Lead Stories
The San Jose Mercury News reported in May that because of a housing shortage in Silicon Valley, people are renting attics, basements, and storage sheds to live in. Others pay as much as $200 a month just to sleep in a corner of someone’s living room to avoid a lengthy commute from their homes. And in June the New York Times quoted a yakuza crime boss in Tokyo lamenting how his turf has been taken over by immigrant gangs from China: “The Japanese yakuza think of long-term business relationships, but the Chinese mafia thinks just of the short term. Their only goal is money, money, money.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
For his June exhibit in San Francisco, Yukinori Yanagi built a giant ant farm in which sand was dyed to create a finely detailed image of a $1 bill that the ants would modify by moving the sand around. A press release said Yanagi’s work “is a dialogue about the fluency of boundaries in the 20th century and the dissemination of cultures through the expanding notions of globalism.”
In April the Baduy tribe of Indonesia was granted the right to refrain from voting in the June elections after its leaders met with the government. For the last three decades Suharto’s government forced the Baduy to vote despite their religion’s ancient prohibition against participation in politics.
Food Fights
