Poor Mojo's Newswire

Nothing about Die Antwoord ever really suggested that they WEREN'T art school drop-outs with a half-finished thesis paper on post-Weimar Republic performance art. Dude was wearing Dark Side of the Moon boxers for goodness' sake, and the girl had on a t-shirt that probably cost 599.419 South African Rand. If you looked at their website, which is beautiful and interesting, they give a shout out to their HAIR STYLIST. The "Ninja" video was a Keith Haring nightmare. I am just saying: let us not turn our backs on Die Antwoord. Not now. I'm sure for some reason everyone would have liked it better if they were actually borderline mentally-retarded Poor Children from Ghettos covered in Generic Cheetoes Dust and Meth Crumbs or whatever, but none of these new revelations makes what they are doing any less great. We all agreed that we should give them whatever they want, and I maintain that that is still the smart thing to do. It was always "give them whatever they want because what they are doing is great," not "give them whatever they want unless I find out that they are not actually addicted to Jenkem in attempt to escape from their abject misery." The joy that we felt at discovering them was unapproachable, and nothing can take that away from us.

WASHINGTON – A Northwest Airlines passenger landing in Detroit on Friday tried to blow up the flight but the explosive device failed, two U.S. national security officials said. The passenger, who was traveling on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam, was not identified. He was being questioned Friday evening, according to one of the officials, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. The motive of the Christmas Day attack was not immediately clear. "He appears to have had some kind of incendiary device he tried to ignite," said one of the U.S. officials.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding an untold number of people in secretively maintained detention facilities all over the United States, according to a report set to be published next year in The Nation. Many of the sites are unmarked and unlisted, going unnoticed in office parks and commercial zones, according to reporter Jacqueline Stevens. The so-called ICE "subfield offices" are mainly used to house prisoners in transfer and are not subject to the basic standards applied to ICE and even military prisoners. At a subfield office known as B-18, located near a Los Angeles federal building, ICE keeps immigrant prisoners in "a barely converted storage facility." "You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voil�, you're in a detention center," explained Ahilan Arulanantham, an ACLU immigration attorney interviewed by The Nation. "Without knowing where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."