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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UN: Death toll from Syrian civil war tops 191,000
The death toll from three years of Syria’s civil war has risen to more than 191,000 people, the United Nations reported Friday.
The figure, covering the period from March 2011 to April 2014, is the first issued by the U.N.’s human rights office since July 2013, when it documented more than 100,000 killed.
The high death toll is a reflection of the brutality of Syria’s conflict, which has transformed into a complex, multi-layered war where various factions fight against each other.
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Hamas executes 11 alleged collaborators after Israel kills military chiefs
Hamas said it shot dead 18 suspected informants for Israel on Friday, a day after an Israeli airstrike on a house in southern Gaza Strip killed three top Hamas military commanders.
The Hamas-run website Al Rai said 11 people were killed by firing squad and warned that “the same punishment will be imposed soon on others.” It suggested a link between the killing of the alleged informers and Israel’s targeting of top Hamas leaders, saying that “the current circumstances forced us to take such decisions.”
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Ukraine crisis: Russia aid trucks ‘an invasion’
A senior official in Kiev has accused Russia of invading Ukraine after Russian humanitarian aid lorries crossed the border without permission.
Russia began sending in its lorries, stranded at the border for more than a week, after formally accusing Ukraine of unreasonable obstruction.
Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, head of Ukraine’s SBU security service, said it was a “direct invasion”.
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Tallahassee federal judge throws out Florida’s ban on same-sex marriage
A Tallahassee federal judge ruled Thursday that Florida’s ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional, the fifth judge in the past six weeks to do so.
This time, however, the ruling has a wider scope: It covers all 67 Florida counties.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle handed down the wide-ranging decision but also issued a stay, meaning no same-sex couples can get married in Florida anytime soon.
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Murder rap tossed, man to be released after 24 years in prison
A former New York City businessman who has spent 24 years in prison after being convicted of setting a fire that killed his mentally ill daughter is scheduled to walk out of a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania a free man, following a judge’s ruling that the case against him was based on now-debunked arson science.
Han Tak Lee, 79, was due to be released from a state prison in rural central Pennsylvania Friday morning, then driven by a longtime supporter to the federal courthouse in Harrisburg for a hearing to determine the conditions of his release. Several dozen friends, family members and supporters were expected to greet him there.
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Among Whites, Protests Stir a Range of Emotions and a Lot of Perplexity
The march of clergy members, black and white and demanding a full investigation into police actions in St. Louis County, wound from the well-groomed and highly reputed high school, past the curious onlookers out for sushi or Starbucks, and finally to the county prosecutor’s office.
Wednesday was the first day that demonstrations reached Clayton, the affluent and mostly white county seat, 20 minutes and a million miles away from Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death on Aug. 9 and protesters and the police have clashed violently in the streets. Here in Clayton, where Mr. Brown’s mother works at a gourmet grocer, and throughout the patchwork of largely white suburbs that curl around St Louis to the west and south, people have watched the events in Ferguson with compassion, outrage and indifference, some with sympathy, some with contempt.
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Global warming slowdown ‘could last another decade’
The hiatus in the rise in global temperatures could last for another 10 years, according to new research.
Scientists have struggled to explain the so-called pause that began in 1999, despite ever increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The latest theory says that a naturally occurring 30-year cycle in the Atlantic Ocean is behind the slowdown.
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Talk Therapy Plus Meds May Be Best for Severe Depression
A combination of therapy and antidepressants appears to best help people with severe but short-term depression, a new study reports.
Four out of five people suffering from severe depression for less than two years experienced full recovery when treated with cognitive therapy plus antidepressant medication, researchers found.
On the other hand, the combination didn’t work much better than drugs alone in helping people with mild depression or those with severe and chronic depression lasting longer than two years, said lead author Steven Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
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