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Chadwick played the medley on a 1958 Fender Stratocaster that belongs to the store where he works, The Chicago Music Exchange, which helped him put together the video and features it on the store’s page. The store specializes in new and vintage guitars, basses and drums.

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I’ve been to hundreds of depressing media trade shows, and SOFEX’s salespeople are no different from the rest, except that their wares are designed to destroy things and kill people. I witnessed representatives from almost every nation spending millions of dollars on heavy munitions; I was wondering if the transactions were padded by foreign aid from the US and other countries. I heard high-ranking soldiers say things like, “When I retire I’m going to be on the other side of the table—ha ha ha ha.” What this means is that it’s not uncommon for generals with government-controlled salaries around $100,000 a year to spend the twilight of their careers purchasing billions worth of munitions from arms companies who, in turn, offer these same senior officers state-side “consulting” gigs with multimillion-dollar salaries. It’s blatant payola, the whole thing so corrupt it borders on absurd. Absurdity, as it turned out, was a running theme of the conference.

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Bystanders are dwarfed as they stand watching a tremendous rush of water gushing through gaps in a dam in China, part of a carefully-choreographed operation to remove silt from the Yellow River in Luoyang, in the Henan province.

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onday began yet another negotiating round for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, this time in San Diego. To the amazement of everyone, the US Trade Representative (USTR) announced on July 3 it would now include a provision in the intellectual property (IP) chapter recognizing the importance of “limitations and exceptions” to copyright and embracing the international 3-part test for what constitutes suitable limitations and exceptions. (For those not familiar with this term of art, “limitations and exceptions” are things like Fair Use and First Sale Doctrine in the United States. As the name implies, limitations and exceptions to copyright limit the rights of the copyright holder and create exceptions to the general rule against copying without permission.)

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Let me use an analogy to explain why this is, nevertheless, a big deal. For USTR to publicly embrace limitations and exceptions as “an important part of the copyright ecosystem” is the equivalent of The Pope saying: “in some cases, birth control is a good thing because it allows married couples to have sex without procreation, deepening their emotional bond with one another.”

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On July 9, Hallandale Beach officials will present former lifeguard Tomas Lopez, 21, and his co-workers who supported him, with the keys to the city for their courageous actions.

According to the press release, the man Lopez and his fellow lifeguards helped to save in the near-drowning incident on July 2 will meet his rescuers for the first time.

“It’s an amazing honor, really,” said Lopez. “But honestly the point of this is to discuss what we’ve been fighting for.”

Lopez said he and his fellow former lifeguards are hoping to change the rule in place that prohibited them from saving lives outside designated beach coverage zones. He said he hopes the city will have a plan in place should someone need rescuing outsize the patrol zone.

Lopez had been working as a lifeguard in Hallandale Beach, Fla., for only 4 months when he was fired on Monday for leaving his post to save a man who was drowning in unprotected waters.

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The fact is, organic food has become a wildly lucrative business for Big Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery store. The industry’s image — contented cows grazing on the green hills of family-owned farms — is mostly pure fantasy. Or rather, pure marketing. Big Food, it turns out, has spawned what might be called Big Organic.

Bear Naked, Wholesome & Hearty, Kashi: all three and more actually belong to the cereals giant Kellogg. Naked Juice? That would be PepsiCo, of Pepsi and Fritos fame. And behind the pastoral-sounding Walnut Acres, Healthy Valley and Spectrum Organics is none other than Hain Celestial, once affiliated with Heinz, the grand old name in ketchup.

Over the last decade, since federal organic standards have come to the fore, giant agri-food corporations like these and others — Coca-Cola, Cargill, ConAgra, General Mills, Kraft and M&M Mars among them — have gobbled up most of the nation’s organic food industry. Pure, locally produced ingredients from small family farms? Not so much anymore.

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BIG FOOD has also assumed a powerful role in setting the standards for organic foods. Major corporations have come to dominate the board that sets these standards. As corporate membership on the board has increased, so, too, has the number of nonorganic materials approved for organic foods on what is called the National List. At first, the list was largely made up of things like baking soda, which is nonorganic but essential to making things like organic bread. Today, more than 250 nonorganic substances are on the list, up from 77 in 2002.