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
World War II’s Battle of Stalingrad ends; Idi Amin seizes power in Uganda; author James Joyce born; dancer-actor-coreographer Gene Kelly dies; punk rocker Sid Vicious dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts.
Breakfast News
How Free Electricity Helped Dig $9 Billion Hole in Puerto Rico
To understand how Puerto Rico’s power authority has piled up $9 billion in debt, one need only visit this bustling city on the northwest coast.
Twenty years ago, it was just another town with dwindling finances. Then, it went on a development spree, thanks to a generous —some might say ill-considered — gift from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.
Today, Aguadilla has 19 city-owned restaurants and a city-owned hotel, a water park billed as biggest in the Caribbean, a minor-league baseball stadium bathed in floodlights and a waterfront studded with dancing fountains and glimmering streetlights.
Most striking is the ice-skating rink. Unusual in a region where the temperature rarely drops below 70 degrees, the rink is complete with a disco ball and laser lights.
Shootings and racist messages prompt DoJ inquiry into San Francisco police
The US Department of Justice said Monday that it would examine use of force and ethnic disparities in arrests as part of a review of the San Francisco Police Department amid heightened racial tensions.
Unlike investigations by the DOJ’s civil rights division, the review will be voluntary and won’t end with a court-monitored legal settlement.
San Francisco’s mayor, police chief and others requested the review, which is expected to take about two years and include public reports every six months.
The review will be done by the department’s office of community oriented policing services (Cops), which promotes improvements to officers’ ties with communities.
Authorities double Cologne carnival police numbers in effort to ensure safety
Authorities in Cologne have vowed to do everything in their power to make sure the city’s famous carnival is not blighted by a repeat of the violence seen on New Year’s Eve.
The city’s new police chief, Jürgen Mathies, said on Monday that more than 2,000 officers would work 12-hour shifts alongside 350 cadets to guarantee safety on the streets during the “women’s carnival day” (Weiberfastnacht) on Thursday, twice as many officers as were employed in 2015.
Video surveillance would also be increased, said Mathies, whose predecessor resigned after the scale of the New Year’s Eve assaults became apparent in early January.
Italian police seize Mussolini’s yacht from businessman linked to mafia
Italian police have seized a yacht that once belonged to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini from a businessman suspected of links to a huge organised crime network.
The yacht was among €28m ($30.5m) worth of assets including real estate, luxury cars and company stakes sequestered in an investigation into three individuals and 10 companies, the finance police said in a statement.
A confiscation order from a Rome court named the businessman as Salvatore Squillante, 68. The lawyer named in the order as acting for Squillante declined to comment. The finance police did not name the businessman.Squillante had bought the classic sailboat, which was christened the Black Flame by a fascist friend who gave it to Mussolini as a present in the 1930s, through one of the seized companies.
Paris hopes €1bn revamp Les Halles can become city’s ‘beating heart’
For 40 years, Paris has carried the shame of an incredible act of architectural self-sabotage. The heart of the city has never fully recovered from the brazen 1970s bulldozing of the magnificent, 19th-century wrought-iron market pavilions at Les Halles and the creation, in their place, of an airless underground transport and shopping complex seen as a monstrous, mirror-glassed carbuncle.
But after decades of cultural spats, protests and political handwringing, the city is finally attempting to make amends. Later this spring, Paris will unveil an entirely reworked Les Halles crowned with one of the most ambitious architectural projects of the decade – a giant, undulating glass roof spanning 2.5 hectares, which hopes to literally put a lid on the problem.
Known as “the Canopy”, the enormous, undulating roof is made up of 18,000 scale-like pieces of glass held in the air by 7,000 tonnes of steel at a cost of over €200m (£150m). It was designed to open up a new panorama across the city centre.
As the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, toured the structure amid the rush to finish work on the €1bn refurbishment before the opening in April, she vowed that the area she once described as an “urban catastrophe” would now become “the beating heart” of the capital.
But a history of errors and regrets still hangs heavy over the site.
Breakfast Blogs
DOJ Lies To ‘FOIA Terrorist’ Jason Leopold; Claim They Have No Documents On Aaron Swartz Mike Masnick, Techdirt
What Happens to Farmers’ Interests After Everyone Packs Up and Leaves Iowa? Charles Pierce, Esquire Politics
The Wages of Derp are Derp. Lots of it. Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memp
Why Trump beating Bush in Iowa is good news for Democrats Spocko, Hullabaloo
‘The ACLU Effect’: Chicago Cops Blame Changes To Stop And Frisk Policies For Spike In Violence Kevin Gosztola, ShadowProof