Miami New Times
Longshot: Democrat Lois Frankel’s bid to be Florida’s governor
Lois Frankel isn't going to get to eat her pie.
She doesn't have time. Hunched over a legal pad, she's scrawling notes. "I should have prepared something to say," she says under her breath. Frankel scans the room. Chanel jackets, Nordstrom pantsuits, wide-necked Lane Bryant silk shells, a dining room full of Talbots disciples. Forty-three ladies and their manicured nails in shades aplenty fondle American flags pinned to their lapels -- the jeweled, crystal, pewter, gold-plated ones, the Gulf War antiques, those God Bless America and Protect Our Troops brooches. Moussed up, sprayed up, some subtly bouffanted, the women of the Lakeland chapter of the Women Business Owners re-lacquer their lips while tuxedoed boys whisk away the carcasses of their buffet lunch.
Lost in thought, Frankel stares at the pie's puddling ice-cream topping. She swings her right arm around the back of her chair, leans over, and whispers, "These women are probably Republican." Good guess. In this conservative patch of North Florida, GOP loyalists outnumber Democrats four to one, and no woman has served as a Polk County commissioner in 13 years. These facts don't raise one bushy, dark eyebrow of the first female Democratic Minority Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. The pro-choice, pro-gun control, über-liberal, six-term legislator will connect with them. The Frankel for Governor campaign is converting more believers today. The politician didn't drive five hours from her West Palm Beach home to give in to the odds.
Oxford American Magazine
Reform comes slow to a master jewel thief.
You have to live the life of speedboats, close-calls, and multi-million dollar scores, get popped, serve 11 years, get out, and then, tempted to do just one more house, get sent right back. You have to lose your son, whom you taught the tricks of your trade, be a liar to everyone, your truth told only in police records.
Walter Shaw wears a gold chain with two charms – a yellow-gold pry bar and an onyx black cat, a diamond in its winking eye. His black hair is slicked back and his button-down looks bought off the rack at a Jersey Big&Tall. Once a man with Rat Pack good looks, he is tired now, bags under his eyes, pouring his fifth cup of coffee at a café in downtown Fort Lauderdale. The 58-year-old spent most of his life asleep at this lunchtime hour. These days, Shaw hustles his legacy, trying to sell a biopic to Hollywood. He drops names, says a book is in the works, too. He likes to hand out pictures of himself from the late 1960s, when he was in his prime, all dark suited “Ocean’s 11.” For nearly three decades, he was a member of the Dinnerset Gang.
Miami New Times
Inside HotJamz, Miami’s club candy monopoly
A couple of dollar bills are tucked into Pamela Canellas's cleavage. With a flurry of boa feathers sprouting from the base of her ponytail and floating down half the length of her five-foot, three-inch body, Canellas is working her French manicure into the sides of her red-sequined Charo getup. Here, in the privacy of the concierge's storage closet at Hollywood's Diplomat Hotel, she seizes the money, throws it on a rack next to tubs of economy-size Dove dishwashing soap, and peels off a long satiny glove.
"Ah, can you believe this? Some guy out there gave me money -- two bucks," she says, rolling her eyes, the lids of which are dusted in gold glitter. "I mean, I never do this. I don't take money ever. I tell my dancers not to, but this guy was with his wife, and he was old. Like, you know, he was just out trying to have a good time. He was smiling and I didn't want to make him feel bad by rejecting it."
Canellas crinkles her forehead and moves the Velcroed fabric around like a jigsaw puzzle over her torso. "We call this the Britney,'" she says, arranging the outfit to resemble the green belly-dancing bikini Ms. Spears wore during an awards show. "Two dollars, though?" she adds. "If you're gonna try to give us money, I mean, c'mon."
CNN
The Uncounted
A young, pretty mom with a voice so soft she often sounded like she was telling a secret, Liz weathered five deployments with her husband and knew how to calm other wives. When they were rattled by another deployment, another order to move, an argument with their Marine or some kind of broken heart, she'd say, "Stay on the positive side." Or, "God doesn't hand you something you can't handle."
In a hope chest at her home on Camp Pendleton in California, she kept a memento of her nomination as 2011's Military Spouse of the Year. It was a huge honor in her world. "The nomination itself is an award for me," she told a local news reporter at the time. "It takes qualities of strength and adaptability to thrive within the military spouse lifestyle."
Liz Snell was very convincing. There was nothing she worked harder at than hiding the truth.
CNN
24 Minutes
Every Monday, people who live in Joplin, Missouri, begin their week with the sound of tornado sirens.
They take showers listening to the sirens. They pour coffee and wake their kids to the head-rattling blare. They jog around their neighborhoods, absent-mindedly pleased that their headphones help drown out the annoying screech of those damn sirens.
Every day in cities and towns across the Midwest, the routine test of an emergency system intended to save lives often gets ignored.
But after Sunday, no one in this college town of 50,000 is likely to dismiss a siren's call again.
