It's easy to laugh at a grandiose addict taking his rant on the road, but troubled Charlie Sheen may have a mental illness and, if so, needs help. We've learned plenty about addiction from Charlie Sheen, on our narrated tour through winning-ville: Alcoholics Anonymous is a cult, social crack smoking is just plain fun and tiger blood can subdue most anything.

by Amarnath Amarasingam The recent revelation that members of the federal and provincial Conservative Party have been getting into bed with former members of the World Tamil Movement (WTM), banned as a terrorist organization in Canada since 2008, was not...

Reaching, perhaps, the pinnacle of his pop-culture status, the once-anonymous Chicagoan behind the popular and profane @MayorEmanuel Twitter account appeared Tuesday night on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," meeting fellow satirist Stephen Colbert and hinting that the fake Rahm Emanuel could one day return.

by Anthony Reinhart Tories trying to win support from South Asians in Ontario have opened the door to remnants of a Tamil Tiger front group the federal Conservatives themselves banned in 2008. The unlikely association, forged behind a curtain of...

Columbia professor is the foul-mouthed mystery impersonatorThe other (expletive) shoe has dropped, and the anonymous Twitterer known as @MayorEmanuel is anonymous no more: He's Dan Sinker, a 36-year-old Columbia College journalism assistant professor and founder/editor of the long-running, now-defunct Chicago-based magazine Punk Planet.

The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) today cautioned people to not be deceived by welfare related hoax text messages sent by anonymous sources which claim that if the receiver forwards the...

18 Days That Shook The World How People Power Worked By Charles Levinson And Margaret Coker Hosni Mubarak was thrust by violence into the leadership of the Arab world’s most populous country, and has been forced out by a wave of popular protest. Stability had been the watchword of his presidency, with emergency law — ...

A monthly exploration of addiction and recovery through the lens of Buddhism. Step One: Powerless "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol [drugs, food, sex, etc.], that our lives had become unmanageable." People often tell me that they have trouble with the word "powerless" in the first of the 12 Steps. They'll say, "I'm not powerless; there are lots of things I can do. " They thi...

by IRIN News COLOMBO, 12 January 2011 (IRIN) - Ongoing storms have dumped more rain in one eastern district of Sri Lanka than witnessed in a century, according to the country's Disaster Management Centre (DMC). Nationwide, storms have hit some...

By Indi Samarajiva Mark Zuckerberg was recently named TIME magazine’s person of the year. This comes as no surprise to the over 500 million people who know him impersonally as the founding head of their online social network, Facebook. It does, however, disappoint supporters of WikiLeak’s Julian Assange, another strong contender. They both have something ...

A package left at L.A. County Sheriff's Department headquarters contains 100 hours of footage of men who appear to be assaulting severely disabled women. Investigators are looking for leads on who is involved and where the attacks took place.The package mysteriously left at Los Angeles County Sheriff's headquarters shocked even some of the department's most grizzled detectives: A hundred hours of ...

When voters went to the polls two years ago, Nikki Haley was a South Carolina state representative mostly known for backing Gov. Mark Sanford's vetoes and stepping on toes in a push to force lawmakers to record every one of their votes.Alvin Greene was toiling away in the Army, an anonymous grunt with a string of bad performance reviews from an earlier stint in the Air Force. Tim Scott was a Charl...

Times critic S. Irene Virbila was waiting for a table at Red Medicine when the manager snapped her photo and told her to leave. It sparked a debate over whether modern critics can — or should — remain anonymous.Los Angeles Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila ducked into Red Medicine, a new Beverly Hills restaurant, for some modern Vietnamese food the other night, but got nothing t...

A decade ago, having recently begun Buddhist meditation practice, I attended a lecture/Q&A with a Tibetan master at a Buddhist center in Hollywood. The warm vibes and the stunning icons and paintings suggested a sacred, healing space. The speaker -- I knew so little at the time, I thought his name was "Sri" -- seemed the embodiment of enlightenment. He described how we can foster spiritua...

