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 hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’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 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) 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
First steps toward building the Berlin Wall during the Cold War; Cuba’s Fidel Castro born; Spain’s Cortez captures what’s now Mexico City; Director Alfred Hitchcock born; Baseball’s Mickey Mantle dies.
Hong Kong airport protests: flight chaos as Carrie Lam warns of ‘path of no return’
Hundreds of flights cancelled ahead of further protests as territory’s leader says violence is pushing city into danger
Staff and agencies
Hundreds of flights out of Hong Kong have been cancelled on Tuesday in the wake of Monday’s demonstrations as the territory’s leader, Carrie Lam, warned that violence will push Hong Kong “down a path of no return”.
Thousands of passengers remained stranded after one of the world’s busiest airports shut down in a dramatic response to mass demonstrations. Further protests are expected on Tuesday and passengers have been urged to check with their airline before they travel.
At a media conference on Tuesday, Lam said: “Violence, no matter if it’s using violence or condoning violence, will push Hong Kong down a path of no return, will plunge Hong Kong society into a very worrying and dangerous situation.
Children of British Isis members will not be allowed to return to UK, government rules
‘If these children are not returned to their country, rehabilitated and reintegrated into their communities, they will all become future terrorists,’ warn the Kurdish authorities
Children of British Isis members stranded in Syria will not be allowed to return to the UK, the government has reportedly decided.
At least 30 British children are currently being held with their mothers in camps in northern Syria, after being detained as they fled the crumbling Isis caliphate.
The government has been under pressure to bring them home from the dangerous and overcrowded camps, both from local Syrian authorities and from the Trump administration. Earlier this year the infant son of Shamima Begum, the teenager who fled her home in Bethnal Green to join Isis, died weeks after arriving at one of the facilities.
Two new drugs offer hope against Ebola in DR Congo
Two experimental Ebola drugs being tested in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a yearlong outbreak has killed more than 1,800 people, have succeeded in raising the survival rate to around 90%, health authorities said Monday.
Scientists are a step closer to finding the first effective treatments for the deadly Ebola haemorrhagic fever after two potential drugs showed survival rate of as much as 90% in a clinical trial in Congo.
Two experimental drugs – Regeneron’s REGN-EB3 and a monoclonal antibody called mAb114 – were both developed using antibodies harvested from survivors of Ebola infection.
‘Don’t touch me’: How a culture of sex abuse devastated a Catholic community
By David Goldman
Updatedfirst published at
Long after clergy sex abuse erupted into scandal in the United States, it remained a secret on the American island of Guam in Micronesia. Here it spans generations and reaches to the very top of the Catholic hierarchy.
For decades, abusers held the power in a culture of impunity led by an archbishop who was among those accused. Anthony Sablan Apuron was convicted in a secret Vatican trial and suspended in 2016, after which restrictions he supported on the reporting of abuse were eased.
Putin’s Private Army
There’s nothing secret about Russia’s presencein the Central African Republic. The streets are plastered with propaganda posters proclaiming “Russia: hand in hand with your army!” A local radio station churns out Russian ballads and language lessons. New recruits to the army are being trained in Russian, using Russian weapons.
But the Russian campaign in this war-torn country is anything but straightforward, drawing on a mix of guns-for-hire and clever PR to increase Moscow’s influence, outmaneuver its rivals and re-assert itself as a major player in the region.
A months-long CNN investigation has established that this ambitious drive into the heart of Africa is being sponsored by Yevgeny Prigozhin — an oligarch so close to the Kremlin that he is known as President Vladimir Putin’s “chef.” He was sanctioned by the US for funding the Internet Research Agency that meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
Iraq says Israeli role in Gulf flotilla unacceptable
Baghdad’s top diplomat says presence of Western forces raises tensions in the region adding Gulf states can secure it.
Iraq “rejects any participation of forces of the Zionist entity in any military force to secure passage of ships in the Arabian Gulf”, Foreign Minister Mohammed Ali al-Hakim wrote on social media on Monday.
