"This time, it is not an entire agency, but a local developer and town officials who Mr. Serpico says have ignored his complaints; this time, it is not over issues like taking cash payments from drug dealers, but over the fate of some trees and the desecration of pristine woodland. 'It’s like fighting the system again,' Mr. Serpico said. 'Here I’m trying to enjoy my tranquillity and I’m being dragged back into a world of corruption.' So discouraged has Mr. Serpico, 77, become that he has renewed his American and Italian passports with an eye, he said in all seriousness, toward moving back to Europe."
"Deen, who is 66, holds to a moonlight-and-magnolias romanticism that is common among white Southerners of her generation. Yes, it is now in questionable taste, and yes, it reveals an impoverished moral imagination. But this acute sensitivity is a fairly new thing in American culture. Every younger white Southerner who holds enlightened opinions on race knows that you have to allow for the cultural deformation of older white Southerners. Every one of us knows elderly whites who, despite their residual racism, have done more good for particular black neighbors than many of us who believe the right things, but who have done little or nothing to help actual black people in our midst."
From the Tumblr Concerns of an Egyptian Anglophile, a photo of an estimated 33 million people protesting; BBC News estimates this as perhaps the single largest gathering of protesters in a single place in all recorded history. But this inspirational spectacle came at great cost, as Sarah Lynch and Doug Stanglin report in USA Today, "At least 30 killed in day of protests in Egypt."
Via Mother Jones.com, video of the first time former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has fired a gun since sustaining a gunshot wound to the head during a January 2011 assassination attempt in Tucson, Arizona. For more, click here.