A group of Mexican citizens are preparing the first civil lawsuit in the Mexican courts against British oil company BP for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The plaintiffs are bringing the class action lawsuit under a 2011 reform of the Mexican constitution that allows a large number of people with a common interest in a matter to sue as a group. The civil lawsuit encompasses “damages to people living in the area or who own residential and commercial property along the coast, and people indirectly affected” by the spill. 

With the exception of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire and thus sparked what became known as the Arab Spring, self-immolation has by all accounts become a failed form of protest as an agent of change. Since Bouazizi, in fact, 150 more Tunisians have set themselves on fire in protest against the new government that took over after the downfall of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali's secular dictatorship. 

For many of us-- and this includes those who haven’t dedicated the better part of our careers to Manchester’s mightiest quartet-- that feeling was first generated in 1983 with The Smiths’ debut performance on Top of the Pops. Still, this iconic appearance is one of the most discussed and dissected moments in televised music history. For Britain, it was a fittingly bold introduction to the band that would forever mold popular music. 

Kuklinski killed well over 100 people as a contract killer for the DeCavalcante and Gambino crime families in New Jersey and New York from the late 1960s until his arrest in 1986. He earned his nickname “The Iceman” by freezing the bodies of his victims for months before dumping them, confusing the time of death and keeping the police at bay for over a decade. His wife and children knew nothing of his “career” until the AFT bust. 

I didn’t know any victims of gun violence myself, but I did know that more than 30,000 Americans are killed every year by guns. After seeing my city recently come together so passionately to mourn the three people killed in the Marathon bombing that Monday, I couldn’t help but wonder why more people – especially the senators who voted against universal background checks – weren’t equally affected by these other 30,000 unnecessary deaths. 

For months, hundreds of community members and advocates participated in workshops throughout California to figure out how to spend millions generated through the state’s cap-and-trade program. Just when the groups finally hammered out an investment plan that would start to pump money back to communities, Gov. Brown proposed Tuesday to divert that money to the general fund.

There have been many failed attempts to bring On the Road to the silver screen by U.S. filmmakers. Francis Ford Coppola, who purchased the rights to the screenplay in 1979, tried several times to adapt the work into film, but his efforts never materialized. “I never knew how to do it,” he remarked when Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles accepted the cumbersome task of filming the unfilmable. It was Salles (best known for the Motorcycle Diaries, another road film) that Coppola finally trusted to make On the Road a reality, with a screenplay developed by José Rivera. 

As one might expect, when all these semi-estranged siblings and their provocative mother are forced to be under the same roof for seven days, shenanigans, fights, heartfelt moments, and confessions ensue. At the outset, it all feels a little too set up and predictable, almost a bad knockoff of Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections. Many characters have a too-familiar feel to them.