(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Breakfast News
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Egyptian court seeks death sentence for top Muslim Brotherhood leader and 682 supporters
An Egyptian court sentenced the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and 682 supporters to death on Monday, intensifying a crackdown on the movement that could trigger protests and political violence ahead of an election next month.
In another case signalling growing intolerance of dissent by military-backed authorities, a pro-democracy movement that helped ignite the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011 was banned by court order, judicial sources said.
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Holocaust ‘most heinous crime’ of modern history, says Mahmoud Abbas
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has called the Holocaust the most heinous crime in modern history , in a rare acknowledgement by an Arab leader of Jewish suffering during the Nazi genocide as Israel began its annual commemoration of the event.
In a statement published in English, Spanish and Arabic on Wafa, Palestine’s official news agency, Abbas expressed sympathy with the families of the Jewish victims and other victims of the Nazis.
“The Holocaust is a reflection of the concept of ethnic discrimination and racism which the Palestinians strongly reject and act against,” said Abbas, describing Nazi atrocities as “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era”. He added: “The world must do its utmost to fight racism and injustice in order to bring justice and equality to oppressed people wherever they are.”
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Iraq gears up for bitter, bloody election battle
His campaign poster, jostling among the thousands that line the streets of the capital, has a message of unity: “Together we build Iraq.”But as the country prepares for its first elections since the withdrawal of U.S. troops, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s political rivals accuse him of the opposite: stoking sectarian divides and dismantling its hard-fought democracy.
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A US soldier searches for his Vietnamese son
A tall, thin American wearing a straw hat wanders through the narrow streets of Ho Chi Minh City, clutching a photo album. At his side is a Vietnamese interpreter and fixer, Hung Phan, who has helped dozens of former American soldiers locate their long-lost children over the last 20 years. His latest client, the American under the straw hat, is Jerry Quinn. He has come to Vietnam to find his son.
“I know we lived at number 40,” says Quinn, looking down the street for the house he used to share with his Vietnamese girlfriend. But there is no number 40.
A small crowd gathers. An elderly man, emerging from his house, explains that when the Vietcong entered Saigon in 1975, they didn’t stop at changing the name of the city to Ho Chi Minh City – they also changed all the street names, and even the numbers.
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Law-Breaking Judges Took Cases That Could Make Them Even Richer
When Linda Wolicki-Gables and her husband appealed a lawsuit all the way to the second-highest court in the nation against Johnson & Johnson over a malfunctioning medication pump that had been implanted in her body, the couple had no idea that one of the judges who decided their case had a financial stake in the giant multinational company.
Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Hill owned as much as $100,000 in Johnson & Johnson stock when he and two other judges ruled against the Gables’ appeal in the precedent-setting case.
For the Gables, a different decision in the 2011 appeal could have helped them win a verdict for as much as $20 million, a sum that would have vastly improved the quality of her care, according to their attorney, T. Patton Youngblood Jr. Today, the Florida woman is a partial paraplegic, he said, largely confined to her home with only her husband to care for her.
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Woman posts about ‘Happy’ song on Facebook seconds before fatal Business 85 crash
Investigators believe a driver was posting to Facebook seconds before she crashed and died.
The wreck happened Thursday morning on Business 85 in High Point. Investigators say 32-year-old Courtney Ann Sanford crossed the median and crashed head-on into
a truck.Later on Thursday, investigators say some of Sanford’s friends and family told them about a Facebook post that Sanford made around the same time as the crash. Investigators discovered the Facebook post was made seconds before the deadly crash.
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The real tragedy of Donald Sterling’s racism: it took this long for us to notice
As riots exploded across America in early April 1968 in the immediate wake of Rev Martin Luther King’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson went on a Capitol Hill offensive to pass a law he hoped would, in part, quell some of the violence and best honor the man just slain. A day after King was buried, the Fair Housing Act was passed.
And in the nearly half-century since the enactment of that bedrock piece of civil rights legislation, which outlawed housing discrimination, there hasn’t been a greater offender of it, perhaps, than longtime NBA owner Donald Sterling of the Los Angeles Clippers.
Yet it was just this Saturday that there arose a hue and cry for the NBA to act against Sterling. It came in reaction to an audio recording allegedly of Sterling, who is white, telling his mixed-race girlfriend not to bring black people to his team’s games.
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The people who are still addicted to the Rubik’s Cube
The record for a human is 5.55 seconds. A robot can do it in 3.253. Ed Miliband takes one-and-a-half minutes.Most people – despite toiling over it for hours – have probably never managed it.
But 40 years after its birth, the Rubik’s Cube continues to beguile, frustrate and – like a Filofax or Walkman – evoke its 1980s heyday when schools were full of children puzzling over its brightly coloured squares.
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Long-Life Secrets From The 115-Year-Old Woman
The secret to a longer life may be discovered in the body of one of the world’s oldest humans.
When Hendrikje Van Andel-Schipper donated her body to science, she gave longevity researchers a truly special gift. She was the oldest person in the world when she died at age 115, and her body, in the hands of a team of Dutch researchers, launched a slew of breakthrough investigations into why some people live longer than others. In 2010, scientists led by Dr. Henne Holstege at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam sequenced Andel-Schipper’s genome with the hope they would uncover something about the secrerts of longevity from her genes.
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Must Read Blog Posts
You Are Being Tracked and Monitored
Sunday Train: Freight Transport and the Highway Funding Crisis, Part1
The Associations behind FBI’s No Fly Informant Coercion
Rant of the Week: Bill Maher’s New Rules: Liberals Can Be Obnoxious Too!
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The Daily Wiki
Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. The concept of functional fixedness originated in Gestalt Psychology, a movement in psychology that emphasizes holistic processing. Karl Duncker defined functional fixedness as being a “mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem.” (Duncker, 1945) This “block” limits the ability of an individual to use components given to them to complete a task, as they cannot move past the original purpose of those components. For example, if someone needs a paperweight, but they only have a hammer, they may not see how the hammer can be used as a paperweight. This inability to see a hammer’s use as anything other than for pounding nails, is functional fixedness. The person couldn’t think to use the hammer in a way other than in its conventional function.
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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
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Breakfast Tunes
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