The average U.S. student watches 1,500 hours of TV annually while spending only 1,100 hours in school. If we continue to increase TV viewing while decreasing time in school, we end up with an equation that threatens the underpinnings of our democracy.
Your search for crime returned 1,290 results
Fraternity Life & Death
Junior Johnson’s Sigma Chi brothers are mourning his apparent suicide, while his mother says they killed him
On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2008, 20-year-old Gregory Marcel Johnson Jr. was discovered dead in the basement of the Sigma Chi fraternity house in downtown San Jose. He was found hanging from a ceiling water pipe, a noose fashioned from 14-gauge heavy-duty electrical cord wrapped around his neck twice.
Kids Need Options
Violent crime among young people is on the increase, according to a new study by James Fox and Marc Swatt from Northwestern University. Fox and Swatt indicate that the much heralded decline in youth crime in the 1990s has ceased. According to anecdotal data of my neighbors and friends, we are experiencing a rising tide of youth crime and gang-related violence in the suburbs of San Jose.
Drunk-in-Public Taskforce Must Be Committed to Action
Are taskforces where community hopes goes to die? I am about to find out. On Jan, 15, I went to the first meeting of the drunk-in-public taskforce, a group assembled by the council as their response to a heated public forum back in November.
Neighborhood Budget Meeting
On Saturday, City Manager Debra Figone and Mayor Chuck Reed hosted 100 neighborhood residents at City Hall for a discussion and group exercise on how to balance the city’s budget and eliminate the $65 million dollar deficit.
Saigon: the Second Look
Tom McEnery recently returned from a visit to Vietnam. This is the second in a three-part series.
Beyond the Continental Hotel and the Cathedral of Notre Dame—we just missed a wedding there—is a place I was both anxious and nervous to see. It was once called the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes. But in slight bow to political expediency, it has a new name: The War Remnants Museum.
Saigon: The Original
“My father insists that I call it Saigon—you see, he was in the Southern Army,” was the simple, direct way our guide informed us why he used the city’s old name. The comment was made in near perfect English. “Sometimes we say Ho Chi Minh City,” he conceded, “but I prefer Saigon.” This was our introduction to a place so much in American minds for the last forty years, just recently a significant factor in San Jose politics.
Ta-tas in Garlicville
News that Saratoga developer Ante Bilic is moving forward with plans to convert a Gilroy restaurant into a topless bar has set South County tongues wagging. Some locals are worrying aloud that the proposed Showgirls nightclub would be a crime magnet. Others seem to find some humor in the situation.
Rogues in Robes
Recently, a blog by The Fly referred to some cops in its title as “Rogues”—few of us who live and work Downtown see it that way. We admire and appreciate them greatly. But here’s a group of dangerous people that we should be worried about.
Very, very soon, three federal judges will be deciding whether to free 52,000 of California’s 172,000 prison inmates because of overcrowding. And we have to ask the question: “Haven’t we tried this before—and with disastrous results?”
Safe: What Does it Mean?
Well, we are no longer the safest city in the US—we lost that title two years ago. But much like that absurd slogan, “America’s 10th Largest City,” which some lunatic believed would set us up for great international renown, this title too is not worth the banner that it’s printed on. When it comes right down to it, who cares what a few magazine writers and the guy who makes the banner think? High time to set aside childish things and look to what is important in our city
A Dream Come True
Saturday, Dec. 6, marked one the most anticipated boxing matches in recent history—dubbed the “dream fight:” pound-for-pound king Manny Pacquiao versus the sport’s golden boy, Oscar De La Hoya. The fight was, quite unexpectedly, a drubbing. Pacquiao, the smaller boxer, who was not favored going into the fight, handily destroyed the bigger and older De la Hoya, forcing a stoppage going into the ninth round. It was a mauling. It looked like a video game where one guy plays all the time, and the other guy is still trying to figure out what buttons do what.
Madison Nguyen’s Last Stand
By Erin Sherbert
Madison Nguyen rolls up in a Lexus SUV and parks behind Lighthouse Café, a popular Vietnamese coffee shop off King Road. She greets a handful of volunteers, rattling off a few words in Vietnamese as she unlocks the door to the headquarters of her anti-recall campaign. It’s pure coincidence that this small space next door to the coffee shop is the same spot where Nguyen hosted her 2005 victory party, the night she was elected to San Jose’s City Council.
India Needs to Hear from ‘the Cousins’
The voice of experience, and a word of temperance, in the wake of India’s 9/11
For three days, South Asian Americans sat transfixed to their televisions, watching in horror as the bodies of innocent men, women and children lay bullet-ridden and burned in hotels and community centers in Mumbai. Many are calling these events “India’s 9/11,” and in that framing, South Asian Americans have a unique viewpoint that can inform India’s reaction to terror.
Campbell Street Party
Every time the economy tanks, police departments warn people to be on guard against the inevitable uptick in crime. The logic is simple: the more desperate people get for work and money, the more they turn to lives of crime to bring in some extra cash. Fly got a firsthand view of the phenomenon last Wednesday when we found ourselves right in the middle of a bust.
Single Gal and Is Campbell the New “It” Place?
It has been discussed here before many times about how to make San Jose a cooler, hipper, more “it” place to be, but it seems as if Campbell may have cornered the market on “it.” Whenever you seem to meet a nice, young person in the South Bay, if they don’t commute back and forth from San Francisco, inevitably, if you ask them where they live or where they spend most of their time, it’s Campbell
Silicon Valley Cubicle Workers Protest Proposition 2
Nerds Claim Their Conditions Worse Than Slaughterhouses
Thousands of high tech cubicle dwellers have taken to the streets in protest over Proposition 2 and what they feel is an unfair bias towards the welfare of barnyard animals and a societal insouciance towards the conditions they are being asked to endure.
“My house was foreclosed on, my car was repo’d and I lost my Starbuck’s card,” said one disgruntled cubey. “And we are going to spend millions of dollars giving futons to cattle?”
