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Breakfast News
Oregon college shooting is 994th mass gun attack in US in three years
Barack Obama put words to the desperation of millions of Americans – and the despair of the rest of the world – after another mass shooting at a school in Oregon on Thursday, the latest of nearly 1,000 since his reelection in 2012.
“Somehow,” the president said, “this has become routine. [..]
The words mark a long list of tragedy. Since Obama’s reelection to a second term in November 2012 – which itself was followed by the shooting of 26 people including 20 children at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, just a few weeks later – there had been 993 mass shooting events in the United States . Thursday’s attack, at Umpqua community college in the town of Roseburg, was No 994. Almost 300 of them have occurred in 2o15.
That’s almost one every day.
Obama has spoken or issued statements 15 times in the wake of mass shooting events. “I’ve made statements like this too many times,” he said after the church shooting this June in Charleston, South Carolina.
The numbers go deeper than the statements, as the president said.
Russia admits targeting non-Isis groups in Syria as airstrikes continue
Russian combat aircraft have carried out a second day of airstrikes against Syrian rebel forces as Moscow admitted it had targeted groups other than Islamic State in coordination with the government in Damascus.
As Vladimir Putin travelled to Paris for talks with French president Francois Hollande, the Russian president seized on US and western disarray and insisted that Russia was targeting Isis.
But Moscow appeared to admit it was striking more widely as American-backed rebels reported that they had been hit.
Netanyahu predicts Arab countries will align with Israel against Iran and Isis
The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has claimed that shifting alliances in the Middle East are drawing Arab countries closer to the Jewish state in confronting the common enemies of Iran and Islamic State.
In a lengthy speech to the UN general assembly, punctuated by long pauses in which he glared at delegates after denouncing them as “obsessively hostile” to Israel, Netanyahu said he hoped the shared threat posed by Tehran and Islamic State would remake the politics of the region.
“Common dangers are clearly bringing Israel and its Arab neighbours closer and as we work together to thwart those dangers, I hope we’ll build lasting partnerships,” he said.
But Netanyahu spent much of his speech re-fighting the lost battle over the US-led nuclear deal with Iran.
Hurricane Joaquin lashes Bahamas as it heads for US east coast
Hurricane Joaquin unleashed heavy flooding as it roared through sparsely populated islands in the eastern Bahamas on Thursday, with forecasters warning that the category 4 storm could grow even stronger before nearing the east coast of the US.
Joaquin battered trees and buildings as surging waters reached the windows of some homes on Long Island in the Bahamas and inundated the airport runway at Ragged Island.
There were no immediate reports of casualties, according to captain Stephen Russell, the director of the Bahamas national emergency management agency.
Prime minister Perry Christie said he was amending laws to mandate evacuations because some people were refusing to move into shelters.
Police use of chemical spray on Alabama schoolchildren violated civil rights
A federal judge in Alabama ruled on Thursday that Birmingham police department officers violated the civil rights of high school students when officers used chemical spray to subdue them for minor behavioral issues.
The suit, initially filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2010, alleged that school resource officers (SROs) assigned to schools in the Birmingham public school district were routinely resorting to chemical spray to deal with “normal – and, at times, challenging – adolescent behavior”. This included what the US district court judge Abdul Kallon described as non-threatening infractions that are “universal to all teenagers – ie backtalking and challenging authority”.
According to the SPLC, police in Birmingham public schools – whose students are predominantly black – sprayed about 300 students in 110 incidents between 2006 and 2011.
Experian hack exposes 15 million people’s personal information
Experian, one of the largest credit agency data brokers in the world, has been hacked. Some 15 million people who used the company’s services, among them customers of cellular company T-Mobile who had applied for Experian credit checks, may have had their private information exposed, the company confirmed on Thursday.
Information from the hack includes names, addresses, and social security, driver’s license and passport numbers. The license and passport numbers were in an encrypted field, but Experian said that encryption may also have been compromised.
Connecticut’s attorney general said he will launch an investigation into the breach.
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Must Read Blog Posts
After Oregon, Death By Gunfire Is a Natural Law in America Charles Pierce, Esquire Politics
With One Bombing Run Russia Gets the US to Acknowledge CIA’s “Covert” Regime Change Forces emptywheel aka Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel
Clinton Emails Reveal More About How State Department Shaped Media Coverage Of WikiLeaks Kevin Gosztola, ShadowProoof
Toys ‘R’ Us Misuses H-1B Temporary Foreign Worker Visas To Outsource Jobs Dan Wright, ShadowProof
Bernie Sanders & Jill Stein’s College Plans Treat Education As A Human Right Kit O’Connell, ShadowProof
What’s Called “Capitalism” Is Far from Any Model of Capitalism or Market Gaius Publius, Hullabaloo
Court Says USTR Can Continue To Keep The Public From Seeing The Trade Agreements They’ll Be Subjected To Tim Cushing, Techdirt
John Oliver Would Like You To Replace Your Bogus Facebook Copyright Privacy Statement With His Own Mike Masnick, Techdirt
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