The Breakfast Club (Ground Speed)

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.

Breakfast Tune: Ground Speed – Tokyo Banjo Trio

Today in History

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac:

Breakfast News & Blogs Below

News

Brutal killing of a samba ‘queen’ exposes dark world behind the glitter of carnival

Beth McLoughlin, The Guardian

February 7, 2015

…It was a murder that provided macabre confirmation of Brazil’s homophobia and transphobia problem, as well as shining a light on the criminal underworld that lurks behind the happy-go-lucky carnival facade.

The alarm had first been raised the week before, when Da Silva failed to turn up for a rehearsal at the samba school’s quadra, or main hall – she never missed a practice, so her relatives and friends became concerned.

Next day a shocking video surfaced on social media, purporting to show her being tortured to death in a nearby favela known as Morro da Mina. Da Silva lived in the neighbouring district of Anchieta, which is close to both the samba school headquarters and Morro da Mina. …

US drug czar supports DC pot legalization drive

Wilson Dizard, Al Jazeera

February 7, 2015

Michael Botticelli, the U.S. drug czar, said on Friday that he agrees Congress should not interfere with Washington D.C. voters’ decision to legalize recreational marijuana use for adults.

“As a resident of the District, I might not agree about legalization, but I do agree with our own ability to spend our own money the way that we want to do that,” Botticelli, the acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said during a meeting at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Though he personally opposes to marijuana use, Botticelli’s statements are another signal of the increasing shift in drug policy politics. Historically, drug czars are uncompromising defenders of the war on drugs and vehemently opposed to legalization. The Obama administration, Botticelli noted on Friday, also supports the District’s ability to govern itself. …

Plague, anthrax and cheese? Scientists map bacteria on New York subway

Alan Yuhas, The Guardian

February 7, 2015

Like veins carrying the lifeblood of a city, a subway system teems with billions of inhabitants: the bacteria of swiss cheese and kimchi, of bubonic plague and drug-proof bugs and of human skin, guts and waste. Now, for the first time, scientists have started to catalogue and map the bacteria coursing through a city’s subway – and they have found a wealth of curious results.

Dr Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College, led a team that for 18 months swabbed the New York City subway system for the microscopic life-forms that cover its turnstiles, seats, ticket booths and stations. In what Mason called “the first city scale genetic profile ever”, his team found meningitis at Times Square, a trace of anthrax on the handhold of a train car, and bacteria that cause bubonic plague on a garbage bin and ticket machine at stations in uptown Manhattan.

In research published in the journal Cell Systems on Thursday, the team strongly downplayed the findings of plague and anthrax, noting the extremely small trace of the latter, that rats likely carried the former, and that no one has fallen ill with plague in or around New York for years. …

Blogs

• The Re-Colonization of Africa, by Jim Goodman
• Seattle mayor defends plan to open tent cities to curb rising homelessness, by Renee Lewis
• Aaron Swartz stood up for freedom and fairness – and was hounded to his death, by John Naughton