On December 9th, the late Sujith Prasanna Perera was given the National Integrity Award by Transparency International. It is perhaps telling that our bearer of integrity is dead. Sujith Perera died for fighting fraud within the Customs Department. His murderers were convicted, but he could not be replaced. More tellingly, his attitude of taking risks ...

By Indi Samarajiva Behind every conspiracy, there’s a Private First Class, getting the coffee. There have always been leaks. WikiLeaks is just a digital bucket. The Leaks Bradley Manning had been busted down to Private First Class for assaulting an officer. It was the latest in a series of troubles for the 22 year old ...

Anonymous donor to match value of up to 100 gold coins found in Salvation Army kettles in area this seasonGold coins in the kettles of Salvation Army bell-ringers have become as much a tradition in the Chicago area as lights along the Magnificent Mile.

by Tisaranee Gunasekara Basil Rajapaksa is unabashed in claiming that in Sri Lanka an era of ‘ruler kings’ has begun. Western ideas of transparency, he claims, along with limits of presidential power and accountability, are not relevant to ‘Asian Culture’.”...

A woman from Humboldt County writes anonymous, fictionalized blog accounts of skirting the law and, with luck, staying alive.COPY DESK: Please attach to the story on export the following slug: la-me-pot-blogger-audio

Many people look to Siddhartha Gautama as an example of someone who attained nirvana, a buddha. Every other week in this column we look at what it might be like if Siddhartha were on his spiritual journey today. How would he combine Buddhism and dating? How would he handle stress in the workplace? "What Would Sid Do?" is devoted to taking an honest look at what we as meditators face in th...

(Lanka-e-News, 09.Nov.2010, 10.40PM) A senior DIG who wished to remain anonymous speaking to Lanka e news said , the IGP should shoulder the full blame for the stupid and blind raid conducted by the...

By Gazala Anver Construction on the illegal bungalow built by the Air Force Commander, Roshan Goonetilleke in Sudugalla, Knuckles, an environmentally protected area, is still continuing, alleges Programmes Manager, Sri Lanka Nature Forum, Sajeewa Chamikara. According to Chamikara, construction has been going on for over a month now. “Minister Faiser Mustapha went to see the ...

THAT the second testing of his urine sample might clear Manju Wanniarachchi of any wrongdoing and so restore his Commonwealth Games gold medal is pretty much a hope that rides on the wings of a prayer. The truth though is, hardly ever does the result of a second examination (for banned substance in the system ...

We are a group of concerned citizens including university academics who are writing this letter to express our concern over the incident reported in The Sunday Leader of September 19 and 26, 2010. According to these reports the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura sent six female students in a university vehicle to ...

Two weeks ago, Dr Dayan Jayatilleka alleged that I had drafted a constitutional amendment in the 1970s in an abortive attempt to enable Mrs Bandaranaike to extend her term of office. Last week, in an article in which he transported...

Victim may have been robbed of $2,500 she had gathered to file for bankruptcy, authorities sayA Frankfort Square man accused of fatally shooting an acquaintance and stuffing her body in her car trunk allegedly left an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting early to commit the murder, a Will County police sergeant testified Monday.

NOT that our little world of sport was at peace with itself last week and so free of issues that might warrant critical scrutiny. If there was such bliss for seven straight days, then, it must’ve been in some other land; over here (where, as the popular joke says, God deems it unnecessary to station ...

With trademark brashness, Emanuel helped White House pass stimulus, health careWASHINGTON — A president's chief of staff tends to be discreet, low-key and anonymous.

Government officials in the Vavuniya, Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu districts yesterday said that they get a number of complaints from people who have returned to the country after a lapse of 20- 25 years over the illegal occupation of their lands. Lands taken over by the LTTE were distributed among Mahaveer families by them during the time of the Ceasefire Agreement. The UNF Government had issued t...

By Tisaranee Gunasekara “Today there was total confusion in Sri Rajapaksistan (formerly Sri Lanka) when thousands and thousands of people changed their name to “Rajapaksa” to get into Parliament or even get a job… Hospital authorities report that all new...