Day: 31 January 2004

An investigative journalist is publishing a book alleging that five untouchable rich narco-gangsters are responsible for the murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez.

‘Mexican federal authorities have conducted investigations, which reveal who the killers are,’ she claims. ‘Five men from Juarez and one from Tijuana who get together and kill women in what can only be described as blood sport. Some of those involved are prominent men with important political connections – untouchables.’

The chosen victims are so young, explains Washington, to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. Underlings supply new victims: ‘They capture the girls and bring them to their masters.’

Washington alleges at least 100 women have been killed by these men, of whom all but one are multi-millionaires. They have political connections going all the way to President Vicente Fox, and some have allegedly made contributions to Fox’s presidential campaign. They have ties to the Juarez Cartel, and have used their drug wealth to build respectable businesses.

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(Thanks, Zed!)

A Negativland-produced indie film coming to the San Francisco Indie festival features nothing but product-placement shots from other movies.

Steve Seid, Video Curator for Pacific Film Archive and Peter Conheim of Negativland present a finely tuned montage of egregious product placement shots, drawing on 70 films – removing the gratuitous and unnecessary plots and leaving behind just the exhilarating core of consumerism.

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(Thanks, Steve!)

Atom is a powerful, open, RSS-like syndication format, but so far, not a lot has been done with it. Now, Deez Steeles has used Atom to ship an iPhoto-to-Typepad tool that directly exports pictures that are retouched, selected and organized in Apple’s iPhoto to Movable Type’s Typepad blogging service. That’s pretty sweet.

I’m digging the new Atom API interface to typepad. I have just completed a prototype of an iPhoto2Typepad interface. That means that its now possible to select photos in iPhoto and directly export into a Typepad Photo Album. This is basically my Holy Grail of digital photo convenience. Now the same program we use to import, and organise our pictures can send them right to Typep

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(via Dive Into Mark)

The guys who run Car Talk on NPR have dumped RealMedia in favor of Windows Media Player, having gotten fed up with Real’s deceptive practices that try to force you into downloading the payware version of their player.

Here’s the problem. In order to hear our audio, you have to go to Real.com and download their “free” RealPlayer. But when you get to the web site, the free player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night. And the site seems to do everything it possibly can to get you to “buy” a player instead. You have to work very hard to get the free player. And we think that stinks. And get this. It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That’s something, huh?

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(via /.)