The Breakfast Club: 7-21-2014

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. Everyone’s welcome here, no special handshake required. Just check your meta at the door.

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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Havens Are Few, if Not Far, for Palestinians in Gaza Strip

As civilian casualties mounted on Sunday in the Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military reminded the world that it had warned people living in targeted areas to leave. The response from Palestinians here was unanimous: Where should we go?

United Nations shelters are already brimming, and some Palestinians fear they are not safe; one shelter was bombed by Israel in a previous conflict. Many Gaza residents have sought refuge with relatives, but with large extended families commonly consisting of dozens of relatives, many homes in the shrinking areas considered safe are already packed.

Perhaps most important, the vast majority of Gazans cannot leave Gaza. They live under restrictions that make this narrow coastal strip, which the United Nations considers occupied by Israel, unlike anywhere else.

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Cambodian Opposition Leader Rainsy Returns Amid Political Tensions

Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy returned from overseas Saturday to be greeted by thousands of supporters, just days before the anniversary of last year’s disputed general elections. He called for the release of detained opposition politicians and for talks to end the country’s political deadlock.

Up to 20,000 cheering supporters were on hand to welcome Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy on his return to Phnom Penh. He was transported by open top truck through the city.

Sam Rainsy’s return comes just days after street clashes outside Freedom Park – which is closed off to rallies – later led to the arrest of seven member of his Cambodia National Rescue Party [CNRP].

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Iran eliminates sensitive stockpile under interim nuclear deal: IAEA

Iran has moved to eliminate its most sensitive stockpile of enriched uranium gas under an interim nuclear deal reached with six world powers last year, according to a monthly update by the U.N. nuclear watchdog obtained by Reuters on Sunday.

The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) showed that Iran had met the terms of the six-month agreement, under which it limited its atomic activities in exchange for some easing of sanctions that are crippling its economy.

The preliminary accord had been due to expire on Sunday but will be extended with some adjustments, after Iran and the six powers failed during negotiations in Vienna to meet a self-imposed July 20 deadline for a long-term deal to end the decade-old nuclear standoff and agreed to continue talking.

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Florida town stunned by news of police KKK ties

Ann Hunnewell and her central Florida police officer husband knelt in the living room of a fellow officer’s home, with pillow cases as makeshift hoods over their heads. A few words were spoken and they, along with a half-dozen others, were initiated into the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, she says.

Last week, that five-year-old initiation ceremony stunned residents of the small town of Fruitland Park, who found out an investigative report linked two city officers with the secret hate society that once was violently active in the area. Ann Hunnewell’s ex-husband, George Hunnewell, was fired, and deputy chief David Borst resigned from the 13-member Fruitland Park Police Department. Borst has denied being a member.

James Elkins, a third officer who Ann Hunnewell says recruited her and her husband, resigned in 2010 after his Klan ties became public.

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Trial to start in death of unarmed woman on porch

Roused from sleep by the sound of pounding in the wee hours, a suburban Detroit man grabbed his shotgun, opened the front door and blasted a young woman in the face.

Is Theodore Wafer guilty of murder? Or did the 55-year-old use deadly force based on a reasonable fear that he was at risk?

Jury selection starts Monday in a trial that will put Wafer’s self-defense claim to a tough test. The 19-year-old woman, Renisha McBride, was drunk but unarmed when she climbed the steps of his Dearborn Heights porch, 3 ½ hours after crashing her car a few blocks away.

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Racy Photos Were Often Shared at N.S.A., Snowden Says

The former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden said in a wide-ranging interview published on Sunday that the oversight of surveillance programs was so weak that members of the United States military working at the spy agency sometimes shared sexually explicit photos they intercepted.

He also said the British government often pioneered the most invasive surveillance programs because its intelligence services operate with fewer restrictions intended to protect individual privacy than its counterparts in the United States and other allies.

The interview, which was published by The Guardian, was conducted in Moscow, where Mr. Snowden has been marooned for a little more than a year. He fled there from Hong Kong after he gave journalists hundreds of thousands of classified documents he downloaded from the N.S.A., which specializes in electronic surveillance. He had most recently worked for the agency in Hawaii.

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With liberals pining for a Clinton challenger, ambitious Democrats get in position

On the night before her Friday keynote address to a gathering of progressive activists here, Sen. Elizabeth Warren tried to slip into a hotel restaurant for a quiet dinner. But the former law professor has become a liberal superstar, and when a few admirers spotted her walking to the corner of the dining room, they cheered loudly. A moment later, more joined in the applause. Then one urged her, “Run for president!”

The next morning at Netroots Nation, where Warren (D-Mass.) gave a fiery sermon for economic populism – “The game is rigged, and it isn’t right!” – scores of swooning supporters wore faux-straw boater hats with “Warren for President” stickers and chanted, “Run, Liz, run!”

Even as Hillary Rodham Clinton looms as the overwhelming favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, the party’s base is stirring for a primary fight. There’s a pining for someone else, and a medley of ambitious Democrats are making moves – many of them previously unreported – to position themselves to perhaps be that someone.

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Climate Records Shattered in 2013

If global warming could be compared to middle-age weight gain, then Earth is growing a boomer belly, according to a newly released report on the state of the global climate.

Climate data show that global temperatures in 2013 continued their long-term rising trend. In fact, 2013 was somewhere between the second- and sixth-hottest year on record for the planet since record keeping began in 1880, according to the climate report, released Thursday (July 17) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (Four groups of scientists, who rely on slightly different methods to calculate global surface temperatures, ranked 2013 slightly differently compared with other years.)

The annual State of the Climate report compiles climate and weather data from around the world and is reviewed by 425 climate scientists from 57 countries. The report can be viewed online.

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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

When you play the game of thrones you win, or you die. There is no middle ground.

Cersei Lannister

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Breakfast Tunes

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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee

Convictions They Should Not Go as the Wind Blows

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