House tangles with the police over weekly free lunches in Robinson Park

For almost 120 Sundays, about two years, Catholic organization Trinity House has served up hot lunches to the homeless. On July 1, after a handful of warnings, police officers told volunteers not to get out of their cars when they pulled up to their usual spot, according to a Trinity House news release.

What 30 Million People?

Want to know if the mainstream media has a conservative or a liberal bias? Look no further than the widespread coverage of the recent “Live Earth” concert. The 24-hour music event, running July 9 and 10, was intended to raise awareness of global warming and other environmental issues. Shortly after the broadcast ended, conservative news sites like the Drudge Report were straining at their leashes to declare the concert a failure of epic proportions.

The news just keeps on coming. Some days you pay attention. Some days you don't. Look here in every Alibi to refresh your memory about what's going on in your community. Don't worry if you don't know all the answers—there's a cheat sheet at the end.

Xavier Mascareñas

An interview with Clarence Bass, local bodybuilder extraordinaire

Clarence Bass has the lungs of a cheetah, pecks that could snap a leather belt and abs that give his fitted T-shirts rug burns. Not bad for a 69-year-old.

Impeach Cheney now

Where are the teeth-grinding, strict-constructionist Republicans when their nation needs them? For that matter, where’s the Democratic Party? We’re living through America’s first coup d’etat, and so far, just 14 Democratic Congressmen are doing anything about it.

Letters

Dateline: Iraq—Agence France-Presse is reporting that the Iraqi port city of Basra, already embroiled by a nasty turf war between rival militia factions, is now gripped by rumors of giant badgers stalking the streets at night and eating humans. Local farmers who have caught and killed several of the beasts claim the animals were released into the area by hostile British forces. Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra’s veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several badgers and has tried to assure locals that the animals are not postwar arrivals to the region. “The animals appeared before the fall of the regime. They are known as Al-Ghirayri and locally as Al-Girta.” he told AFP. “Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific.” British army spokesperson Maj. David Gell said the animals—believed to be a kind of honey badger—“are native but rare in Iraq. They’re nocturnal carnivores with a fearsome reputation, but they don’t stalk humans and carry them back to their lair.”