Drug Dealing for Jesus: Mexico’s Evangelical Narcos

News anchor Marcos Knapp had been broadcasting reports of narco carnage all week from his western state of Michoacan: the mutilated corpses of 12 federal police officers dumped on a road; police headquarters attacked by dozens of gunmen with grenades; three officers called out to a traffic accident and then murdered in an ambush. But, as violent as the incidents were, Knapp was only truly shocked when a caller phoned his news show and said he was one of the cartel capos behind this bloodshed. “Our fight is with the federal police because they are attacking our families,” the voice said calmly while Knapp stared worriedly at the camera

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Walter Cronkite spoke from the heartland

When David Halberstam wrote his 1979 book, "The Powers That Be," about four powerful news organizations and how they shaped the national dialogue, he focused on three print publications — Time magazine, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — and one television network: CBS. The reason for CBS was obvious.

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Private space pioneers: We’re inheritors of Apollo legacy

Richard Garriott had more reason than most to dream the Apollo moon landings would rapidly expand space travel. His father was a NASA astronaut, as were many of his neighbors near Texas’ Johnson Space Center. With nearly all of humanity still on Earth nearly four decades later, the computer game developer paid $35 million for a ride aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the international space station

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From doughnuts to lift off, Apollo 11 launch was blast

Just after midnight on July 16, 1969, Jack King kissed his wife goodbye at their Cocoa Beach, Florida home, jumped in his car, and drove to Dunkin Donuts for a doughnut and a cup of coffee. It was the start of a big day: the launch of a Saturn 5 rocket, lifting man from the face of the Earth to the face of the moon. King, the chief of public information at Kennedy Space Center, would become known that day as the voice of Apollo 11.

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Why the Controversy over Judge Sotomayor’s ‘Wise Latina’ Remark?

Washington politics may not be good at producing health-care reform, but it’s great at creating catchy new lingo. Getting “Borked.” “Hanging chads.” “Lipsticks on pit bulls.” The latest is “wise Latina,” two words that have been repeated ad nauseam since the middle of May, when conservatives started flogging the text of a 2001 speech given by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor at the University of California, Berkeley. In that talk — on the subject of a Latino presence in the American judiciary — Sotomayor now famously said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Since May 14, when the New York Times posted the full text of the speech online, a vaudevillian assortment of right-wing politicians and commentators have taken this remark as evidence that Sotomayor is a racist who will pursue an unknown agenda once ensconced in that great neoclassical retirement home known as the U.S

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U.S. panel demands release of Baha’is facing trial in Iran

Seven Baha’i prisoners face a death-penalty trial Saturday in Iran amid calls for their release from a U.S. panel on religious freedom. Responding to a letter from Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist who spent four months in an Iranian jail earlier this year, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) demanded the seven prisoners be freed rather than stand trial on charges of espionage and religious violations.

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