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Police in Ferguson, Mo., on Monday began telling protesters – who have been gathered for days demanding justice for the death of an unarmed teenager at the hands of police – that they were no longer allowed to stand in place for more than five seconds, but had to keep moving. When inquiries were made to law enforcement officers regarding which law prohibits gathering or standing for more than five seconds on public sidewalks,” the ACLU of Missouri wrote in its emergency federal court filing to block the apparent policy, “the officers indicated that they did not know and that it did not matter. The officers further indicated that they were following the orders of their supervisors, whom they refused to name.” The ACLU argued the policy was a prior restraint on speech and asked for a temporary restraining order.

“The attorney general came to court via phone and announced that there was an alternative speech zone that was being set up,” Tony Rothert, the legal director of the ACLU of Missouri, told msnbc. That satisfied the judge, who agreed it was a close call but denied the ACLU’s request to block the policy.

So where and what was that free speech zone? “It’s supposed to be at the intersection of Ferguson and Florissant,” Rothert said. “There is a field there, but it is padlocked and no one can get in.

America 2014: “Free Speech Zone padlocked and no one can get in.“  Yeah, that about sums it up. (via twiststreet)
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Jess was on her way to college with an athletic scholarship—until her first sexual experience enabled her to see inter-dimensional monsters who live secretly among us and feed on SINERGY (energies emitted by sin)!

From the new Image solicits, a book called Sinergy. Weren’t we just talking about books that would try and take Sex Criminals as their starting point on the last episode…?

(Also, “emitted by sin” sounds worryingly puritanical to me. Does this mean the book is assuming that sex out of wedlock is a sin? Because, holy shit if so.)

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Perkins, a playwright, is the second female writer to join a DC series starring a high-profile female character in November – along with Meredith Finch, who’s taking over “Wonder Woman” with her husband David Finch. “Supergirl” #36 is slated to be illustrated by regular series artist Emanuela Lupacchino, also a female creator.

Kate Perkins joins Supergirl over at DC as co-writer in November. As the CBR quote above points out, Perkins is the second female writer to join a DC title in November alongside Meredith Finch – but that’s also following October’s addition of Genevieve Valentine as new Catwoman writer, and Becky Cloonan as co-writer on Gotham Academy.

Currently, the female writer/artist list with regular DC gigs goes Perkins, Finch, Valentine, Cloonan, Emanuela Lupacchino, Margueritte Bennett, Amanda Connor, Ann Nocenti, Babs Tarr, Caitlin Kittredge, Cat Staggs and Yuko Shimizu, right? Oh, and Sandra Hope, too. With Ming Doyle, Meghan Hetrick and Tula Lotay on minis, Gail Simone on a secret project yet to be announced and a handful of fill-in/irregular creators on other books (Joelle Jones on He-Man in November was a nice surprise).

Worth pointing out that neither Perkins nor Valentine were comic book writers previous to their new gigs, too – so it’s expanding the overall talent pool as well as expanding DC’s female creator count. A nice counterpoint to commentary about “the big leagues” and “running a business” from other publishers out there, he writes, pointedly.

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The intermission was especially long, with boys hyped up on sugar with nothing to do but ask their parents to purchase one of the doodads being hawked by vendors canvassing the seats. The mother in front of me balked at the $25 price tag on a watch that would light up at a key part of the performance. When her son insisted she held up his Captain America motorcycle, “Do you know much this cost? $15.” Then she held up his popcorn in a box covered in Marvel characters. “Do you know how much this cost? $7.” Then she held up a picture her son had taken in front of a green screen so it looked like he was posing with the Avengers amid some rubble. “Do you know much this cost? $27. Do you know how much that seat you’re sitting in cost?” He shook his head. “No. Well, Citibank does.”

From here.
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The intermission was especially long, with boys hyped up on sugar with nothing to do but ask their parents to purchase one of the doodads being hawked by vendors canvassing the seats. The mother in front of me balked at the $25 price tag on a watch that would light up at a key part of the performance. When her son insisted she held up his Captain America motorcycle, “Do you know much this cost? $15.” Then she held up his popcorn in a box covered in Marvel characters. “Do you know how much this cost? $7.” Then she held up a picture her son had taken in front of a green screen so it looked like he was posing with the Avengers amid some rubble. “Do you know much this cost? $27. Do you know how much that seat you’re sitting in cost?” He shook his head. “No. Well, Citibank does.”

From here.
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Here you see an internal Time Inc. spreadsheet that was used to rank and evaluate “writer-editors” at SI.com. (Time Inc. provided this document to the Newspaper Guild, which represents some of their employees, and the union provided it to us.) The evaluations were done as part of the process of deciding who would be laid off. Most interesting is this ranking criteria: “Produces content that [is] beneficial to advertiser relationship.” These editorial employees were all ranked in this way, with their scores ranging from 2 to 10.

Anthony Napoli, a union representative with the Newspaper Guild, tells us: “Time Inc. actually laid off Sports Illustrated writers based on the criteria listed on that chart. Writers who may have high assessments for their writing ability, which is their job, were in fact terminated based on the fact the company believed their stories did not ‘produce content that is beneficial to advertiser relationships.’” The Guild has filed an arbitration demand disputing the use of that and other criteria in the layoff decisionmaking process. In a letter to Time Inc., the Guild says that four writer-editors were laid off “out of seniority order” based on the rankings in the spreadsheet above.

…Holy shit. (From here.)