The Breakfast Club (Dreams)

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.

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This Day in History

Start of the Berlin blockade during the early Cold War; Boxing champ Jack Dempsey born; Comedian and actor Jackie Gleason of ‘The Honeymooners’ fame dies.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Breakfast News

Congressional Democrats to introduce new Voting Rights Act fix

Congressional Democrats are expected to unveil new legislation this week, possibly as soon as Wednesday, that if passed would restore the requirement for federal approval for voting procedure changes in some states, a provision of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court two years ago.

The legislation, titled “The Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015,” would force any state that has had 15 or more voting rights violations in the last 25 years to be subject to federal preclearance for any change in voting procedure or law.

That criterion would initially subject 13 states to preclearance: New York, California, Arkansas, Arizona, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, according to a copy of the legislation obtained by the Washington Post. Those states would be able to free themselves of the preclearence provision by going 10 consecutive years without a voting rights violation.

The bill is the latest in what has been an ongoing effort to restore the preclearence provision of the Voting Rights Act, which required many southern states to have any change to voting laws cleared by federal officials. The Supreme Court, in its 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, tossed the formula used to determine which states need preclearence, effectively ending the federal government’s role as a monitor to state voting changes until a new formula is approved by Congress.

Black Americans unfairly targeted by banks before housing crisis, says ACLU]

Black Americans were unequally issued loans on unfavorable terms during the sub-prime loan bonanza that prefigured the housing crisis and are still suffering in its aftermath, a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found.

The resulting economic downturn has adversely affected them to a much greater degree than white homeowners, said the ACLU’s Rachel Goodman, who said the findings suggest banks knowingly preyed on black mortgage-seekers when it came to issuing sub-prime mortgages. [..]

Goodman said the black families in the study, which surveyed 3,000 households (741 of them black), had been subjected to “redlining” – denying or charging more for necessary services – loans to people in historically black neighborhoods, which made the residents of those neighborhoods particularly susceptible to predation by fly-by-night mortgage outfits pushing sub-prime loans so they could turn them around on the then-booming secondary market.

Tsipras summoned to Brussels for emergency talks over Greek bailout deal

Greece’s prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, is to travel to Brussels on Wednesday for critical talks with the country’s creditors as the outlines of the latest proposed deal to avoid bankruptcy threatened to unravel, worsening the intractable crisis.

In advance of the third meeting of eurozone finance ministers in less than a week, Tsipras was summoned to the office of Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, to try to thrash out remaining differences.

Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, and Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who runs the Eurogroup committee of finance ministers, are to confront Tsipras over his tax raises and spending cuts tabled on Monday in the hope of securing more bailout funds and avoiding default next week.

François Hollande calls emergency meeting after WikiLeaks reveals US spied on three French presidents

The French president, François Hollande, has called an emergency meeting of his country’s defence council for Wednesday morning after revelations that American agents spied on three successive French presidents between 2006 and 2012. According to WikiLeaks documents published late on Tuesday, even the French leaders’ mobile phone conversations were listened to and recorded.

The leaked US documents, marked “top secret”, were based on phone taps and filed in an NSA document labelled “Espionnage Elysée” (Elysée Spy), according to the newspaper Libération and investigative news website Mediapart. The US was listening to the conversations of centre-right president Jacques Chirac, his successor Nicolas Sarkozy, and the current French leader, Socialist François Hollande, elected in 2012.

The recorded conversations, which were handled by the summary services unit at the NSA, were said to reveal few state secrets but show clear evidence of the extent of American spying on countries considered allies. WikiLeaks documents suggest that other US spy targets included French cabinet ministers and the French ambassador to the United States.

Hillary Clinton denounces Charleston shooting as act of ‘racist terrorism’

Hillary Clinton has branded the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston an act of “racist terrorism” and linked the attack to America’s wider problem of entrenched racial inequality.

Clinton was in South Carolina not far from the Emanuel AME church, last Wednesday, just a few hours before an accused white supremacist joined a Bible study in its basement and opened fire.

“That night word of the killings struck like a blow to the soul,” Clinton said on Tuesday. “How do we make sense of such an evil act? And act of racist terrorism, perpetrated in a house of God?”

Commentators have been divided over whether the atrocity, allegedly perpetrated by a 21-year-old South Carolina man, Dylann Roof, constituted an act of terrorism. The Justice Department said it was investigating the mass shooting as a possible case of domestic terrorism, while the the FBI’s director, James Comey, said he does not believe the atrocity fits that definition because it was not, in his view, “a political act”.

Obama’s bid for ‘fast track’ negotiating authority survives key Senate vote

Global free trade talks were shunted back on track on Tuesday after the US Senate voted by the tightest of margins for a procedural motion that deprives Democratic opponents of their last big chance to block so-called “fast-track” negotiating authority for the president.

The cloture vote to bring debate to a close, which needed 60 votes and passed by 60 to 37, marks the conclusion of an unexpectedly spirited fight against free trade by a coalition of Democrats and union interests concerned at the decline of US manufacturing.

But it represents a victory for Barack Obama, who had been forced to join forces with Republicans after two earlier refusals to give him fast-track negotiating authority – which would help the president pass trade deals more easily – threatened to derail not just his trade agenda but the future of wider talks involving dozens of Asian and European countries.

Could these piglets become Britain’s first commercially viable GM animals?

On an isolated farm outside Edinburgh, pigs grunt eagerly as their food arrives. The barn has a typical farmyard whiff, and a litter of tiny piglets, born just hours earlier, lie with trotters outstretched and eyes sealed, as helpless as any newborns. Only the occasional fluorescent snout or trotter reveals that the building is home to one of the world’s most advanced genetic modification projects.

“These are happy animals. They have a lovely sheen on them, their tails are wagging away,” said Prof Bruce Whitelaw, head of developmental biology at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute, which is responsible for the pigs.

Prof Whitelaw believes the newborn piglets, which are designed to be resistant to the disease African swine fever, could be among the first commercially viable GM animals to have been created in Britain. The piglets are indistinguishable from other Large White variety pigs – except one letter of their genetic code has been flipped to make their immune system slightly closer to a warthog’s.

Stonewall Inn, gay rights icon, gets official New York landmark status

The Stonewall Inn, the bar in New York’s Greenwich Village widely considered to be the birthplace of the gay rights movement, was designated as a city landmark on Tuesday.

Following a public hearing on Tuesday morning, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously to designate the bar an individual landmark. Under this designation, the Stonewall Inn is guaranteed preservation and protection as a site of historical significance. [..]

The bar was the site of the Stonewall riots, a series of demonstrations by members of the LGBT community against a police raid that took place on the establishment in June 1969. The uprising inspired a new phase in the gay liberation movement, and several organizations formed nationally and internationally to promote and support LGBT civil rights – including the British gay rights lobby group Stonewall.

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