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 Tunes
Breakfast News
Missouri governor declares state of emergency and curfew in Ferguson
The governor of Missouri declared a state of emergency and imposed an overnight curfew in Ferguson on Saturday, in an attempt to quell disturbances that have rocked the city since police shot dead an unarmed teenager a week ago.
“We must have – and maintain – peace,” said the governor, Jay Nixon. “The eyes of the world are watching.” The curfew was scheduled to start at midnight and be lifted at 5am, local time.
The unexpected announcement, made at a raucous press conference, marked another shift in law enforcement tactics which have veered from overtly militarised to inclusive and conciliatory in an effort to contain protests over last Saturday’s killing of Michael Brown, 18. Nixon, a Democrat, said the latest measure were necessary after a small group of looters smashed windows, lobbed bottles and ransacked three stores on Friday night. The looters sabotaged not just property but the community’s peaceful protests, he said.
US confirms Iraq air strikes on Isis fighters near key Mosul dam
The US confirmed on Saturday evening that its planes and drones had carried out air strikes against Islamic State (Isis) fighters in the area around Iraq’s crucial Mosul dam.
A statement from US Central Command said: “US military forces continued to attack [Isis] terrorists in Iraq Saturday, with a mix of fighter and remotely piloted aircraft successfully conducting airstrikes near Irbil and the Mosul dam.
Germany ‘spied’ on John Kerry and Hillary Clinton – Der Spiegel
German intelligence services eavesdropped on calls made by US secretary of state John Kerry and his predecessor Hillary Clinton, Der Spiegel has reported.
The German foreign intelligence agency, BND, tapped a satellite phone conversation Kerry made in 2013 and also recorded a conversation between Clinton and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan a year earlier, according to the magazine.
The three officials were not directly targeted with phone calls collected by accident within the context of other operations, according to the report. In Clinton’s case, the call reportedly took place on the same “frequency” as a terror suspect.
UK ambassador ‘lobbied senators to hide Diego Garcia role in rendition’
Logs released under the Freedom of Information Act have reinforced claims that the UK lobbied to keep its role in the CIA’s torture and interrogation programme out of what is expected to be a damning Senate report.
They show that the UK ambassador to the US met members of the Senate select committee on intelligence 11 times between 2012 and 2014 – as they were investigating the CIA’s rendition programme. This included two meetings with the committee’s chair, Diane Feinstein, which took place as crucial decisions were being made regarding how much of its report into the programme should be made public.
The internet is broken. You can blame sharks. And Netflix
Don’t panic, the situation isn’t as awful as it sounds, but online space is running out and undersea creatures are nibbling at some very important cables
Bad news: The internet ran out of space on Tuesday. Worse news: Sharks are eating what is left.
Thankfully, it is not as bad as it sounds. Yet. But there are some existential threats to the internet on the horizon, and there are worse ways of putting it than to point out that the whole thing is full up.
On Tuesday, a small collection of out-of-date routers, in charge of mapping out routes using the internet’s backbone of physical cables, failed. The routers use a system called the border gateway protocol, or BGP, to track these routes, of which there are around half a million. [..]
To add insult to injury, on Wednesday, reports surfaced that Google was having to protect what was left of the internet’s backbone from shark attacks. Unlike so many things named by the architects of the internet, “shark attack” is not just a catchy name for something dull: it is literally sharks attacking the undersea cables that connect the world.
Must Read Blog Posts
Conservatives Admit That Having Too Many Arms Causes Violence The Rude Pundit
You Can Get Hacked Just By Watching This Cat Video on YouTube Morgan Marquis-Boire, The Intercept
Obama’s Nazis Eric Zeusse, Washington’s Blog
Let’s talk about freedom and liberty some more, shall we? by digby, Hullabaloo
Memo To Chuck Todd: Your Job Is The Thing You Think Isn’t Your Job John Perr, Crroks & Liars
Red Cross Reverses Stance on Sandy Spending “Trade Secrets” Justin Elliot, ProPublica
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