“Together, the Gulf states can secure the passage of ships,” he said.
Tokushima’s famous Awa Odori festival kicks off
Tokushima Prefecture’s famous Awa Odori dance festival kicked off in the streets of Tokushima City on Monday night. More than 1 million people are expected to visit during the four-day event which is one of Japan’s most famous summer dance festivals.
Awa Odori, which originates from a Japanese Buddhist custom of honoring the spirits of ancestors, features groups of dancers and musicians, parading through the streets to the sound of traditional music instruments such as lutes, drums, flutes and bells. Sporting kimono-like costumes with hair bands or straw hats, they chant in chorus and dance in synchronized routines.
In the Great Trump Debate, there are fine people on both sides: those who say he’s an evil genius pursuing a diabolical master plan and those who say he’s evil, but too impaired, too compulsive and too impulsive for any strategy needing forethought or self-discipline. The truth may lie in between, but last week was a big week for Team Impairment, and a terrible one for Trump.
After the carnage unleashed on El Paso and Dayton, Trump felt he had to visit both cities despite being welcome in neither. Trump taught the world how to diagnose malignant narcissism; he has no capacity for empathy or even a poor politician’s gift for pretending. He’s spent four years inciting racial hatred, slandering immigrants and kowtowing to the NRA. The El Paso shooter used Trump’s racist rhetoric in his online manifesto. Trump could have made his excuses and everyone would have understood.
Trump’s day of mourning began with his usual rage-based tweet fusillade. Of 29 tweets, 20 were attacks: on Joe Biden, Beto O’Rourke, Julián Castro and his twin brother Joaquin, the mayor of Dayton, the Federal Reserve Board, the State of California, others. Of six tweets pertaining to El Paso or Dayton, four were candid photos of Trump caught in the act of being admired. He mentioned the tragedy once (“They’ve been through so much. Sad!”) in a tweet that also bemoaned his suffering at the hands of his critics and rhapsodized over how much Dayton and El Paso loved him.
Trump fumed over a leaked video in which he lied to hospital personnel about the crowd size at an O’Rourke rally, but photos he released on purpose hurt him more. When all eight victims being treated at El Paso’s University Medical Center declined a Trump visit, the hospital lured two discharged patients back for a meet and greet. One of those was a two-month-old infant, whose parents had just died shielding her from gunfire. The pic of a grinning Trump giving thumbs up as Melania held the baby was bizarre and exploitative. (While we’re on the topic, hospital infections are a notorious public health risk. For a hospital to expose an infant to such risk for a mere photo op seems utterly reprehensible.)
As Trump comforted the afflicted, ICE was hauling in 680 undocumented Latinos at seven Mississippi poultry processing plants. Under Trump, ICE has never had a Senate-confirmed director. It has had five acting directors. At the time of the raid, current director Mark Morgan had been on the job for a week. Days later, children had not been reconnected to parents. ICE said the raid was conducted “in the normal course of business,” but it was the biggest in a single state in U.S. history. The agency called the timing a coincidence, but you’d think a president who called off a bomber strike on Iran in mid-flight could postpone a raid on a poultry plant if he thought it served his interests.
Trump thought the raids served his interests. They didn’t. For one thing, the children were not in ICE custody and were thus freer than border children in cages to give press interviews. When 11-year-old Magdalena Gómez Gregorio sobbed convulsively into a camera, “I want my daddy … my dad didn’t do anything … he is not a criminal,” it tore at the hearts of all decent people.
Trump says he prioritizes criminal deportations, but like July’s 10-city ICE “sweep” meant only to rally his base and terrify families, the raids reminded voters outside his base of several things: The people Trump targets do jobs we don’t want for wages we can’t live on; they pay taxes to support programs that benefit us, not them; they’re the very people to whom we want to offer a path to citizenship. Even on his signature issue, Trump’s a soulless con man.
