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: Folk Alley Sessions: Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn – “Little Birdie”
Folk Alley Sessions: Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn perform “Little Birdie” from their album “Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn”.
Recorded at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, October, 2014
Today in History
Published on Aug 22, 2011 Nazis and Soviets sign a non-aggression pact on eve of World War II; Sacco and Vanzetti executed; Defrocked priest John Geoghan killed; Movie star Rudolph Valentino and Broadway’s Oscar Hammerstein die. (Aug. 23)
Something to Think about, Breakfast News & Blogs Below
Mistrial for officer and no justice for unarmed man: family vows to fight on
Christina Cooke, The Guardian
Defense witness Dave Cloutier, a former police officer and retired instructor for the North Carolina Justice Academy, testified that according to CMPD policy, Kerrick was justified in deploying his firearm. CMPD captain Mike Campagna testified that he was not.
Activists also plan to continue forwarding the state House Bill 193, also known as the “Jonathan Ferrell Bill”, which is meant to put structures like municipal citizen review boards in place to combat discriminatory profiling by police. Though state representative Rodney Moore submitted the bill early this spring, it has yet to make it out of committee, Dawkins said.
On the night of the incident in September 2013, Ferrell, a 24-year-old former scholarship football player for Florida A&M University, gave a co-worker a ride home to a suburb east of Charlotte. After wrecking his car, he knocked on the door of a nearby house. The homeowner called 911 in a panic, to report a breaking-and-entering. …
Nuclear waste site bid makes waves in Lake Huron
Steve Friess, Al Jazeera
KINCARDINE, Ontario – In nearly every way, this 2-acre clearing dotted with wild purple asters is the ideal place, relatively speaking, to dig a third of a mile into the earth, blast a space the size of a Walmart, load it with radioactive nuclear waste and then seal it. The power plant that produces most of that waste, after all, looms within walking distance. Legions of geologists and nuclear physicists insist it would be entombed safely in layers of rock that haven’t shifted in 50,000 millennia.
There’s just one big problem. The “future home of the planned deep geological repository project for low & intermediate level waste,” as the sign on the site announces, is about a mile from the shores of Lake Huron. And the prospect of burying something so toxic in such proximity to the vast and essential Great Lakes has sparked international outrage and is turning the matter into a wedge issue in Canada’s federal elections this fall. The nation’s next minister of the environment
who that will be depends on who controls Ottawa after vote, Oct. 19will decide whether to endorse the project, as a government-appointed independent joint review panel did in a 450-page report in May, or kill it.“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that burying radioactive nuclear waste that will remain lethal for 100,000 years right beside the drinking water for 40 million people defies common sense,” said Beverly Fernandez, a spokeswoman for Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, who lives in Southampton, Ontario, about 30 miles north of Kincardine. “The last place to abandon radioactive nuclear waste is right beside the largest supply of freshwater on the planet.” …
War Refugees Trapped, Under Fire Trying to Enter Macedonia
Common Dreams staff
Several thousand rain-soaked war refugees and asylum-seekers ran across Macedonia’s border from Greece Saturday as riot police chased them lobbing stun grenades, tear gas and beating them with batons. The violence came as Macedonia is cracking down on the flow of thousands of Syrian war refugees attempting to reach safety in western Europe by traveling through the Balkan region.
Security forces boxed in hundreds of the refugees in no-man’s land – including many children who were separated from their parents in the chaos. But several thousand others made it through muddy fields to Macedonian territory after days spent in the open without access to any shelter, food or water.
In the chaos, many families were separated, some left in Macedonia and others pushed onto the Greek side of the border. Children in tears searched for their parents shouting “mama, baba” while parents scoured the area for their missing children.
“In this Europe, animals are sleeping in beds and we sleep in the rain,” said 23-year-old Syrian woman Fatima Hamido after running across the border. “I was freezing for four days in the rain, with nothing to eat.”
…
Yanis Varoufakis brands Alexis Tsipras the ‘new De Gaulle’ as election gets ugly
Helena Smith and Andrew Anthony, The Guardian
Greece’s pre-election campaign has turned ugly before it has even officially commenced, with senior figures – including the former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – rounding on the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, for his governance of the crisis-plagued country.
Breaking the wary truce since his surprise resignation the day after Greeks voted to reject austerity in a referendum last month, Varoufakis has lashed out at the leftwing leader’s policy choices, saying in an interview in the New Review that Tsipras had decided “to surrender” to the punitive demands of international creditors keeping Athens afloat. Instead of remaining faithful to the anti-austerity platform on which his radical left Syriza party had been elected, the young prime minister had allowed his ego to get the better of him and made a conscious decision to become the “new De Gaulle, or Mitterrand more likely”.
…
In July 62% of Greeks, at the behest of Tsipras, voted to reject policies that have been blamed for the nation’s extraordinary loss of GDP and economic depression in recent years. The prime minister’s last-minute U-turn ensuring Greece’s continued eurozone membership was the last straw for hardliners, who formally broke ranks with Syriza with the creation of their own political movement, Popular Unity, last week. …
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Mike Daisey
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac:
Defense lawyer skips hearing so wife in labor won’t kill him
PITTSBURGH (AP) – A Pittsburgh defense attorney got a hearing postponed at the last minute after convincing a judge that his wife’s labor was a matter of life – or his death.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports Marc Daffner was granted a continuance Thursday after filing a blunt request with a Pittsburgh City Court magistrate.
It read: “Defense counsel’s wife went into labor at approximately 11:15 a.m. today, and defense counsel will be killed by his wife if he does not get to the hospital immediately.”
Daffner says the district attorney and judge agreed to the move. His client is charged with receiving stolen property.
Daffner says, “I didn’t have a legal reason for the continuance, but that was the truth.”
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