Lead Story
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Last month the local-news Web site Pasadena Now hired two reporters based in India to cover the “city government and political scene” in Pasadena, California. The site’s proprietor explained to the Associated Press that since most information can easily be gathered long-distance (especially now that Pasadena city council meetings are viewable online), outsourcing was a reasonable and cost-effective way to improve the site’s reportage. Meanwhile, UPI reported in March that to meet increased demand among U.S. businesspeople for visas to India, the Indian embassy in Washington, D.C., had been forced to post ads looking to outsource some of their visa-application processing.
Because tough local laws prohibiting sex offenders from living near places children congregate have left most of Florida’s Miami-Dade County off-limits, the state Department of Corrections was as of April housing at least five offenders in a makeshift encampment underneath the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which connects Miami and Miami Beach. According to a report by CNN, the site lacks electricity and running water, is open to the elements, and teems with rats; because all offenders are required to be at their residence between 10 PM and 6 AM, a probation officer visits before dawn each day to check up. Offender Kevin Morales–who has a job and a car but was forced to leave his apartment because groups of children used the pool in his building–told the reporter, “Jail is anytime much better than this.”
The Litigious Society
Big Star Trek fan Tony Alleyne of Leicestershire, England, was last discussed here in 2006: he’d recently filed for bankruptcy and was having a hard time selling his apartment, which he’d painstakingly converted into a replica of the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Last month Alleyne finally sold the one-bedroom on eBay for the equivalent of about $847,000–reportedly five times its market value–after spending more than a year remodeling it into the flight deck from Star Trek: Voyager.
