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
A tsunami kills more than 200-thousand people is Southeast Asia; Six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey is found beaten to death; Winston Churchill addresses joint session of Congress; Presidents Truman and Ford die.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
Rare Full Cold Moon Brightens Christmas Sky
A rare sight in the sky overhead this Christmas, and no, we’re not talking about Santa Claus.
A full cold moon was out shining bright at its peak Friday morning.
A full moon hasn’t appeared on Christmas Day since 1977.
It won’t happen again until 2034, so hopefully you were able to catch a glimpse.
NBA stars’ PSA against gun violence a first-of-its-kind power move
Vaunted NBA players Stephen Curry and Carmelo Anthony appeared in a first-of-its-kind campaign against gun violence which debuted during the NBA’s Christmas day game slate on Friday.
The public service announcement is the result of a partnership between the NBA and Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun violence advocacy group started by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Chris Paul and Joakim Noah join Curry, Anthony, victims of gun violence and their families in the 30-second spot.
“We can all make a difference,” said the Chicago Bull’s Joakim Noah at the end of the ad.
It is unusual for a major sports league to align itself so closely with a gun control group, but the NBA stressed that it worked with Everytown’s educational wing and not it’s political lobby for the campaign.
More than 100 homes confirmed lost in Great Ocean Road bushfire
The number of homes destroyed in the Wye River fire on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road on Christmas Day has risen to 103.
The 2200ha fire destroyed 85 homes in Wye River and 18 in Separation Creek as it swept through bushland and began to advance toward the town of Lorne on Friday night.
And the emergency management commissioner, Craig Lapsley, said the blaze could continue burning until January or February. Even a dousing of rain on Saturday was unlikely to do much in the long term once the state began to dry out. “This fire doesn’t go away,” Lapsley said.
Twitter pledges to clamp down on trolls
Social media giant Twitter has pledged to clamp down on trolls once and for all, according to reports. Malicious Twitter users are said to be hampering the site’s efforts to be a frontrunner in the online news market, and its European head, Bruce Daisley, told the Independent that Twitter was committed to cleansing the service as it enters its 10th year.
Twitter reportedly plans to introduce measures that spell out to trolls that their undesirable communications have an effect in the offline world, as well as on the internet. By making it clear that trolls’ actions exist “in the real world” and encouraging victims to expose their abusers by publishing their names, it hopes to eradicate trolling and improve its brand.
Rockefeller Christmas tree’s lumber slated for Habitat for Humanity homes
Even the iconic Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has to come down after the holidays.
For the ninth year in a row, the tree set aglow during a televised ceremony and visited by an estimated 500,000 people each year, will be milled into lumber for Habitat for Humanity projects.
The 2014 tree, an 85ft tall Norway spruce from Danville, Pennsylvania, is being used in five Philadelphia homes. Chris Clarke, Habitat’s vice president of marketing and communications, says projects are selected close to where the annual tree grew, re-using them close to home.