In bucolic Northern California, the author's pot-growing neighbors are facing a new fear of legalization.
hen my wife and I bought a house last year in the little town of Ukiah, California, the first person to offer us advice about growing marijuana was our realtor. The house was a stolid 1909 prairie box that had been partitioned into four units, with a front porch, dark green trim, and a couple of fruit trees in the yard. It was charming, but we probably would have settled for a yurt. What mattered most to us was having a foothold in Mendocino County, a place we had long ago decided was the most beautiful in America.
Now that passenger rail is expanding from Portland to Brunswick in 2012, state transportation officials are looking toward Maine's western mountains and beyond as the next possible link in service. They're gathering input for a preliminary feasibility study that's expected to be released early next year.
Victoria Mansion Holiday Gala
Thursday, December 2, 2010
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Don't miss the Mansion's most elegant and spectacular event of the the year. Get an early look at two floors of period rooms transformed by local designers with dazzling decorations inspired by this year's theme: The Twelve Days of Christmas. Fabulous food and drink provided. Tickets are $50/person, all proceeds to benefit the restoration and operation of Victoria Mansion. Please call (207) 772-4841 ext.. 10 for reservations.
Christmas at Victoria Mansion
Friday, November 26, 2010 - Saturday, January 8, 2011
Open daily 11:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day
Each holiday season, local designers showcase their talents by transforming the Mansion's interiors with extravagant decorations. This year, the Mansion will be decorated to reflect the stanzas of the much-beloved Christmas carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. This not-to-be-missed event is now in its 26th year!
Adults $15; AAA/Senior $13.50; Members $7; Children (6-17) $5; Children under 6 free; Family ticket $35
He was living in Portland, Maine, working full time while taking classes toward his high school diploma, when he was detained by federal immigration agents, he said, just one month shy of graduation.
With the recent opening in Portland of the new Trader Joe’s less than a mile away from both Hannaford and Whole Foods, The Free Press decided to see how the three stores compare. We purchased several similar items — generic to the individual store when possible — at each location and saw how they matched up in terms of price and quality.
Annals of Economics: The financial sector tries to justify itself.
A few months ago, I came across an announcement that Citigroup, the parent company of Citibank, was to be honored, along with its chief executive, Vikram Pandit, for “Advancing the Field of Asset Building in America.” This seemed akin to, say, saluting BP for services to the environment or praising Facebook for its commitment to privacy. During the past decade, Citi has become synonymous with financial misjudgment, reckless lending, and gargantuan losses: what might be termed asset denuding rather than asset building. In late 2008, the sprawling firm might well have collapsed but for a government bailout. Even today the U.S. taxpayer is Citigroup’s largest shareholder
Mr. Peanut has a new sidekick, much like the Jolly Green Giant has Little Green Sprout. Mr. Peanut’s buddy is named Benson, and to make sure that snackers understand the pecking order between them, Benson is shorter than Mr. Peanut—one nut in his shell rather than two. “Benson is quite enamored of Mr. Peanut,” Mr. Levine said, but they are, as the saying goes, just good friends. —The Times.
I am Mr. Peanut, and I can be silent no longer. While I have only the greatest respect for Mr. Levine, who is the senior director for marketing at Planters, I cannot live a lie. I’m a gay nut, and Benson and I are in love
The whistleblowing websiteWikiLeakswas preparing to release a cache of 250,000 classified U.S. State Department documents as early as Sunday. .
The State Department told website founder Julian Assange in a letter on Saturday the release would endanger countless lives, jeopardize American military operations and hurt international cooperation on global security issues.
U.S. ambassadors anticipate embarrassing revelations affecting Washington's relations with its allies and other nations.
Here are some facts about WikiLeaks:
* WikiLeaks says it is a non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, journalists and the general public. Launched in 2006, it promotes the leaking of information to fight government and corporate corruption.
* In October, WikiLeaks released 400,000 secret U.S. files on the Iraq war. The documents involved sensitive subjects including abuse of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody, Iraqi rights violations and civilian deaths.
* In July, it released tens of thousands of secret U.S. military documents about the war in Afghanistan, offering them first to The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and Germany's Der Spiegel.
* The Pentagon said the Afghan war documents leak -- one of the largest in U.S. military history -- had put U.S. troops and Afghan informers at risk.
* Under the heading "Afghan War Diary," the 91,000 documents collected from across the U.S. military in Afghanistan cover the war from 2004 to 2010, WikiLeaks said in a summary.
* Although founder Julian Assange has given few interviews recently, a website, www.wikileaks.org, and a Twitter feed, www.twitter.com/wikileaks, occasionally release material.
