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
Breakfast News
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Why launch Thailand takeover now?
It was a strange day, but not because we were not expecting a military takeover – a coup had been on the cards since martial law was declared on Tuesday.
It was more the way events unfolded.
On Wednesday, Thailand’s army chief Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha had summoned representatives of all the main political groups for talks.
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Russia’s Latest Syria Veto Underscores UN Impasse
Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution to refer allegations of war crimes in Syria’s civil war to the International Criminal Court, underscoring the UN’s inability to halt atrocities or resolve the three-year conflict.
Thirteen of the council’s 15 members voted yesterday for a French-drafted text calling for The Hague-based court’s prosecutor to investigate all warring parties. Russia and China, two of the five permanent council members with veto power, blocked passage of the resolution, which had been endorsed by more than 60 countries and 100 nongovernmental organizations.
Ahmad al-Jarba, president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, condemned the outcome in a statement, calling it “a veto against justice” that “gives the criminal regime and extremists in Syria a license to kill.”
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Pope Francis to tread careful path on Mid-East visit
Pope Francis sets out from Rome this weekend on his first visit to the Middle East as pontiff, specifically to the lands designated as “Holy” not only by the world’s Christians, but also by members of the two other major monotheistic faiths.
He plans a packed, whistle-stop tour of three countries in as many days – namely Jordan, the Palestinian territories, and Israel – setting a new rhythm for papal travel which recalls the enthusiasm for foreign pilgrimages shown by his ground-breaking predecessors who kick-started papal travel in the 20th Century.
He will deliver a total of 13 speeches, all in Italian, which will be translated into the other five main languages used by the Vatican: English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Translations will also be offered into Arabic in Amman and Bethlehem, and into Hebrew in Jerusalem.
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Tennessee Brings Back Electric Chair
Tennessee has decided how it will respond to a nationwide scarcity of lethal injection drugs for death-row inmates: with the electric chair.
Republican Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill into law Thursday allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event prisons are unable to obtain the drugs, which have become more and more scarce following a European-led boycott of drug sales for executions.
Tennessee lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the electric chair legislation in April, with the Senate voting 23-3 and the House 68-13 in favor of the bill.
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Indictment Details 3 Kidnappings Linked to Coerced Divorces
When several rabbis and ultra-Orthodox men were accused in October of being a part of a ring that kidnapped and tortured Jewish husbands who refused to grant divorces to their wives, the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey said the number of victims might run into the dozens.
But the authorities would not discuss any of those cases. Initially, the charges against the accused kidnappers were based only on an F.B.I. operation involving an undercover agent who posed as a wife wanting to leave a deteriorating marriage. In headline-grabbing detail, court papers described how the agent infiltrated a world of “special rabbis” willing to authorize the torture of recalcitrant husbands until they agreed to a divorce, which under Jewish law cannot occur without the man’s consent.
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In Policy Change, Justice Dept. to Require Recording of Interrogations
The Justice Department said Thursday that the F.B.I. and other federal law enforcement agencies would be required to videotape interviews with suspects in most instances, bringing the federal government in line with the practices in many state and local jurisdictions.
It is one of the most significant changes in F.B.I. policy under James B. Comey, who took charge as the bureau’s director in September. Mr. Comey’s predecessor, Robert S. Mueller III, and senior bureau officials had once opposed the video requirement, saying the tapes could reveal agents’ interrogation tactics and discourage witnesses from talking.
Senior Justice Department and F.B.I. officials have been increasingly open to the videotaping, and former prosecutors and defense lawyers have also advocated it. A former United States attorney for Arizona, who had been fired in 2007 for his opposition to the F.B.I. policy, reached out to Mr. Comey’s chief of staff last year in the hope that he would change it.
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Fruit flies pause to contemplate tough decisions
Just as a high school student lingers over a difficult exam question, fruit flies take pause to process information when faced with a tough decision — like differentiating between two odors. That according to a new study published this week in the journal Science.
“This is the clearest evidence yet of a cognitive process running in a very simple brain,” explained Professor Gero Miesenböck, who led a team of researchers at the University of Oxford’s Center for Circuits and Behavior.
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Woman in Coma Gives Birth to Healthy Baby Boy
A 39-year-old Santa Cruz woman who has been in a coma for more than 10 weeks gave birth to a healthy baby boy Thursday.
Melissa Carleton, still in a semi-comatose state, gave birth by cesarean section to West Nathaniel Lande at 10:56 a.m. The baby came in at 5 pounds 9 ounces.
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The Daily Wiki
Sheeple (a portmanteau of “sheep” and “people”) is a term that highlights the herd behavior of people by likening them to sheep, a herd animal. The term is used to describe those who voluntarily acquiesce to a suggestion without critical analysis or research.
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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
I grew up with the understanding that the world I lived in was one where people enjoyed a sort of freedom to communicate with each other in privacy, without it being monitored, without it being measured or analyzed or sort of judged by these shadowy figures or systems, any time they mention anything that travels across public lines.
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Breakfast Tunes
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