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
Philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli born; The U.S. Supreme Court rules racial covenants in real estate are unenforceable; Joe DiMaggio makes his baseball debut; Singers Pete Seeger and James Brown born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody.
Breakfast News
Turkish journalists accuse Erdoğan of media witch-hunt
Can Dündar appears in good spirits for a man facing espionage charges and a possible life sentence.
The editor of Cumhuriyet, one of the last remaining bastions of media opposition to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had appeared in court that morning over a documentary he produced on government corruption. It is one of two cases against him – in February, he was released from prison pending a spying trial over a story on arms shipments to Syria. [..]
Turkish journalists say local media outlets are facing one of the worst crackdowns on press freedoms since military rule in the 1980s. Prosecutors have opened close to 2,000 cases of insults to the president since Erdoğan took office in 2014, prominent journalists appear in court two or three times a week, Kurdish journalists are beaten or detained in the country’s restive south-east and foreign journalists have been harassed or deported.
Egyptian journalists protest against arrests after ‘raid’ on union
Egypt’s journalists’ union has called for the dismissal of the interior minister and an immediate sit-in at its headquarters in Cairo to protest against the arrest of two journalists on Sunday night.
After an emergency meeting in the early hours of Monday morning, the group called for an open-ended sit-in to run through World Press Freedom day on Tuesday and into Wednesday.
Dozens of people gathered on the steps of the union building on Monday, chanting “journalists are not terrorists”.
The union described the police’s entry into the building as a “raid by security forces whose blatant barbarism and aggression on the dignity of the press and journalists and their syndicate has surprised the journalistic community and the Egyptian people”.
Largest US food producers ask Congress to shield lobbying activities
Some of the largest food producers in the US have successfully petitioned Congress to propose a change to the Freedom of Information Act that would their communications with boards overseen by the US Department of Agriculture from the scrutiny of the public, the Guardian has learned.
The move follows a series of stories that showed the government-backed egg promoter, the American Egg Board, had attempted to stifle competition from Silicon Valley food startup Hampton Creek, in direct conflict with its mandate.
Several agricultural lobbyists including United Egg Producers, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Producers Council have now sent a letter to the congressional subcommittee overseeing appropriations for the Department of Agriculture (USDA) asking to be exempted from Foia requests to their own respective promotional boards.
Incidents of toddlers shooting others or themselves increasing, data shows
In the past two weeks, at least seven toddlers in the US have shot themselves or someone else. It’s a trend that is accelerating.
The latest shooting happened Friday, at Weaver distribution center in Augusta, Georgia. A three-year-old girl waited in a car in the parking lot with her mother and older brother while a family friend went inside to buy car parts. He left his loaded gun in the car. [..]
The pace of such shootings is increasing. Last year, the Washington Post analyzed shootings by small children and found that by this time of year there had been 18. So far this year, there have been 23.
The statistics are worse for children who are not the shooters, but who are the victims of shootings accidental or otherwise. Among children in general, aged 11 or under, the figures are startling: at least 170 have been killed or injured this year in the US.
Wreckage of Captain James Cook’s ship Endeavour found, researchers say
Researchers said they believe they have located the wreckage of the Endeavour, a ship sailed by the famous British explorer James Cook, which was sunk off the US during the revolutionary war.
The ship was scuttled in 1778 leading up to the Battle of Rhode Island between American colonists and the British, and was as part of a blockade during the revolutionary war.
It now appears to have been located by the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) at one of nine sites containing 13 ships.
The ship, which Cook sailed in the Pacific Ocean, passed through a number of hands before eventually being renamed the Lord Sandwich and used in the revolutionary war blockade.
RIMAP said it had pinpointed the wreckage at a site that included five other vessel, off the state of Rhode Island in Newport harbor.
Breakfast Blogs
Why We Refuse to Stop Talking About Voter ID Laws Charles Pierce, Esquire Politics
The (Former) Riyadh Station Chief Defends His Saudi Friends from Charges of Terrorism emptywheel aka Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel
Republicans Don’t Want to Know Costs of U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Alex Emmons, The Intercept
Andrew Sullivan and Plato’s Republicans driftglass at his blog
The Chilling Effect Of Mass Surveillance Quantified Tim Cushing, Techdirt