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.
Today in History for November 22nd
1. Pope Clement V orders arrest Knights Templars (November 22nd 1307).
2. John F. Kennedy Assassination (November 22nd 1963).
3. Release of Toy Story (November 22nd 1995).
Breakfast Tune You’ve Got A Friend In Me
Something to Think about, Breakfast News & Blogs Below
US transgender people solemnly mark a deadly year
Marisa Taylor, Al Jazerra
Anti-transgender violence has killed at least 21 people across the United States in 2015, according to rights activists who gathered on Friday to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, in which the trans community honors it members killed in acts of violence.
Friday’s scheduled events included vigils, marches and rallies in cities across the globe — all aimed at not only mourning the dead, but also at raising awareness about the violence targeting transgender people.
Rights advocates say trans women of color represent a majority of the U.S. victims of fatal anti-transgender violence in 2015. They include Shade Shuler, a 22-year-old black trans woman from Dallas whose body was so decomposed when area police found her in a vacant field in August that they had difficulty determining her race. …
Novartis agrees to pay $390 million to settle kickback allegations
Reuters
Novartis, a pharmaceutical company, has agreed in principle to pay $390 million to settle U.S. allegations that it used kickbacks to specialty pharmacies to push sales of some drugs, the Swiss company said on Tuesday.
The U.S. Justice Department had sued Novartis in Manhattan federal court, saying the world’s biggest seller of prescription drugs sought illegally to boost sales of drugs covered by Medicare and Medicaid.
The lawsuit accused Novartis of paying rebates to induce specialty pharmacies to recommend iron-reducing Exjade and immunosuppressant Myfortic. …
Harvard ‘black tape’ vandalism brings law school’s controversial past to fore
Jamiles Lartey, The Guardian
…The incident comes at a moment when, nationwide, college students are demanding action against the entrenched white supremacy and racism they say still pervades campus life. Even at elite liberal universities such as Harvard – places where some might believe that racist symbols and behavior are a relic of the past – these discussions and protests persist.
…
At Harvard, the tape that was pasted across the faces of black professors appears to have been taken from an “art-action” in which student activists placed black gaffer tape over the law school seal in several locations of the school’s main hub, Wasserstein hall. The action was carried out by members of the campus group Royall Must Fall (RMF) and was intended to draw attention to the seal’s history as the family crest of the wealthy and ruthless slaveholder Isaac Royall Jr.Royall, whose endowment founded the law school in 1817, gained his immense wealth by way of his family’s Antigua plantation, where in the mid-1730s “seventy-seven enslaved people were burned alive, six were hanged, and five were broken on the wheel” in retaliation for a slave uprising, according to an open letter from RMF to the school’s dean, Martha Minow. The school adopted his family crest in 1936 as a part of a fundraising campaign. …
- Teacher returns to school after student’s unlawful cucumber condom lesson
Associated Press in Starkville, Mississippi
- Ben Carson On Racial Bias In Policing: ‘I’m Still Waiting For The Evidence’
Kira Lerner, Think Progress
- Reported terrorist plot to attack Atlanta pro-wrestling event this weekend not credible: FBI
Bethania Palma Markus, Raw Story
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
ROME – Italian investigators have seized 221 toy trains and 126 boxes of collectible stamps from a person suspected of buying them with money amassed through bribes, a finance police document showed on Friday.
As well as the trains, police seized 11 toy tracks.
The suspect admitted to taking 65,000 euros ($69,264) in bribes during an investigation into a system of rigged contracts and favor-trading involving Italy’s state-owned motorway operators, the document showed.
He was one of 31 people put under investigation last month for corruption connected to the country’s highway manager.
(Reporting by Mauro Sarzanini, writing by Isla Binnie)