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The question-answering iPhone app Siri will tell Americans the best places to see strippers, score weed and hide a body, but it won’t direct them to their nearest abortion clinic.
Megan Carpentier at RawStory.com investigated how reliable Siri is when it comes to finding abortion clinics or emergency contraceptives, and found it not only lacking, but sometimes downright interventionist.
For example, when asked where to get an abortion in Washington, D.C., Siri recommends anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centres, but makes no mention of the local Planned Parenthood.
…
The RawStory.com article notes Siri will tell you where to hide a body, where to find strippers, where to find prostitutes, where to get illegal drugs, what to do if you’ve had an erection for over five hours, and where to get breast implants.
hen California teacher Mark Takano ran for Congress 15 years ago, he lost to Republican challenger Ken Calvert by a scant 519 votes. Two years later, things looked more promising. Police had caught Calvert with a prostitute; Takano should have easily clinched a win. But just three months before the election, Ray Haynes—a Calvert supporter in the state assembly—outed Takano as gay.
“I said quite clearly I personally don’t want a homosexual representing me in Congress,” Haynes said at the time.
Takano’s opponents sent a late mailer, which asked voters in pink letters to consider whether Takano should be “A Congressman for Riverside … or San Francisco?” He lost again, by a much wider margin than his first run.
But what once sunk his campaign could prove to be a boon as Takano runs for the U.S. House again next year. “I think the atmosphere has changed fairly dramatically,” Takano says. “A former regional director of the Democratic Party here [told me], ‘Your sexual orientation back in the early ’90s was maybe a liability, but now it’s probably an asset.’”
… We promised a substation as part of our efforts to revitalize Mid-Market, and I am happy to see this move forward,” said Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the neighborhood.
The area remains one of San Francisco’s last pockets of skid row, where poverty and desperation have seeped deep over the decades. With a cluster of single-room occupancy hotels and programs serving the homeless and the destitute, many of whom are struggling with mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction, there is no easy way to fix the problems, which include a troubling crime rate.
“You name it, I’ve seen it,” Richard Rios, an assistant manager at Baldwin House, said early Tuesday morning as he worked the front desk buzzing in residents and signing in visitors. “I’ve seen muggings. I’ve seen prostitution. I’ve seen drug dealing. I’ve seen fights. I’ve seen all kinds of stuff.”
The cost of Healthy San Francisco is split between the city, which pays about $100 million, and a little under $80 million kicked in by local businesses. The 2007 law that crated the program mandated all businesses with over 20 employees (and non-profits with more than 50) had to either provide health insurance for their workers, pay into a city-operated health care fund or contribute to health savings accounts based on the size of the business and the number of hours worked by each employee.
Even with these multiple sources of funding, there have been concerns that the rising cost of health care–and the city’s substantial budget deficit–could put the program in jeopardy and increase the financial pressure on the city’s health clinics, which already feel squeezed the large influx of new patients brought in by the program.
This is not the first time San Francisco has been a selected for the Harvard prize. The city won previously in 1998 for its First Offender Prostitution Program and in 2004 for a Sheriff Department program targeted at reducing violence in prisons.
Santa Clara County is opening up more beds for the homeless. The extra 365 beds will put a small dent in the county’s estimated 7,000 homeless population…
The National Retail Federation says 226 million people spent more than 52 billion dollars while shopping on Black Friday. That’s a new record in participation, and a big sales increase from last year’s 45 billion dollars. Today is Cyber Monday, and retailers are already reporting higher than normal sales over the weekend on the internet…
Druid Heights in Marin County meets the criteria for the register of National Register of Historic Places. The five-acre estate was once home to philosopher Alan Watts, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, and prostitutes union founder Margot St. James, where they shared a lifestyle deprived of many modern comforts. The property awaits acceptance into the National Register.
See the full article from “Crosscurrents from KALW News (blog)”
In a political era in which government is often blamed as a problem rather than a solution, Harvard University’s Innovations in American Government Awards hopes to show the converse can be true. And one of its six finalists – out of 563 applicants from around the country – is Healthy San Francisco.
