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.
I hope everyone had a happy, healthy and peaceful Thanksgiving
This Day in History
Ferdinand Magellan reaches the Pacific Ocean; British prime minister Margaret Thatcher resigns; Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is beaten to death; The Grand Ole Opry makes its radio debut; Comedian Jon Stewart born.
Breakfast Tunes
Breakfast News
UN Experts to Obama: Don’t Bend to CIA Wishes on Torture Report\
A group of United Nations human rights investigators has written to President Obama to urge him not to yield to the CIA but to release in the most transparent way possible the still-classified Senate torture report on post-9/11 abuses.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), has been in negotiations with the administration over redactions to the report, thus continuing to delay its release. [..]
Among those criticizing the delay in release of the report is U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who told the Huffington Post last week that the report “is being slow-walked to death” by the administration. “They’re doing everything they can not to release it,” he said.
Author Jeremy Scahill has also accused the “White House, at the highest levels, [of] basically going through and editing what the American people can and can’t read in this report about one of the definitive, moral questions and legal questions of our time, the extent to which we were involved in systematic torture, with lying to lawmakers, with misleading not only Congress but the American people on a wide range of issues that resulted in our country going to war and being involved in systematic acts of torture.”
Polio Workers Gunned Down in Pakistan
Four health workers who were part of a polio vaccination team were killed in Pakistan on Wednesday.
According to media reports, gunmen riding motorbikes near the southwestern city of Quetta opened fire on a vehicle carrying a vaccination team of three women and three men.
The attack killed the three women and one man, and, according to reporting by Agence France-Presse, three other women were also wounded. [..]
Contributing to mistrust of polio eradication efforts and legitimate health workers is the CIA’s false vaccination campaign conducted as part of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Earlier this year, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs criticized that scheme for fueling the “negative perception” about vaccination efforts.
Coalition Launches to Lead Global Fight For Open Internet and Digital Democracy
As a movement crystallizes around the future of the Internet, more than 35 human rights and technology organizations from 19 countries have come together as a new coalition to define and protect the idea of ‘net neutrality’ as they lead what they say is a global battle to protect the Open Internet and online freedom.
The numerous and diverse groups-coming together as the ‘This Is Net Neutrality’ coalition-released a joint statement (made available in eleven languages) expressing their shared purpose [..]
Dozens of nations are represented by the new coalition, including Pakistan, where the government in recent years has censored Facebook, YouTube, and other websites for allegedly posing a threat to national security or publishing blasphemous material. Mohammad Farooq of Digital Rights Foundation said of the coalition, “The significance of net neutrality in Pakistan cannot be ignored… Net neutrality can help raise awareness about internet censorship issues and champion the cause of internet freedom and the right to free speech worldwide.”
On Holiday, Ferguson Seeks to Salve Wounds
The people who came to this boarded-up downtown on Thursday morning knew they could not do much to salve Ferguson’s wounds. But it was Thanksgiving, and they felt they could not just sit home, either. So they brought paint brushes and prayers, thermoses of coffee and trays of drop biscuits, hoping to counterbalance the arsons, angry protests and racial strife.
“This is a really small thing,” said Darcy Edwin, 26, as she painted a pastel oak tree onto the plywood boards covering an optical shop on South Florissant Road. “It’s not going to fix any big issue.” [..]
The looting and gunshots, flaming buildings and clashes that erupted on Monday after a grand jury’s decision not to indict a white police officer for fatally shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, cast a pall on the holiday for families around the St. Louis area and beyond. While the governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, ate a Thanksgiving meal with the National Guard troops who have been called up to secure the streets here, Mr. Brown’s family and activists nationwide set aside empty chairs as dinner-table memorials.
In Arizona, a Textbook Fuels a Broader Dispute Over Sex Education
The textbook, the one with the wide-eyed lemur peering off the cover, has been handed out for years to students in honors biology classes at the high schools here, offering lessons on bread-and-butter subjects like mitosis and meiosis, photosynthesis and anatomy.
But now, the school board in this suburb of Phoenix has voted to excise or redact two pages deep inside the book – 544 and 545 – because they discuss sexually transmitted diseases and contraception, including mifepristone, a drug that can be used to prevent or halt a pregnancy. [..]
