When an organization creates a video that goes viral by calling for justice against a despicable war criminal (Joseph Kony), a man who’s directly responsible for recruiting child soldiers and over-seeing the murders of countless civilians in Uganda, one can only celebrate their cause.
See the video below:

Sadly, the response to the video has been mixed with ignorant, lazy critics starting to come out of the woodwork against the filmmakers of this video. Instead of thanking the Invisible Children organization for educating them on who exactly Joseph Kony is, they’ve instead questioned the groups fundraising and basically missed the point of the video completely.

What the Invisible Children organization have succeeded in doing is making a war criminal (Joseph Kony) a national priority. That’s not an easy thing to accomplish, and we salute them.

Saturday morning, young Moscow journalist Oleg Kashin was attacked and savagely beaten by two men. Everyone believes it was retaliation for his work. Today, video of the beating emerged. See the video here… Read the Gawker piece here…

From Poynter:

A recent Gizmodo story, “Are Cameras the New Guns?,” created quite a stir in journalism circles recently. Gizmodo found that there appears to be an increase in the number of citizens arrested for filming abuse by police, or just police in action: “In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer. “Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists. Read more
here…

This is late in coming, but we couldn’t help but take notice of these 80’s street- skateboarding pioneers. Street skating has been around since the invention of the skateboard, but it wasn’t until the late 80’s that street-skating started to get the same kind of traction that vertical skateboarding was already getting in California.

Thanks to the initial exposure of these skateboarders below (on widely distributed VHS tapes of these films in the 1980’s), street skating was (and has since become) a respected art-form that’s still alive and very well today, and is arguably more popular then ever.

We compiled some videos below that tell these skater-pioneers stories better than we can.

Below – Here’s Tommy Guerrero skating in Future Primitive, the seminal Powell & Peralta movie that was released in 1985, that single-handedly introduced the world to a real skateboarding pioneer, and the original Bones Brigade:

Here’s the Bones Brigade from the same film, ripping it up in the NYC streets, in a much different New York City then the one that exists today:

Here’s a great clip of Mark Gonzales skating in Video Days, which was put out by Blind in 1991. Gonzales (aka “The Gonz”) is widely credited as one of the first skaters to skate down hand-rails, in addition having an incredible ability to rip it up on Vertical ramps as well:

Here’s a clip of Natas Kaupas showing off his skills in Streets of Fire (by Santa Cruz).
See what he does at 1:07 upon his encounter with a fire-hydrant, this ollie alone should have won awards. Not to mention, how many other skaters could ollie over garbage cans like this guy?

Here’s a clip of Rodney Mullen on That’s Incredible proving why he was the world’s best Freestyle Skateboarder in the history of the sport, and a lot of his maneuvers would find their way to street skaters nationwide over time…

See him here in action many years later with a Louis Armstrong soundtrack, ripping it up on the streets:

Here’s Per Welinder (yep, another clip fromFuture Primitive), who can probably be best described as the Silver Medalist in Freestyle skating one step away from Mullen:

Lastly, here’s a contest video clip from 1986, with a lot of the pioneers in action at
The same Sacremento, CA skateboarding contest:

Links for your perusal:

More on Tommy Guerrero,
More on Mark Gonzales (aka The Gonz)
More on Natas Kaupas
More on Rodney Mullen the Freestyle King
More on Per Welinder

More Links: Tommy Guerrero,
Natas on Facebook,
Mark Gonzale’s skateboard company Krooked
Lastly, the man who helped make it all possible: Alan Gelfand, the inventor of the Ollie.

Even more good Skateboarding links:
Skateboarding History,
Skate History w/Rodney Mullen
Even more good history here as well…

Is this good for investigative journalism?
Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst (who supposedly “boasted” according to the authorities – this isn’t verified) of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Read more at this article courtesy of Wired.com

Read the iReport here

Shot by iUnderground
Read more information here at iReport.com

A classified video taken from a U.S. military Apache helicopter gunship showing the killing of two Iraqi employees of Reuters was released in its entirely today by Wikileaks, which is an organization devoted to covering secrets (and whistleblowers) from anonymous sources.

The edited video shows the Apache firing on a group of men in Baghdad, believed by the pilots to be insurgents, then striking a vehicle that stops to help one of the wounded, and then later, firing Hellfire missiles into a building.

The video was released at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., ending weeks of speculation during which time WikiLeaks dropped hints, but no concrete details, about the video. The video depicts (in it’s entirety) the 2007 Iraqi strike, that killed Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, a Reuters photographer, and Saeed Chmagh, 40, a Reuters driver, and other people. Read more here…You can view the video below….

(Warning, it’s graphic)

You can see the latest Adventure Man video on CNN, Tom O’Connell reporting from Juarez, Mexico…