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
Nine black students escorted into Little Rock’s Central High School; President Woodrow Wilson collapses; Author William Faulkner born; TV’s Barbara Walters and movie actor-producer Michael Douglas born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
Breakfast News
China to launch national cap-and-trade plan in 2017, US announces
China, the world’s biggest carbon polluter, will launch a national cap-and-trade scheme in 2017, the White House said on Thursday.
The move, announced on the eve of a summit in Washington between Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, would make China the world’s biggest carbon market, overtaking the European Union, and could strengthen global efforts to put a price on carbon.
White House officials said the cap-and-trade plan would be formally announced on Friday along with a “very substantial financial commitment” from China to help the world’s poorest countries fight climate change.
The US has already pledged $3bn to a Green Climate Fund for poor countries.
UK, France and Germany lobbied for flawed car emissions tests, documents reveal
The UK, France and Germany have been accused of hypocrisy for lobbying behind the scenes to keep outmoded car tests for carbon emissions, but later publicly calling for a European investigation into Volkswagen’s rigging of car air pollution tests.
Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show the three countries lobbied the European commission to keep loopholes in car tests that would increase real world carbon dioxide emissions by 14% above those claimed.
Just four months before the VW emissions scandal broke, the EU’s three biggest nations mounted a push to carry over loopholes from a test devised in 1970 – known as the NEDC – to the World Light Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP), which is due to replace it in 2017.
Mexico to create special prosecutor to investigate country’s missing thousands
Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, told the families of 43 students who disappeared a year ago in southern Mexico, during a meeting on Thursday, that he would create a new special prosecutor for all of the country’s thousands of missing people.
Eduardo Sanchez, the president’s spokesman, told reporters after the closed-door meeting that the families had presented eight demands and that Peña Nieto had instructed his cabinet to analyze each one and get back to them.
More than 25,000 people disappeared in Mexico between 2007 and 31 July, 2015, according to the government. The students’ disappearance on 26 September, 2014, brought the issue back into the spotlight.
California wildfires: dispatch logs show small towns struggled to respond
A daughter was worried about her elderly parents trying to flee a massive California wildfire on horseback.
A couple needing help evacuating waited for deputies in a creek near their home. A woman fretted that her mother with Alzheimer’s wouldn’t know to leave.
Those were just a few of the overwhelming number of calls the tiny Lake County sheriff’s department received during the fast-moving blaze that began 12 September about 100 miles north of San Francisco.
Dispatch logs released on Thursday showed the small department was strained to its limits by the flames that swept across the mountainous county.
Federal Prosecutors Target Martin Shkreli in a Criminal Investigation
The world’s most hated man this week could well be Martin Shkreli, whose pharmaceutical company inexplicably raised the price last month of a decades-old drug needed to treat a complex parasitic infection by more than 5,400 percent. But there is a group of folks who are probably delighted that Shkreli thrust himself into the public eye in such a negative way: Federal prosecutors.
Since at least in January, Shkreli has been under criminal investigation by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, court records show. And Shkreli is not alone-some of his business associates have also received grand jury subpoenas in the case.
Label cuts ties with hedge fund man who boosted Aids drug price 5,000%
A rock music label has severed ties with the US hedge fund manager who became a global pariah for raising the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000%.
Collect Records said it was “upset on every level” to learn that Martin Shkreli, the boss of pharmaceutical company Turing who is a fan of punk and emo music and a supportive investor in the label, had acquired overnight notoriety for increasing the cost of Daraprim from $13.50 per tablet to $750 (£490).
Daraprim, which was bought by Turing in August, is the standard treatment for the blood infection toxoplasmosis and is a drug many patients have to take daily for a year or more. The owner of Collect Records, musician Geoff Rickly, told the music website Pitchfork that he was heartbroken by Shkreli’s actions.
Edward Snowden calls for global push to expand digital privacy laws.
Edward Snowden has called for a global push to protect people’s rights to digital privacy, arguing that now the bare facts of mass data surveillance are known it is time to “assert our traditional and digital rights so that we can protect them”. Along this same line, companies such as www.privacyhelper.co.uk/gdpr-consulting are there to assist businesses on their digital privacy, plus any data breach issues due to this line of work.
Speaking by video link from Russia where he has been granted asylum, the former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower said efforts to protect privacy “will continue for many years”, culminating, he hoped, in a world in which governments could be relied upon to defend their citizens’ rights rather than “working against them”.
UK trader accused over Wall Street ‘flash crash’ faces US extradition hearing
The extradition hearing is due to take place on Friday for the British financial trader accused of helping trigger a multibillion-dollar US stock market crash.
Navinder Singh Sarao, 36, was granted bail in September while he fights extradition to the US.
District judge Quentin Purdy, sitting at Westminster magistrates court, granted his renewed application for bail with a number of conditions.
Sarao, who had been held in custody since his arrest, had to provide a £50,000 surety which the court said had been taken. The bail conditions also include a ban on travelling outside London’s M25 motorway and a restriction on using the internet for financial purposes.
—–
Must Read Blog Posts
Pope Francis Nails the Rhetoric of Addressing Congress emptywheel aka Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel
This week in the laboratories of democracy. Charles Pierce, Esquire Politics
Unraveling a smear of a smear digby, Hullabaloo
‘Snowden Treaty’ Under Review By Multiple Countries Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter @ ShadowProof
The Wall Street Journal Doubles Down On Dumb: Falsely Claims Net Neutrality (‘Obamanet’) Has Crushed Broadband Investment Karl Bode, Techdirt
GOP mayor wants to build a website to publicly shame welfare recipients in his town Sophia Tesfaye, Salon
—–
Your Moment of Zen
—–