In the middle of a clear, sunny afternoon, the deadliest recorded tornado in U.S. history spun up over Joplin. Within a matter of minutes, it leveled entire blocks, smashing miles of homes to splinters.
Evergreens and sycamores that stood for generations were decapitated. Gnarled metal car frames were wedged on roofs. Dust and insulation particles hung in the heavy, humid air.
The white noise of electricity was replaced by an eerie quiet -- amplifying the sound of feet crunching concrete as people emerged, zombified, wandering along streets that ran together and into the horizon, no longer distinguishable from one another.
CNN
David Koresh is dead. But his cult is alive
Waco, Texas (CNN) -- Sheila Martin's children burned alive. God, she says, wanted it that way.
"I don't expect you to understand," she says, leaning her bird-tiny frame against a full shopping cart in the nursery aisle at a Super Walmart. Her pink shirt, flats and purse match the lilies, hydrangeas and clusters of jasmine she's buying.
"Oh, look, they have forget-me-nots!" She caresses the blue petals and, like a child, puts her nose in the plant and inhales.
"These will be perfect for the memorial."
On Tuesday, Martin and a handful of other surviving Branch Davidians will gather at a hotel off a freeway in this dusty Central Texas town to remember the federal siege on their religious compound, an event that has become synonymous with the word Waco.
On that day in 1993, a 51-day standoff between the armed Davidians and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ended in a fire and the deaths of at least 76 people. Among them were Martin's husband and four of her children.
In the garden center, Martin nervously picks up her pace, examining each plant, smelling and touching their blooms, kneading the soil.
The memories have sharpened each year, not dulled as she had hoped.
CNN
Destroyed: Exclusive - Police nationwide trashed rape kits and bungled sex crimes investigations
Hours after you are raped, you sit in a hospital room, under fluorescent lights, and consent to a forensic exam.
Your body is the crime scene.
When did it happen, a nurse asks. Where did it happen? Can you tell me who did this to you?
The nurse is trained to interview you and search your body for evidence left behind by your attacker. Knowing the details of your assault guides the examination.
Did he ejaculate inside of you, on you? Where did he touch you? Did he use any objects? Did he kiss you, lick you? Have you had anything to drink? Did you shower?
You’re asked to undress slowly while you stand on a special sheet meant to collect any trace evidence that shakes loose.
For three to five hours, the nurse swabs your mouth, your breasts, a bite mark on your neck. She scrapes under your fingernails, combs your pubic hair. She inserts a speculum inside you and drops blue dye on the tissue there to illuminate any places that are torn.
The nurse cuts a hair from your head. She takes photographs of your face and shoulders to pair with your chart, of you in the clothes you wore when you were attacked. Every injury is photographed, too — far away, close-up, with a ruler to show size.
When the exam is over, the nurse puts hair, fibers, swabs, vials of blood and urine in a container smaller than a shoebox. She seals it — your rape kit — and entrusts it to a police officer.
This is the way DNA evidence is collected. This is what you endure so police can identify your assailant, make him pay for what he did.
No one tells you that the exam may be pointless — that police might treat your kit like trash.
CNN
Will Asma al Assad take a stand or stand by her man?
In her Vogue photograph she is beautiful, wrapped in a luxurious fuchsia pashmina. She’s very rich, as the story repeatedly conveys, a stern mother of three, a woman who tries to make it happen everyday while, of course, teetering in her beloved Christian Louboutin heels.
Vogue’s spring 2011 profile of Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was highly controversial. The piece called the British-born 36-year-old a “rose in the desert” but didn’t mention Syria’s abysmal human rights record. In March, protests began spreading around the country – and met brute force from the regime led by Asma’s husband. After intense criticism in the media, Vogue reportedly first defended the piece then removed the story from its website.
Since then, little has been reported about Asma Al-Assad. It’s not even clear where she is. Could she have returned to her native England, where she attended fancy prep schools and got her college degree? Or is she still in Syria with her husband, as he fends off pressure from the growing protest movement and the many governments that have called on him to step down?
What must Syria’s first lady be thinking now? Could she do anything to stop the bloodshed?
CNN
Syrian blogger: I live or die here
In a concrete block apartment building in a working-class Syrian suburb, a young man who calls himself “Big Al” spends his days listening to Nine Inch Nails on his smartphone. He watches back-to-back episodes of “The Simpsons” on his laptop while he shovels a pan of brownies into his mouth.
He loves to cook. It’s the only thing keeping him going.
“Since I’ve been jobless for more than a year, and there are no activities to do, I get busy baking,” he said. “In fact, I made more pizzas and cookies this year than I did in the past three years.”
When the electricity is on, there he’ll be, in a tiny kitchen in his parents’ apartment, stirring and sifting and tasting. He’ll hear gunfire popping in the distance; sometimes the boom of a shell landing shakes the apartment. He is scared. Of course he is scared. Fear settles on everything. His eyelids are heavy. But what else can he do but keep on living?