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Investigating Trump remains a growing, diversifying industry, comprised of state prosecutors and attorneys general, plaintiffs’ lawyers, opposition researchers, hundreds of reporters and the U.S. House of Representatives, among others.
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The news in Nadler’s pronouncement is that House Democrats have found a way to pursue impeachment without implicating every freshman caucus member in the decision. If they get their hands on the real impeachment road map — Trump’s tax returns — he’ll look back on weeks like this with fond nostalgia.
None of these stories was the bombshell of the Democrats’ dreams; the one that forces every American to see Trump as he really is: a racist, a fascist, a narcissist, a criminal and a liar. What they do reveal is a man running out of moves who feels a net tightening.
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Trump loves to brag about his coolness under pressure, but as always, the truth is the opposite of whatever he just said. Last week his compulsion and impulsivity were on full display. We expect presidents to console us in times of tragedy, but knowing he can’t even appear outdoors in Dayton or El Paso, he should have stayed home. He should not have taunted his opponents, to say nothing of his hosts, but he truly can’t help himself. Henceforth, his stage-crafted immigration raids will serve mostly to expose his hypocrisy.
Democrats must also make smarter choices. It’s time to clear out the presidential field, to clarify the race but also to win the Senate. Of the seats worrying McConnell, two are in Colorado and Montana. John Hickenlooper and Steve Bullock, respectively, should run for those. A third is in Texas. In the Democrats’ first presidential debate, Julián Castro seemed to imply he’s smarter than Beto O’Rourke. Who’s really smarter? Whoever drops out to run in the Texas Senate race first.
Trump has ceded all the moral high ground to the Democrats. To take full advantage they need to make their best case. It’s far from clear they know how to do that.
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Trump has also given Democrats a chance to forge a new conversation about racial justice. Three weeks ago, it seemed his attacks on “the Squad” might actually work. Then he savaged Rep. Elijah Cummings, most of Baltimore and all of San Francisco. Then came El Paso. Now Democrats have a chance to lay out a vision of racial justice that inspires every decent American. Trump gave us this teachable moment and the perfect teaching tool: himself.
It’s not like getting rid of the Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio alone is going to solve the problem. He merely articulates the policy of the Republican Party.
There is no ‘capture’, no ‘surrender’. This is what they always believed.
I like to think they have become bolder because they sense defeat is near.
On Sunday, John Oliver, host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” finally pried that gun out of the former president of the NRA Charlton Heston’s cold dead hands then proceeded to take on the NRA and the squatter in the Oval Office with an epic opening segment.
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 hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’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 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) 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
Last U.S. combat troops leave Vietnam; Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. killed in World War II; N.J. Gov. McGreevey to resign after declaring he’s gay; Russian sub Kursk explodes; Director Cecil B. DeMille born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice. Erwin Schrodinger
It’s a viscerally emotive picture. A woman who appears to be pregnant lies on the floor of a subway station. It was taken on July 21, after a mob attack in the Yuen Long district of Hong Kong left at least 45 people injured — including the woman, a civilian who had been caught up in the attack and became known locally as “the woman in white” or “big belly lady,” slang for “pregnant lady” in Cantonese.
On social media, posts alleging that she had suffered a miscarriage were shared thousands of times. As more footage emerged, public outrage intensified over the Yuen Long violence, and towards the police for their alleged failure to protect victims from the baton-wielding attackers, who appeared to target protesters returning home from a march.
Australia coal use is ‘existential threat’ to Pacific islands, says Fiji PM
Frank Bainimarama appeals to larger neighbour to ‘more fully appreciate’ climate risks and reduce carbon emissions
The prime minister of Fiji has warned Australia to reduce its coal emissions and do more to combat climate change as regional leaders prepare to gather in Tuvalu ahead of the Pacific Islands Forum this week.
Speaking in Tuvalu at a climate change conference ahead of the forum on Monday, Frank Bainimarama appealed directly to Australia to transition away from coal-powered energy and asked its government “to more fully appreciate” the “existential threat” facing Pacific nations.
