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
Wiley Post completes first solo flight around the world; Robber John Dillinger shot dead; Saddam Hussein’s sons killed in Iraq; The September 11th Commission releases its report; Birth of the Frisbee.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Breakfast News
China feared CIA worked with Sheldon Adelson’s Macau casinos to snare officials
China feared that casinos in Macau owned by the billionaire gambling magnate and Republican party funder Sheldon Adelson were used by US intelligence agents to entrap and blackmail Chinese officials, according to a “highly confidential” report for the gambling industry.
The report, by a private investigator in 2010, said that Beijing believed US-owned establishments in the former Portuguese colony were working in league with the CIA. [..]
The investigation was commissioned by the Macau branch of Adelson’s company, Sands China, amid concern that the enclave’s government was increasingly hostile to the gambling industry in general and Sands in particular.
The report, dated 25 June 2010 and marked with a warning that it was not to be introduced to mainland China, was uncovered by the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley. It was among a trove of Sands documents filed with a Las Vegas court which is hearing a civil action by the former head of its Macau casinos who is suing for wrongful dismissal.
John Kerry ‘walked away three times’ from nuclear talks with Iran
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has used an unusually emotional interview to reveal he walked away from nuclear talks with Iran on three separate occasions, insisting that the claim that he was too eager to seal a deal was “one of the dumbest criticisms I’ve ever heard in my life”.
“Let me tell you what a complete and total fallacy that criticism is,” Kerry told National Public Radio in an interview broadcast on Tuesday. “It’s totally made up by people who somehow want to find a way to criticise the agreement. Because the fact is that I walked away three times.”
Kerry is leading a major push from Barack Obama’s administration to promote the nuclear agreement in Washington, where a rebellious Congress, dominated by Republicans and backed by Israel, is seeking to unravel the accord.
French speed cameras sabotaged over plain cigarette packaging rules
France’s tobacconists are protesting against plans to force cigarette companies to use plain, unbranded packaging by disabling traffic speed cameras.
The radar “hooding” – by covering them with bin liners – is symbolic: a “cover up” that deprives the government of money in the same way that the anti-smoking legislation will reduce tobacco sales and tax revenue, the protesters say.
The first hooding took place over a month ago and, by this week, speed trap cameras in as many as 20 of 97 districts had been affected, said the group representing France’s tabac bars, the Buralistes Confederation.
“It’s a sign that anger is mounting,” a spokesman said.
BFM TV showed a group of tobacconists wearing white masks on a night-time radar-hooding expedition.
Dodd-Frank’s bid to clean up extractive industries stymied by oil business
US efforts to help mineral-rich countries shake off the “resource curse” have been delayed for five years by the oil industry’s vigorous resistance, campaigners warn.
Five years ago this week, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act, a little-known feature of which was section 1504, targeting corruption in the global oil, gas and mining industries.
The clause required all US-listed extractive companies to publish how much they paid governments for international projects, reducing the scope for officials to pocket the proceeds of drilling, mining and logging rights.
But stiff opposition from the oil industry – spearheaded by the powerful American Petroleum Institute (API) and strongly supported by the US multinational ExxonMobil – has stalled progress on enacting the act.
US efforts to help mineral-rich countries shake off the “resource curse” have been delayed for five years by the oil industry’s vigorous resistance, campaigners warn.
Five years ago this week, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act, a little-known feature of which was section 1504, targeting corruption in the global oil, gas and mining industries.
The clause required all US-listed extractive companies to publish how much they paid governments for international projects, reducing the scope for officials to pocket the proceeds of drilling, mining and logging rights.
But stiff opposition from the oil industry – spearheaded by the powerful American Petroleum Institute (API) and strongly supported by the US multinational ExxonMobil – has stalled progress on enacting the act.
Sandra Bland dashcam video shows officer threatened: ‘I will light you up’
Dashcam video from the officer who arrested Sandra Bland – a black woman who later died in Texas police custody – shows him threatening to drag her out of her car and “light her up” with a Taser after their encounter escalates from a routine traffic stop into an angry confrontation where she is forced to the ground and handcuffed.
The Texas public safety department released the footage on Tuesday amid continuing questions surrounding her arrest and subsequent death in a county jail. As the video circulated on Tuesday night, attention was being drawn to a number of abrupt breaks in what was thought to have been an original, uninterrupted recording – leaving the impression it had been edited before its release. A Texas department of public safety spokesman told the Guardian he did not have an immediate explanation as to why.
Mississippi cities remove state flag bearing Confederate symbol
A growing number of Mississippi cities are removing the state’s flag from public property because it carries the battle emblem of the Confederate flag, even as the state itself has refused to change the symbol.
On Tuesday night, Columbus city lawmakers voted to remove flags in their city 6-0. The ruling is effective immediately and affects all state flags flown inside and outside city property.
Mayor Robert Smith, who in 2007 became the city’s first black mayor, said he introduced the measure following the mass killing in a Charleston, South Carolina church in June that prompted that state to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse.
Smith, 62, said the state flag has long been a contentious issue for residents of his city, 60% of whom are black, according to 2010 US Census Bureau data.
Ai Weiwei free to travel overseas again after China returns his passport
More than four years after he was banned from leaving his native China, artist Ai Weiwei is free to travel again after Beijing authorities returned his passport.
“When I got it back I felt my heart was at peace,” the artist told the Guardian on Wednesday afternoon, just hours after police handed him back the travel document and informed him he was free to go overseas.
“I feel pleased. This was something that needed to be done,” added Ai, who has long been a vocal critic of China’s leaders. “I was quite frustrated when my right to travel was taken away but now I feel much more positive about my condition.
“I think they should have given it back some time ago – and maybe after so many years they understand me better.”
EL Doctorow, author of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, dies in New York aged 84
EL Doctorow, the award-winning novelist and academic whom Barack Obama once named as his favourite author after Shakespeare, has died in New York at the age of 84.
The author of popular American historical novels including Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and World’s Fair died on Tuesday of complications from lung cancer, his son Richard told the New York Times.
In a career spanning half a century, Doctorow published 12 novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage play, as well as scores of political and literary essays.
It was his 1971 novel The Book of Daniel – a fictionalised account of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during the Cold War – that earned him the praise of the US president-to-be in 2008, and caused the cultural critic Fredric Jameson to label him “the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past”.
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Must Read Blog Posts
Why I care when people with ‘something to hide’ are hacked CTuttle, FDL
Despite Support By Experts, Marijuana Still Unavailable To Most Veterans With PTSD Kit OConnell, FDL
DEA’s One Minute Confidential Source Vetting Process emptywheel aka amrcy Wheeler, emptywheel
“Deja vu. It happens when they change something.” Tim F. Ballooon Juice
Nice White Dad Mysteriously Dies In Police Custody, We Can Talk Police Brutality Now? Evan Hurst, Wonkette
Social Security: What Would Happen If the Trust Funds Ran Out? Bruce Webb, naked capitalism
Ugly Greek Bank Resolutions and Depositor Bail-Ins Coming Soon Yves Smith, naked capitalism
Comcast Really Wants Me To Stop Calling Their Top Lobbyist A ‘Top Lobbyist’ Karl Bode, Techdirt
Suspended Cop Sends Email To Department Thanking Them For The Paid Time Off Tim Cushing, Techdirt
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Your Moment of Zen
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