Access to land is one of the key issues for developing countries - and Brazil has one of the most inequitable land distributions in the world, with vast tracts of land held by often absentee landowners. Meanwhile thousands of peasants live in marginal lands in cities and rural areas. The Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST) has proved a huge success with the disenfranchised rural and urban poor in Brazil - becoming one of the largest social movements in the world. Cutting the Wire is the first account in English of the origins, history and current challenges faced by Brazil's poor majority. The authors have traveled the vast expanse of the country to record the words and actions of hundreds of activists who have taken their lives into their own hands. Cutting the Wire is how the MST describes the act of occupying the land, the cornerstone of their movement. It is the baptism of fire for the militant, an essential part of their identity and it plays a key role in the mistica, the moment of collective ritual that kicks off all MST events. Cutting the Wire is the story of the MST told in their own words, in vivid first-hand accounts of a continuing struggle.

The story of the Wire Act and how Robert Kennedy’s crusade against the Mob is creating a new generation of Internet gaming outlaws.Gambling has been part of American life since long before the existence of the nation, but Americans have always been ambivalent about it. What David Schwartz calls the “pell-mell history of legal gaming in the United States” is a testament to our paradoxical desire both to gamble and to control gambling. It is in this context that Schwartz examines the history of the Wire Act, passed in 1961 as part of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s crusade against organized crime and given new life in recent efforts to control Internet gambling. Cutting the Wire presents the story of how this law first developed, how it helped fight a war against organized crime, and how it is being used today. The Wire Act achieved new significance with the development of the Internet in the early 1990s and the growing popularity of online wagering through offshore facilities. The United States government has invoked the Wire Act in a vain effort to control gambling within its borders, at a time when online sports betting is soaring in popularity. By placing the Wire Act into the larger context of Americans’ continuing ambivalence about gambling, Schwartz has produced a provocative analysis of a national habit and the vexing predicaments that derive from it. In America today, 48 of 50 states currently permit some kind of legal gambling. Schwartz’s historical unraveling of the Wire Act exposes the illogic of an outdated law intended to stifle organized crime being used to set national policy on Internet gaming. Cutting the Wire carefully dissects two centuries of American attempts to balance public interest with the technology of gambling. Available in hardcover and paperback.

Winner of the 2019 Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association 2018 Southwest Books of the Year Cutting the Wire, a masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States. Berman, who has photographed and lived in El Paso for decades, is a documentarian who uses his camera to record what's in front of him rather than for, as he puts it, "mere self-expression." Berman's visual investigations of the everyday realities of the border--detention centers, smeltertown cemeteries, kids playing along a river levee, descanso crosses on telephone poles for the disappeared--are exactly the stuff the poetry of Gonzalez and Welsh is made of. The multilayered histories of the border landscape provide an inexhaustible supply of rich and fertile raw material for both Gonzalez and Welsh. But their poetic visions allow them to capture elements of a personal and collective past that historians have often failed to record.

Frontier and Pioneer life in Texas. Texas fence cutting wars fought by competing cattlemen and ranchers.

"An oral history of HBO"s The Wire"--

Create amazing, fun and original sculptures using wire.

Every jewelry maker will find inspiration for using a favorite focal bead, cabochon, or bead stash in Build Your Own Wire Pendants. Whether using inexpensive craft wire, copper, or sterling silver, aspiring wireworkers will have fun with 20 playful projects that encourage them to pick and choose their favorite techniques. Make a basic frame: hearts, stars, circles, pyramids, and more! Then pick embellishments to add interest and dimension: loops, spirals, bails, sewing with wire — the list goes on! This book is a delightful introduction to making wire pendants.