“I appeal to Australia to do everything possible to achieve a rapid transition from coal to energy sources that do not contribute to climate change,” said Bainimarama, who presided over the UN’s peak climate change body, Conference of the Parties, in 2017.
The Death of Marie Sophie HingstWhy It Was Right to Report on Her Lies
In June, I wrote an article exposing fabrications in Marie Sophie Hingst’s blog about Jewish family members who allegedly died in the Holocaust. In mid-July, she was found dead in her apartment. Now, I am grappling with the question of whether my reporting was necessary.
The death of historian Marie Sophie Hingst, who was found lifeless in her apartment in mid-July, bothers me by day and keeps me awake at night. I find myself occupied by the same question that others are also asking in the wake of this dramatic event: Was it right and necessary to report about the young woman and her lies?
My article, which was published on June 1 in DER SPIEGEL, had a prehistory. Her lies were first noticed by a handful of researchers who came together by chance. A historian, a lawyer, an archivist and a genealogist specializing in Jewish families all independently noticed inconsistencies in the blog “Read On My Dear, Read On,” written by Hingst. The group corresponded via Facebook and email, and discovered the Jewish family biographies she had written about on her blog were false, and that she had falsely registered 22 alleged Holocaust victims at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial center in Israel, to support her claims.
China’s Ivy League dreams fuel lucrative admissions industry
From hiring ghostwriters and forging sports credentials to generous ‘gift-giving’, admissions middlemen in China are advising wealthy parents to take an array of ‘shortcuts’ to secure places at foreign universities.
The service comes with a hefty price tag, often running into tens of thousands of dollars, but nonetheless the industry is booming.
The lengths to which some are willing to go to were highlighted in the admissions scandal that shook US universities this year, where prosecutors found one Chinese family had given $6.5 million to an admissions agent to get their daughter to Stanford, while another had coughed up $1.2 million for entry to Yale.
‘Last Week Tonight With John Oliver’ Talks Gun Control and “Weakened” NRA
Dino-Ray Ramos,Deadline
John Oliver came in hot on Sunday’s Last Week Tonightrecapping Donald Trump’s “busy” week which included the largest single-state ICE raid, retweeting conspiracy theories about the death of Jeffrey Epstein and his visit to the sites of last week’s mass shootings where there was footage of him at an El Paso bragging about one of his rally crowd sizes in the city and belittling Beto.
“We all know the struggles to do the bare minimum of being a president,” said Oliver. “But it still generally shocking just how much he struggles to the bare minimum as a f***ing person.” This quip led to a discussion about Trump, gun control and the NRA.
ON DECEMBER 29, 2017, the night his daughter was born, Augusto left the hospital and rode his motorcycle to his home in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, to pick up a change of clothes for his wife. On his way back, he was stopped at a police checkpoint and taken into custody. Police officers questioned him for hours about his father, a former mayor and member of the opposition party to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. At one point, a police detective pushed Augusto into a windowless room and beat him with a plastic Pepsi bottle loaded with sand. The next morning, caked with blood and bruised to a pulp, Augusto was released without charges.
The beating, along with more threats against his father, inspired Augusto to join in the mass protests against the Ortega government that erupted in April 2018. A month later, a little after midnight on May 29, police broke down Augusto’s door, pulled him barely dressed out of his house, and took him back to the police station to question him again about his father.
Oh darling, I am so sorry for you. Get out. Now. While you can. Don’t snub the Helicopter.
Ok. A person is in the middle of a flood zone and the Television says, ‘Evacuation Orders Issued’. God will provide. Cop comes and knocks on the door. God will provide. Fire Department drops by in a boat. God will provide. Well the water gets higher and they have to crawl up on the roof, Coast Guard sends a Helicopter. God will provide.
They drowned of course and at the Pearly Gates Peter said, “Down”. “But wait,” they protested, “Our faith was so great that when the TV talked and the Police, Fire Department, and Coast Guard came I told them all God would provide!”