* Assange is an Australian who spends much of his time in Sweden. Earlier this year, he was accused of molestation by two women there, a charge being investigated by the Swedish prosecutor's office. A complaint about attempted rape led to an arrest warrant, but that was quickly dropped. Assange has denied all charges.
* Sweden's media laws are among the world's most protective for journalists. In addition, Sweden's Pirate Party, which advocates reform of copyright law, has agreed to host WikiLeaks' servers, giving it additional legal protection.
* WikiLeaks has no connection to the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
It’s hardly news when Fox News airs something nasty. This time, though, it’s personal—or, at least, institutional. Recently, the nation’s highest-rated cable-news network’s biggest star devoted three hour-long episodes of his program to an attack on a single prominent citizen. The in-house advance publicity for these broadcasts was lavish. A promotional spot, distilling to thirty seconds the moral essence of the programs it advertised, is worth describing in full.
Reuters photographers produce over half a million images every year. Some pictures define an event, others capture a moment revealing an aspect of the human condition. In the series below, Reuters photographers offer unique insight into some of our best pictures of the year.
On April 1, 2001, an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea, triggering the first international crisis of George W. Bush’s Administration. The Chinese jet crashed, and its pilot was killed, but the pilot of the American aircraft, Navy Lieutenant Shane Osborn, managed to make an emergency landing at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, fifteen miles from the mainland. Osborn later published a memoir, in which he described the “incessant jackhammer vibration” as the plane fell eight thousand feet in thirty seconds, before he regained control.
The plane carried twenty-four officers and enlisted men and women attached to the Naval Security Group Command, a field component of the National Security Agency. They were repatriated after eleven days; the plane stayed behind. The Pentagon told the press that the crew had followed its protocol, which called for the use of a fire axe, and even hot coffee, to disable the plane’s equipment and software. These included an operating system created and controlled by the N.S.A., and the drivers needed to monitor encrypted Chinese radar, voice, and electronic communications. It was more than two years before the Navy acknowledged that things had not gone so well. “Compromise by the People’s Republic of China of undestroyed classified material . . . is highly probable and cannot be ruled out,” a Navy report issued in September, 2003, said.
Frying a turkey isn't just the best way to get tender, moist, less-oily meat —it's also the most fun. This year, inject some muscle into Turkey Day by deep-frying outdoors, building your own outdoor cooking rigs, brewing beer, and constructing awe-inspiring towers made out of pie.
National Geographic is once again holding their annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30th. For the past eight weeks, they have been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to rate them as well. Collected here are 47 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature.
In July, we brought you on board the research vessel "Odyssey" as faculty and students with the Maine Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health at the University of Southern Maine prepared to set sail for the Gulf of Mexico. The BP oil well had exploded in the spring, and the group wanted to study its impact on whales and other marine life. Well, the crew recently returned from nearly four months of collecting whale tissue samples along the Gulf, from Key West to Corpus Christi, Texas. They were surprised by what they found--or in this case, didn't find.
Ireland bailout: the Datablog guide to who will fund it, which countries are most exposed - and who will be next?
Ireland's bailout negotiations for a bailout are under intense scrutiny. But where's the money coming from - and which countries in the world have the most claims by foreign banks?
An increasing percentage of Maine homeowners is having trouble keeping up with mortgage payments, according to new data from a national credit reporting bureau. In its third quarter report, TransUnion says the rate of borrowers who are more than 60 days behind on their mortgage payment increased in ten states, with Maine leading the pack.
As shellackings go, the 2010 election was as comprehensive as it gets. Democrats lost among women, men, high-school graduates, college graduates, Catholics, Protestants, and so on. But there was one demographic group whose repudiation was especially influential: senior citizens. In the 2006 midterm election, seniors split their vote evenly between House Democrats and Republicans. This time, they went for Republicans by a twenty-one-point margin. The impact of that swing was magnified by the fact that seniors, always pretty reliable midterm voters, were particularly fired up: nearly a quarter of the votes cast were from people over sixty-five. The election has been termed the “revolt of the middle class.” But it might more accurately be called the revolt of the retired
Darrell Issa, a Republican representative from California, is one of the richest men in Congress. He made his money selling car alarms, which is interesting, because he has twice been accused of auto theft. (Issa has said that he had a “colorful youth.”) As the ranking minority member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he earned a reputation as President Barack Obama’s “annoyer-in-chief.” Issa told the Times a few months ago, “You can call me a pain. I’ll accept that as a compliment.”
hen my wife and I bought a house last year in the little town of Ukiah, California, the first person to offer us advice about growing marijuana was our realtor. The house was a stolid 1909 prairie box that had been partitioned into four units, with a front porch, dark green trim, and a couple of fruit trees in the yard. It was charming, but we probably would have settled for a yurt. What mattered most to us was having a foothold in Mendocino County, a place we had long ago decided was the most beautiful in America.
