Awful Library Books

Browsing the shelves at some local libraries can seem like an anthropological expedition, a revealing window into how we once lived. Lacking funding to update their collections, library shelves are too often populated with books that are increasingly outdated, irrelevant — or just downright insane. Enter a duo of Detroit-area librarians.

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Asian Film Fireworks for the Fourth

For eight years now, the New York Asian Film Festival has earned “Wow”s and “Huh?”s from Manhattan audiences with its savory mix of action and art-house works from the continent that produces more movies than any other. In its scope and vigor, this is the New York film festival, and it’s run not by a heavily subsidized arts institution but by a few knowledgeable guys from Brooklyn who want to share their enthusiasms with the fanboys of the tristate area.

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How Medicated Was Michael Jackson?

The role of heavy pain-suppressant drugs in Michael Jackson’s life — and possibly in his death — continues to come into focus ahead of Tuesday’s planned memorial service, with new allegations, Friday, that the powerful anesthetic Diprivan had been found in the pop-star’s home. Citing a single, unnamed law-enforcement source, the Associated Press made the Diprivan claim on Friday. Diprivan, also known as Propofol, is typically used in hospital operating theaters as an intravenous anesthetic.

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‘Serial killer’ sought in South Carolina

The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office on Friday released a second sketch of a man believed to have fatally shot four people in less than a week near Gaffney, South Carolina. “Let me say that, under the FBI’s definition of a serial killer, yes, we have a serial killer,” Sheriff Bill Blanton told reporters in Gaffney, a town in the county of about 54,000 residents some 50 miles southwest of Charlotte, North Carolina. He would not detail what has led investigators to conclude the shootings are linked or how they received the description of the suspect that has led to the two sketches.

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