“You’re a moron and a blasphemer,” said Peter, “God provided you with those things.”
The moral of course is don’t believe in God, he’s entirely fictional.
But my point is that carrying an Assault Weapon into a Walmart a week after someone did the same thing and killed 22 people just to ‘test your Second Amendment Rights’ not only makes you the dimmest bulb in the string, it makes you an asshole.
His wife told him it was a bad idea. His sister reminded him of what had happened in El Paso less than a week earlier, when a gunman killed 22 people after opening fire at a shopping center and Walmart.
But Dmitriy Andreychenko went ahead with his plan for a “social experiment,” according to police. The 20-year-old used a cellphone Thursday to film himself entering a Walmart in Springfield, Mo., wearing body armor and carrying a loaded military-style rifle. He said he wanted to test whether his Second Amendment rights would be honored in a public area.
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Andreychenko claimed he did not anticipate customers’ reactions, a Friday statement from a Springfield police officer says.
“This is Missouri,” he told investigators, according to law enforcement. “I understand if we were somewhere else like New York or California, people would freak out.”
Prosecutors on Friday charged Andreychenko, of Springfield, with making a terrorist threat, saying he recklessly disregarded the risk of causing a building evacuation by knowingly sowing fear in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting at the same retail chain.
Missouri is an open-carry state. In 2014, state law allowed anyone with a concealed-carry weapon permit to carry a weapon in the open, statewide, overriding local regulations. In 2017, Missouri became a “shall issue” state for concealed weapons, allowing anyone 19 or older to carry a concealed weapon or one in the open without a permit.
“Missouri protects the right of people to open carry a firearm, but that does not allow an individual to act in a reckless and criminal manner endangering other citizens,” Greene County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Patterson said in a statement, likening Andreychenko’s actions to raising a false fire alarm in a theater.
Andreychenko’s second-degree felony charge carries up to four years’ imprisonment and a fine of as much as $10,000. He is being held on $10,000 bond with the stipulation that he may not possess a firearm, according to the prosecutor.
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Andreychenko — who typically keeps a gun and vest in his car, according to his wife — arrived at Walmart just after 4 p.m. Thursday despite his family’s warnings that his plan would provoke fear after the El Paso massacre, court documents say. The man used his cellphone to record himself entering the Walmart’s front entrance and then headed toward the building’s southeast corner, according to police. On his right hip was another weapon besides his AR-style rifle: a semiautomatic handgun loaded with one round in its chamber. Police say he had more than 100 rounds of ammunition.
He said he was recording in case somebody stopped him. He just wanted to shop, he said — and test Walmart’s support for the right to bear arms.
Although he said he did not anticipate the fearful response, Andreychenko knew about the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and even said he brought the rifle and body armor to protect himself after the deadly attacks, police said.
Walmart employees quickly raised alarms.
Watching the armed man move down the aisles with a shopping cart, a store manager told an employee to pull the fire alarm to get people out of the store, believing that Andreychenko would open fire. Andreychenko said he, too, left the store at that point, police said. Surveillance footage captures shoppers fleeing.
Officers took the man into custody “without incident” after a store patron — identified by the Associated Press as an off-duty firefighter — held Andreychenko at gunpoint outside the building, according to authorities.
While Andreychenko did not fire at anyone, according to police, a Battlefield City officer and another driver “suffered severe injuries” in a crash as the officer rushed to the scene with emergency lights and sirens. Both people were taken to the emergency room.
The debate over where guns are allowed to be carried is long and complex. Missouri is one of about 30 states that allow people to carry an openly held or concealed firearm without a permit, the Associated Press reported. There have been numerous incidents where advocates of the Second Amendment have displayed weapons in the open. But such efforts have rarely triggered the level of panic seen in Springfield.
Walmart said in a statement that Andreychenko is no longer welcome in the chain’s stores and that it is working with authorities.
Banned from Walmart?! Great Moments in White Trash History.
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