Fly far away

The drug wars in Mexico have become so violent and so bad that people are installing chips in their arms so they can be tracked if kidnapped.

Fuck You, Pay Me

If I don't get my money I'm going to have to kill a ...

Seen on Audio

Check out the one and only Charnier Corey

Please disregard if you are not the intended recipient

So today when I woke up there was a missed call - "Unavailable ID." I did a quick mental scan of all the people I didn't want this to be a message from. But lo and behold it was a message for Maria Gonzalez. That tricky bitch gave her debt collector the wrong number. But the guy was all rude and was like and if this is not Maria Gonzalez hang up. I'm like ugh rude! Can he do that? Order me around on my own phone.

My brother wants to kill me....

Soul Glo (Stop frontin' you know the song!)

wouldn't you know some kid gets on the treadmill next to me, and i'm sniffing and like "is that jheri curl juice?" now i don't know if you can appreciate the noxious fumes of a real genuine unwashed head of jheri curls, but its like kryptonite for me. it transports me back to the days i had to ride the bus in the early 90s. it was like car sickness times 50. i remember one time it rained and one of the jheri crew didn't have an umbrella, and she was like "my eyes! my eyes! its burning my eyes!." that juice is deadly. but man these fools in LA just won't let this shit die.

ghost of bagram

For five years, no one would say for certain whether Aafia Siddiqui, a mother of three with a PhD from an elite American university, was alive or dead. Her family did not know and authorities in Pakistan and the US were not saying.

Yesterday, as Siddiqui was produced before a magistrate in New York to face charges of attacking US army officers in Afghanistan last month, that central mystery was resolved.

The devout Pakistani-American Muslim, once named by the US as a top al-Qaida operative, is indeed alive and now in US custody. But almost nothing can be said for certain about her whereabouts since March 2003, when she was last seen getting into a taxi with her three children in Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi.

Some campaigners believe Siddiqui was snatched by Pakistani intelligence agents, passed to the Americans, and held in solitary confinement at the US base in Bagram, Afghanistan. There she acquired mythical status - prisoner 650 - whose wails haunted other inmates.

But the US, which has made multiple allegations against Siddiqui over the years depicting her as a courier of blood diamonds and a financial fixer for al-Qaida, has denied holding her, raising the question: where has she been for five years?

Siddiqui's emergence three weeks ago in Afghanistan is riddled with confusion. The official complaint against Siddiqui says she was picked up outside the governor's compound in the eastern Afghan city of Ghazni on July 17 by police who became suspicious of her inability to speak either of Afghanistan's main languages, Pashtu or Darri. They searched her handbag, discovering documents detailing how to make dirty bombs and biological weapons and descriptions of New York landmarks, as well as sealed glass jars of "numerous chemical substances".

A day later, the complaint says, two US army officers and two FBI agents arrived in Ghazni with their interpreters for a meeting - not realising that Siddiqui was standing behind a yellow curtain in the same room.

Siddiqui is then alleged to have jumped out from behind the curtain and snatched up the assault rifle one of the officers had placed on the floor by his feet, pointing it at the Americans, and screaming threats in English. She is said to have fired at least two shots by the time an interpreter managed to wrestle the gun away from her.

According to the complaint, one officer heard her yell "Allahu Akbar" as she opened fire. One interpreter claimed she shouted: "Get the fuck out of here."

She was shot and hit at least once in the torso but, according to the complaint, continued to hit and kick the officers before losing consciousness.

Siddiqui's lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, told CNN the scenario was utterly implausible. "This is a very intelligent woman. What is she doing outside of the governor's residence?" Sharp said.

"The woman is a PhD. Is a woman like this really that stupid? There is an incongruity, and I have trouble accepting the government's claims."

Yesterday, Afghan police in Ghazni offered another competing version of her detention, telling Reuters that the US troops had demanded she be handed over. When Afghan police refused, they were disarmed. The Americans shot at Siddiqui, thinking she was a suicide bomber. A teenage boy who was with Siddiqui remained in Afghan police custody.

Before yesterday's court appearance in New York, Siddiqui was last seen heading for Karachi's railway station, where, along with her three children, then aged seven, five and six months old, she planned to catch a train to visit an uncle in Islamabad.

Her life before that was exemplary. She had studied in America, earning a degree from MIT before moving on to a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Brandeis University. She was unhappily married, to a Pakistani.

US and Pakistani officials initially admitted that she was indeed in detention, and some reports said she was being held by the Americans outside Kabul.

But by 2004 John Ashcroft, then US attorney general, said she was among seven high-level al-Qaida suspects still at large.

In the meantime, concern for her grew after accounts emerged from prisoners at Bagram of a solitary woman inmate. Anger at her disappearance was further stoked last month when Yvonne Ridley, a British Muslim journalist, flew to Pakistan and held a press conference claiming that Siddiqui was Prisoner 650 at Bagram.

Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician, hosted the event, where Ridley, who also now does human rights work, said: "I call her the 'grey lady' because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her."

A group of Arab prisoners who escaped from Bagram in 2005 said they saw a woman being taken to the toilets at the base. After breaking out, Abu Yahya al-Libi told an Arabic news channel that there was a woman from Pakistan at Bagram who was referred to simply as prisoner 650, held in solitary confinement.

The American account of her capture was dismissed yesterday. "This is one of the greatest lies of the 21st century ... " said IA Rehman, director general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), an independent organisation.

Siddiqui's sister, Fauzia, said she had been raped and tortured. "Her rape and torture is a crime beyond anything she was accused of," she said. "This is the real crime of terror here." She pleaded for the child who was with her sister when she was captured, according to the American authorities, to be immediately handed over to the family. It is unclear what has happened to the other two children.

"She has had no access to any lawyer ... presume her to be innocent before proven guilty, please. How can this punishment be fit for any crime?" said Fauzia Siddiqui.

Asim Qureshi, a London-based investigator for Cage Prisoners, a campaign group, said the US had in the past denied holding other prisoners, such as Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a Spaniard of Syrian descent also captured in Pakistan.

"They just release the information when it suits them ... everything we know about Bagram means that we know she [Siddiqui] would have suffered abuse."

Constance Howarth aka "The Black Widow"

The company secretary of Manchester underworld boss Bobby Spiers, and convicted gun-runner Constance Howarth, known locally as the Black Widow. Spiers ordered a $10,000 pound hit on David Totton, a known criminal. Howarth agreed to sit in the pub and guide two gunmen to their target by sending text messages to the pair. One shot Totton, 29, six times in the face and chest but he miraculously survived. However, the weapon belonging to his accomplice jammed and amid the ensuing commotion, drinkers overpowered the two would-be assassins and shot them with their own weapons. Both managed to escape but were caught by the pub's clientele and attacked as they lay dying from their gunshot wounds on a nearby grass banking. Meanwhile, Howarth applied fresh lipstick in the toilets and left. No one came forward to identify those who shot the two young gang members and by the time police arrived CCTV footage from inside the pub had been wiped clean.