To highlight the plight of the homeless, some have traded the comfort of their apartments for cold tents along the Canal St.-Martin in Paris.



The government says that a third of the country’s homeless hold jobs.

Middle-Class French Join Sleep-In Over Homelessness

PARIS, Jan. 1 — Hundreds of people emerged from tents beside this city’s Canal St.-Martin to greet the chilly New Year with a hot lunch from a nearby soup kitchen. But not all of them were homeless.

Dozens of otherwise well-housed, middle-class French have been spending nights in tents along the canal, in the 10th Arrondissement, in solidarity with the country’s growing number of “sans domicile fixe,” or “without fixed address,” the French euphemism for people living on the street. The bleak yet determinedly cheerful sleep-in is meant to embarrass the French government into doing something about the problem.

“Each person should have the minimum dignity in a country as rich as this,” said Bleunwenn Manrot, a 28-year-old with a newsboy cap on her head and a toothbrush in her hand. Ms. Manrot drove more than six hours with friends from her home in Carhaix, Brittany, to spend New Year’s Eve along the canal.

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From left, Tyrell, Gary and Dominick, among the small population of young inmates at Rikers Island, received information about their rights.



a Department of Correction van dropped the 17-year-old and about 30 other convicts at Queensborough Plaza, among the “homeless, a lot of prostitutes, and crackheads” on the street that morning, he said.

Helping New York Youths, Fresh Out of Jail, Stay Out

After serving six months for strong-arm robbery, Frank Stephens left Rikers Island nearly five years ago in the same manner as most inmates. Just as dawn broke in April, a Department of Correction van dropped the 17-year-old and about 30 other convicts at Queensborough Plaza, among the “homeless, a lot of prostitutes, and crackheads” on the street that morning, he said. He shared a few of his $22 with three other teenage convicts, before hopping on the train home to Brownsville, Brooklyn.

“Maybe they made it, like me,” Mr. Stephens, now 21, said of the other convicts he was released with. “Or, maybe they fell back into old habits.”

Half of all Rikers inmates serving city sentences of a year or less are back in jail within a year, according to the Correction Department. Juvenile advocates argue that Queensborough Plaza — where they estimate 10 teenage convicts are dropped off each week — is for many of them the first step on a path back to jail, as they slip back into the city alone, without help assimilating. Even department officials say the plaza, having always been the closest transportation hub to Rikers since it opened as a jail in 1932, is not the ideal place for any newly released convict, young or old.

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Caio Fonseca





http://www.seniorandshopmaker.com/fonseca.htm

Experiments suggest that the conscious choice is an illusion, but some philosophers and physicists choose to disagree.

Once settled in France, Mick and Keith began “an endless game of cat-and-mouse,” which found them “struggling against all odds, virtually every illicit drug known to man, and one another to begin work on their new album.”

Norman Seeff

Keith Richards, from an “Exile on Main Street” photo shoot by Norman Seeff, a designer and photographer for the album.

“Layla” the album, like “Exile,” was a two-record set heavily steeped in both the blues and the drug world.

The sense of chaos and evil that surrounded the recording of “Exile on Main Street” — originally titled “Tropical Disease” — is palpable in Greenfield’s thrillingly immediate, if sometimes overripe, prose. He displays his strengths as a reporter in stories about some of the more lunatic hangers-on. Greenfield also performs a fine service by dispelling the myth that “Exile” was greeted tepidly by critics — and by noting that nearly a third of the album is made up of leftovers from “Let It Bleed” and “Sticky Fingers.”

Torn and Frayed

The album is dying. As a format of recorded music, the album — LP, CD, record, disc, platter, licorice pizza, whatever — has been tossed aside by file sharing and the iPod. Tower Records, rest in peace. For better or worse, pop music has effectively returned to the days before the Beatles arrived, when everything was strictly one single at a time.

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Chris Anthony

http://www.chris-anthony.com/