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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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Is anyone really trying to save Nigeria’s kidnapped schoolgirls?
If 234 schoolgirls were kidnapped in Britain today, it’s a reasonable assumption that it would dominate the news agenda for days, if not weeks. Headlines would scream from front pages, outrage would pour from the commentators, a Cobra meeting would be hastily convened and David Cameron’s face would appear on our screens far more often than, in normal circumstances, anyone would really wish for.
Yet that very same abduction, except in northern Nigeria, apparently at the hands of Islamist fighters, has made only the briefest of flitters across the international media radar. That is in part due to a lack of access: the raid having occurred in a remote, virtually lawless north-eastern area where militants hold sway and where the military, let alone the press, rarely dare venture.
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Xinjiang railway attack: ‘It was as if someone stepped on a landmine’
Tang Yan’s job is to stand outside a variety store every day and call out to potential customers emerging from the bustling Urumqi south railway station, the biggest in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang.
Perched on a short flight of stairs overlooking the station’s square, the 19-year-old stood watching as commuters emerged from a long-distance train from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, shortly after 7pm on Wednesday night.
As scores of passengers squeezed through a narrow exit on the southern side of the station square, a loud, powerful and apparently strategically positioned explosion erupted, killing three people, including two ethnic Uighurs suspected of having set off the blast. Another 79 people were injured.
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North Korea suffering from ‘severe’ drought: State media
North Korea is suffering from its worst spring drought in more than three decades, threatening thousands of acres of staple crops, state media said on Friday.“Severe drought” has been reported across the country, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
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Snooping reports’ pileup problem
Could surveillance reform succumb to death by a thousand blue-ribbon panels?
That’s what some are fearing as bookshelves in congressional offices, lobbying suites and newsrooms across Washington begin to sag with the accumulation of snooping-related reports and recommendations unveiled since Edward Snowden’s stunning disclosures last June about widespread National Security Agency gathering of U.S. telephone data.
The White House added two more studies to the growing stack Thursday: assessments of the risks and dangers inherent in collection and mining of so-called “big data” by both government and the private sector. One writeup came from Obama advisers and Cabinet officials like counselor John Podesta, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Another came from a 20-member council of outside experts on technology issues.
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Waseca teen accused in school shooting plot had been planning for months
John David LaDue had it all figured out. He would kill his mother, father and sister and then create a diversion to keep first responders busy while he went to Waseca Junior/Senior High School to wreak havoc.
There, the 17-year-old planned to set off pressure-cooker bombs full of nails and metal ball bearings in the cafeteria. Students who weren’t maimed or killed would be gunned down in the halls, he told police.
After his arrest Tuesday, the high school junior said he intended to kill “as many students as he could,” before he was killed by the SWAT team, according to charging documents filed in Waseca County District Court.
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Big Banks Erred Widely on Troubled Mortgages, U.S. Regulator Confirms
A federal regulator confirmed on Wednesday that the country’s biggest banks committed widespread errors in dealing with homeowners who faced foreclosures at the height of the mortgage crisis, but the findings are unlikely to put to rest questions from lawmakers and others about the extent of the problems.
The report released by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is a post-mortem of the Independent Foreclosure Review, a costly but ultimately limited examination of how banks mistreated homeowners.
The latest analysis found that at least 9 percent of the errors discovered in the review involved banks improperly denying loan modifications that would have prevented foreclosures. The report also found that more than half of the errors related to administrative flaws and improper fees charged to homeowners during the foreclosures process.
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CDC: 5 things cause two-thirds of U.S. deaths
Five things kill more people in the United States than anything else: heart disease, cancer, lung disease such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis, stroke and unintentional injuries such as those on roads or caused by medication overdoses.
Together, these five conditions cause almost two-thirds of all deaths in the country — nearly 900,000 each year.
On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is releasing its first report on potentially preventable deaths from those causes in each one of the 50 states. The data suggest we could prevent at least a third of those deaths.
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How the Ancient Egyptians Really Built the Pyramids
The ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids may have been able to move massive stone blocks across the desert by wetting the sand in front of a contraption built to pull the heavy objects, according to a new study.
Physicists at the University of Amsterdam investigated the forces needed to pull weighty objects on a giant sled over desert sand, and discovered that dampening the sand in front of the primitive device reduces friction on the sled, making it easier to operate. The findings help answer one of the most enduring historical mysteries: how the Egyptians were able to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of constructing the famous pyramids.
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The Daily Wiki
Humility (adjectival form: humble) is variously seen as the act or posture of lowering oneself in relation to others, or conversely, having a clear perspective, and therefore respect, for one’s place in context. In a religious context this can mean a recognition of self in relation to a deity or deities, acceptance of one’s defects, and submission to divine grace or as a member of an organized, hierarchical religion. Absent a religious context humility can still take on a moral and/or ethical dimension.
Humility, in various interpretations, is widely seen as a virtue in many religious and philosophical traditions, often in contrast to narcissism, hubris and other forms of pride.
The act of imposing humility upon another person is called “humiliation”.
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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.
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Breakfast Tunes
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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee
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