The city’s first-of-its-kind universal health care program is up against New York City’s NYC Service, which connects volunteers with service opportunities; a separate New York City antipoverty program; Littleton, Colo.’s home-grown business program; a job creation program in Oregon; and an apprenticeship program for Boston teachers.
The finalists will receive $10,000 and the winner, to be announced early next year, will receive $100,000. The money is designed to help the winners replicate their efforts in other cities. Previous winners include programs begun elsewhere that have been adopted in San Francisco, including New York City’s crime-tracking program called CompStat and Chicago’s 311 phone system. San Francisco has won twice before – in 1998 for a program to help prostitutes and in 2004 for an effort to stop violence in prisons.
If the person will listen, she’s discreet but direct, getting as much information out there as possible. Pedro uses polite language, but she’s no softie about breaking the news. “You may not get them again,” she says of her attempts to notify people and encourage them to get treatment. “You try to knock it all out the same day.”
* * * * *
The youngest person Pedro ever had to break the news to was 14 years old. The oldest was 87, in Miami, where she spent three years notifying contacts in the late 1990s. Since coming to Tampa in 2006, she has met contacts in nearly every neighborhood in Hillsborough County, from upper-middle class subdivisions in Valrico to mobile homes on dirt roads in Wimauma.
In a single day, Pedro will reach out to teenagers still in school and middle-aged professionals; she’ll talk to young wives on their way out to the grocery store and professional dancers working at strip clubs along Nebraska Avenue. Everyone gets the same introduction and treatment.
See the full article from “Tbo.com”
Nikki Collins (Deanna Durbin) witnesses a murder while waiting for a train, but can’t get the police to believe her when no body is discovered. While they dismiss her as daft, she enlists the help of a mystery writer to sleuth out the culprits on her own. Based on a story by veteran mystery writer Leslie Charteris (\The Saint\), this is a wildly entertaining mix of comedy, musical, and suspense, rendered in evocative noir style by cameraman Woody Bredell (\Phantom Lady, Christmas Holiday, The Killers\), and featuring a superb cast of sinister and suspicious supporting players swirling ominously around “America’s Sweetheart.”
\Christmas Holiday (1944) Dir. Robert Siodmak. 93 min. 9:20 p.m.\
A young soldier gets more than he bargained for on a holiday stopover in New Orleans when he is introduced to a young “singer” (prostitute) and a local “nightclub” (brothel) and he learns the tale of her descent into degradation. Venerable scribe Herman Mankiewicz hews Somerset Maugham’s novel into a brilliant script, directed with delirious intensity by Siodmak. Deann …
… I don’t know how I made it, I just don’t. ‘Cause I beat myself up,” she said, describing her life on drugs. “Sometimes I looked at myself and I didn’t even recognize myself, that’s how bad my skin [was] and my face was sucked in. I looked like death.”
Her physical appearance was not the only thing that suffered as a result of her addiction.
“Drugs are something else,” she said. “You don’t think right, ’cause you’re not all there. You do things on impulse. And you get in trouble like that, too.”
Joiner said she got into even more trouble when she turned to prostitution as a means to pay for drugs.
“When you turn dates and you prostitute, a little bit of you is taken out every time,” she said. “You get desensitized to anybody and people’s feelings. You become hard and callous. You do. I did. And the more you turn dates, the more you use. That’s how you get lost in drug addiction, too. You don’t feel worthy.”
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A San Francisco woman accused of breaking into the hotel room of “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek is facing trial on charges of first-degree burglary and receiving stolen property.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Andrew Cheng ruled at the end of a preliminary hearing on Tuesday that there was sufficient evidence for 56-year-old Lucinda Moyers to stand trial on those charges.
Authorities say Moyers broke into Trebek’s room at a downtown San Francisco hotel on July 26 and stole a bracelet, purse and wallet with $661 in cash.
The Jeopardy host allegedly tore his Achilles tendon as he tried to chase Moyers down.
Moyers’s attorney, Mark Jacobs, has said his client was a prostitute looking for a john and was not in Trebek’s room. He said the bracelet and the $661 were not found on Moyers after she was searched.
