Gangster disciple hand signs

Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) signed legislation over the weekend legalizing the use of firing squads to carry out execution sentences in his state. On the morning of Friday, March 24, 2023, Breitbart News reported Idaho was on the cusp of becoming the fifth state to legalize execution by firing squad, and later that day Little signed the legislation. The Associated Press noted that Idaho turned to firing squads because the companies that make drugs for lethal injections do not want their products used in executions. This has made the drugs hard to acquire and “one Idaho death row inmate has already had his execution postponed repeatedly because of drug scarcity.” Some states are looking to electric chairs in the absence of lethal drugs, but Idaho, Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, have all legalized firing squads as an option. File/17 January, 1977/Point of the Mountain, Utah: Newsmen looking at and taking photos of the chair in which Gary Gilmore sat … [Read more...] about Idaho Gov. Signs Bill Legalizing Execution By Firing Squad

America's first female VP candidate on a major party ticket died today at 75. Lynn Sherr, who traveled with Ferraro on her groundbreaking 1984 campaign, recalls the congresswoman's electrifying debut, the way she inspired women all over the country—and how she handled her loss with grace. Plus, Mark Katz remembers Geraldine Ferraro's great sense of humor . Geraldine Ferraro opened the door to her Washington congressional office, grabbed my hand, and pulled me to the mirror above her fireplace. "C'mere," she said in her brisk Queens cadence. "C'mere. I have to see what everyone's talking about." Photos: Geraldine Ferraro It was the summer of 1984, the first time I'd met her, and the two of us stood side by side gazing at each other's reflection. Everyone, it seems, was right. We did look alike, with our nearly identical short, thatched, and blond-streaked hair, our high cheekbones and strong chins. True, I was some four inches taller than the congresswoman, and she had a … [Read more...] about Geraldine Ferraro Dies: Memories of Her 1984 Campaign

One night in October, just a couple blocks from Harvard Square, a young crowd gathered at a music space called the Sinclair to catch a performance by Bill Callahan, the meticulous indie-rock lyricist who has been playing to bookish collegiate types since the early ‘90s. Callahan’s opening act, Lonnie Holley, had been playing to similar audiences for two years. A number of details about Holley made this fact surprising: He was decades older than just about everyone in the club and one of the few African-Americans. He says he grew up the seventh of 27 children in Jim Crow-era Alabama, where his schooling stopped around seventh grade. In his own, possibly unreliable telling, he says the woman who informally adopted him as an infant eventually traded him to another family for a pint of whiskey when he was 4. Holley also says he dug graves, picked trash at a drive-in, drank too much gin, was run over by a car and pronounced brain-dead, picked cotton, became a father at 15 (Holley now has 15 … [Read more...] about Lonnie Holley, the Insider’s Outsider

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — For a long time, Joe Minter managed to share a yard with his wife, Hilda, their two sons and 100,000 of their neighbors. His scruffy three-bedroom house filled up most of a small city lot, just up the hill from Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. But somehow he made it work. When these souls began to cry out for their own lawn ornaments, however, he realized he would have to find more room. The sloping land to the south and west of Mr. Minter’s dooryard belonged to the two historically black graveyards called Grace Hill and Shadow Lawn. “We are in the presence of about 100,000 African ancestors,” Mr. Minter will tell visitors who drop by on a Sunday morning. These are the emancipated slaves and farmers and steelworkers who made Birmingham: the muscle that built the “Magic City.” The dead weren’t going anywhere, but the rest of the neighborhood was thinning out, Mrs. Minter said. Some homeowners died off; others drove north and never came back. So the Minters began … [Read more...] about Scrap-Iron Elegy

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Lonnie Holley’s life began at an impossible place: 1950, seventh among his mother’s 27 children, in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Ala., the air thick with violent racism toward him and everyone he loved. Things got even worse as he grew up. At four years old, he said, he was traded for a bottle of whiskey by a nurse who had stolen him away from his mother. Later, as the story goes, he was in a coma for several months and pronounced brain-dead after being hit by a car that dragged him along several blocks. Then he spent time in the infamous Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children until his paternal grandmother — he refers to her simply as “Momo” — was able to take him away at the age of 14. He forged his way out of the miry roads of his origins, becoming a musician and filmmaker, and teaching himself to make visual art. Since then, he has come far, far enough to have just completed a residency as an artist at the Elaine de Kooning House in this celebrity-filled … [Read more...] about Lonnie Holley’s Life of Perseverance, and Art of Transformation

GENEVA SIMON STUDER started his career in a basement vault in a warehouse complex near the heart of this city, known for international banks and outrageous prices. It was a strange job. Every day, someone would open the vault and lock him inside until it was time for lunch. Then he’d be let out of the vault and, after eating, he’d be locked in again until it was time to go home. He was taking inventory for one of Switzerland’s best-known gallery owners, who rented the space. “I was checking sizes, condition, looking for a signature,” Mr. Studer recalls, “and making sure the art was properly measured.” This might have been a tedious way to spend four months, but what was being tallied and assessed was the handiwork of Pablo Picasso. Not hundreds of pieces, but thousands — shelf upon shelf of drawings, paintings and sculptures. It was Mr. Studer’s first peek at the astounding wealth stuffed inside the Geneva Freeport, as this warehouse complex is known. The second peek came when … [Read more...] about Swiss Freeports Are Home for a Growing Treasury of Art