May I interest you in some Aunt Mary? Or perhaps a little baby bhang? No, I can see, you prefer El Diablito. Or bambalacha? Juju? Laughing weed? Doobie, chillum, ganja, blue de Hue, black mo, ding, bud, leaf, Marley, pachalolo? Of course, how could I be so foolish, some rainy day woman? Still not with me? How about some skunk, righteous bush or, let's be perfectly clear, marijuana? The intimate, hazy compact between pot smokers and their herb has generated a thesaurus of terms for cannabis, rivalled only perhaps by the Inuit and their supposedly countless words for snow. Now one of those terms has leapt from the bubbling bong of pot subculture and landed in the American mainstream: 420, pronounced four-twenty, has become the banner cry for high-school pot smokers and for those campaigning to legalize marijuana. [continues 495 words]
Cannabis Has Spawned A Huge Number Of Nicknames, But Only One Can Be A Noun, Verb, Adjective, Date - And Time Of Day, Reports . May I interest you in some Aunt Mary? Or perhaps a little baby bhang? No, I can see, you prefer El Diablito. Or bambalacha? Juju? Laughing weed? Doobie, chillum, ganja, blue de Hue, black mo, ding, bud, leaf, Marley, pachalolo? Of course, how could I be so foolish, some rainy day woman? Still not with me? How about some skunk, righteous bush or, let's be perfectly clear, marijuana? [continues 567 words]
A newly elected US state politician who says all police should be killed is testing the legendary tolerance of New Hampshire. Since being elected to the state legislature, Tom Alciere has been called a "hate-mongering lunatic" by a police chief, been shunned by fellow Republicans and earned the "shock and dismay" of the governor. The Granite State - where the motto is "Live free or die" - is now reviewing its electoral system to discover how he got elected. He in turn has called those who voted for him in the town of Nashua "a bunch of fat, stupid, ugly old ladies that watch soap operas, play bingo, read tabloids and don't know the metric system". [continues 231 words]
Deep in the woods of Appalachia, old stills not used since Prohibition are bubbling again and the new breed of moonshiners have brought modern technology to the illicit trade. Guards with guns, night-vision goggles and radio scanners protect the remote stills. Sophisticated accounting techniques are being used to buy the vast quantities of sugar, rye and containers needed. The main markets for moonshine are the poor towns of Virginia and North Carolina which have been passed by in America's recent economic boom. The decline in the textile and tobacco industries has left pockets of desperate poverty, where a shot of moonshine for 60p is more than welcome when legal whisky sells for three times the price. The police are pursuing the bootleggers on money-laundering charges, which carry heavier sentences than illegal liquor laws. Accountants have been brought in to pore over the bank accounts of Appalachian farmers. Agents made their first arrests earlier this month. [end]
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel prize-winning Colombian writer, has been acting as a behind-the-scenes negotiator in talks between Washington and Bogota on how to quell Colombia's drug and civil wars. The author helped bring together Presidents Clinton and Andres Pastrana earlier this year. He has also used his close friendship with Fidel Castro to enable Mr Pastrana to talk to the Cuban-linked rebels waging war in his country. In an interview with the New Yorker magazine, Garcia Marquez, 72, tells how his fame and the respect he commands in his divided country enables him to act as a "fixer". The violence in Colombia has now reached a point where 200 people are kidnapped and 2,000 are murdered a month. [continues 71 words]
