Reuters:

[Carin] Froehlich is among the growing number of people across America fighting for the right to dry their laundry outside against a rising tide of housing associations who oppose the practice despite its energy-saving green appeal.

Although there are no formal laws in this southeast Pennsylvania town against drying laundry outside, a town official called Froehlich to ask her to stop drying clothes in the sun. And she received two anonymous notes from neighbors saying they did not want to see her underwear flapping about.

"They said it made the place look like trailer trash," she said, in her yard across the street from a row of neat, suburban houses. "They said they didn't want to look at my 'unmentionables.'"

As a testiment to Delaware's secrecy, I barely knew it existed.

Reuters:

Move over Switzerland. The tiny state of Delaware beats the Alpine country in a contest for the most secretive financial jurisdiction, a tax justice rights group said on Saturday.

The United States, led by the eastern seaboard state, took in $2.6 trillion in deposits from non-resident corporations and individuals in 2007, according to a survey of financial jurisdictions analyzed by the Tax Justice Network.

Reuters:

On the auction block in Detroit: almost 9,000 homes and lots in various states of abandonment and decay from the tidy owner-occupied to the burned-out shell claimed by squatters.

Taken together, the properties seized by tax collectors for arrears and put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York’s Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area almost the size of Boston, according to a Detroit Free Press estimate.

Reuters:

As Los Angeles housing advocates launched a campaign warning of mortgage rescue scams, a couple hit by foreclosure are charged with torturing two loan-modification agents they suspected of fraud, authorities said on Monday.

Of course, we shouldn't be torturing anybody, not even loan modification agents; after all, they're just part of a "complex ecology." What we ought to be doing is giving artificial persons the death penalty -- starting with Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and the other top banks, and working our way down.

Reuters.

1. The ads are now working for me.

Yes, it's OK to sell stuff, or link to pages that sell stuff (as long as it's legal, and the ad passes muster with the admin, whose judgment is arbitrary, whimsical, and not subject to appeal, as if I had to say that).

Examples of ads with The OK Nature: Your movie, books, consulting services, heirloom tomato seeds, knitting, ponies, jewelry.

Examples of ads with the Not OK Nature: Liquor, firearms, the scantily clad, torture implements, health insurance ads, anything with animated gifs, anything that plays sound on page load, for fuck's sake, obnoxious rollovers that cover the page, and other stuff that makes the admin want to put his fist through the screen.

I'm back from a long day in D.C., with pictures and stories and plenty to tell, but I'm too tired to write about it yet. I will tell you this much, though: I glanced at the coverage given the march by Reuters, Knight Ritter, CNN, the AP (whose piece was reproduced by the LATimes), NYTimes, and WaPo.

And they lie.