The controversy has turned into a referendum on the 2012 law, with supporters saying the textbook content cannot be removed fast enough and opponents crying foul for any number of reasons: technical, ethical, pedagogical. But the Gilbert school board is moving forward, trying to figure out how to remove the material in question – by way of black markers or scissors, if need be – despite resistance from parents, residents, the American Civil Liberties Union and even the district’s superintendent.
Uber Suspends Operations In Nevada
Ridesharing company Uber suspended its operations in the U.S. state of Nevada late on Wednesday in a setback that it said would cost nearly 1,000 jobs.
Companies such as Uber allow passengers to summon cars using apps on their smartphones, rather than calling a taxi company, and have gained popularity in dozens of U.S. cities over the past few years. [..]
On Tuesday, a Washoe County District Court issued a preliminary injunction preventing the company from statewide operations, siding with Nevada over regulatory concerns in a case that was referred to the court by a split panel of the state’s Supreme Court, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Kabul suicide attack on UK diplomats leaves six dead
At least six people including a British embassy guard were killed on Thursday when the Taliban launched a devastating suicide attack on a British diplomatic convoy near the Afghan capital Kabul, in a day of mayhem that also saw gunfire in the city.
The convoy was travelling on the road between Jalalabad and Kabul – about three miles east of the heavily fortified British embassy – when a suicide bomber struck. The bomber’s Toyota Corolla vehicle exploded – hurling the armoured British embassy SUV across the road and blowing off its roof completely. Smouldering debris was flung across a packed area including a mosque.
Al-Qaida escapes with British and American hostages before US special forces raid in Yemen
US operation forces took part in a rescue mission that freed eight hostages in a remote corner of Yemen, but a Yemeni official said on Wednesday that it did not liberate five others, including an American journalist and a Briton who were moved elsewhere by their al-Qaida captors days before the raid.
Eight hostages including a Saudi were liberated in the joint US-Yemeni operation, a rare instance of American forces intervening on the ground in Yemen.
A member of the Yemeni anti-terrorism forces was quoted on a website connected to Yemen’s defence ministry, saying that the mission searched for a group of hostages from several nations in an eastern province, but when the commandos arrived at the cave where al-Qaida militants had chained and covered the hostages in blankets, the American and four others were already gone.
Deforestation dropped 18% in Brazil’s Amazon over past 12 months
Deforestation in the Amazon rain forest dropped 18% over the past 12 months, falling to the second-lowest level in a quarter century, Brazil’s environment minister said on Wednesday.
Izabella Teixeira told participants at a news conference that 4,848 square kilometers (1,870 square miles) of rain forest were destroyed between August 2013 and July 2014. That’s a bit larger than the US state of Rhode Island. [..]
Wednesday’s lower figures came as a surprise because many environmental groups had been warning of a second consecutive spike in the annual deforestation numbers, as the forest continues to be razed to make way for grasslands for cattle grazing, soy plantations and logging. Teixiera insisted the numbers were accurate.
Restoring Lost Names, Recapturing Lost Dignity
For a half-century, a slight and precise man with an Old World mustache resided as a patient at the Willard State Psychiatric Hospital, here beside spectacular Seneca Lake. You are not supposed to know his name, but it was Lawrence Mocha. He was the gravedigger.
Using a pick, a shovel, and a rectangular wooden template, he carved from the upstate loam at least 1,500 graves, 60 to a row and six feet deep. At times he even lived in the cemetery, in a small shack with a stove, beside a towering poplar.
The meticulous Mr. Mocha dug until the very end, which came at the age of 90, in 1968. Then he, too, was buried among other patients in the serene field he had so carefully tended.
But you will not find the grave of Mr. Mocha, whose name you should not know, because he was buried under a numbered marker – as were nearly 5,800 other Willard patients – and the passing years have only secured his anonymity. The hospital closed, the cemetery became an afterthought, and those markers either disappeared or were swallowed into the earth.
Must Read Blog Posts
US, Canada, And Ukraine Only Countries To Oppose UN Resolution Condemning Nazism DSWright, FDL News Desk
Neither Michael Brown’s Family Nor Protesters Should Be Held Responsible for the Violence Kevin Gosztola, FDL The Dissenter
Thanks Be for Michigan’s Bounty – Better Load Up for Another Tough Winter Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel
Obama Should Only Nominate Jeh Johnson If He Plans on Breaking Up DHS Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel
Ferguson and the brokenness of America’s “Justice” System Ian Welsh
In Brief: Something Else That’s Wrong with Darren Wilson’s Story of the Shooting of Michael Brown The Rude Pundit
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
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