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.
AP’s Today in History for August 28th
Martin Luther King, Jr. gives ‘I Have a Dream’ speech; Clashes mar 1968 Democratic National Convention; Black teen Emmett Till abducted, killed in Mississippi; Britain’s Prince Charles, Princess Diana granted a divorce.
Breakfast Tune December Waltz
Something to think about, Breakfast News & Blogs below
In Kenya’s Baringo county, police raid, burn and murder
On the trail of police who storm a village, burn down homes, steal livestock – and murder an 80-year-old man.
Jacob Kushner, Anthony Langat, Aljazeera
Chemolingot, Kenya – One May afternoon along a dirt road in a remote swath of Kenya’s Baringo County lay the remains of an elderly man. Wild animals had eaten his flesh, torn off some of his limbs, and dragged his body – now mostly bones. A purple shawl and a yellow football jersey clung to the skeleton.
Witnesses say nine days earlier, several truckloads of police officers raided their village, burning their huts and stealing their goats. Officers then threw rocks at the elderly man who had tried to escape. They loaded him onto a truck, dumped him by the side of the road and shot him.
Reporting by Al Jazeera corroborates witnesses’ accounts that on May 9, Kenyan police murdered 80-year-old Ekurio Mugeluk and left his body to the wild. …
‘The president speaks for himself’: Rex Tillerson distances himself from Trump
Molly Redden, The Guardian
Appearing to suggest that Donald Trump did not represent “the American people’s values” after the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Rex Tillerson said on Sunday “the president speaks for himself”.
The US secretary of state was responding to questions about Trump’s assertion that “many sides” were to blame when white supremacists and anti-racism protesters clashed in Virginia on 12 August.
One person died and many more were injured when a suspect who demonstrated with white nationalists at a so-called Unite the Right rally rammed his car into crowd of counter-protesters. …
ICE stranded 50 immigrant women and children at closed bus station in Harvey’s path
David Ferguson, Raw Story
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents dumped off a busload of immigrant women and children at a closed bus station in San Antonio on Friday directly in the path of Hurricane Harvey, which was then a Category 4 storm poised to make landfall.
Buzzfeed News reported that Democratic U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett contacted ICE and told them not to transport the recently released detainees, but the agency dropped them at the downtown bus station anyway, in spite of the fact that all transport services were suspended ahead of the hurricane.
“Knowing that, they just dropped them off,” said Barbie Hurtado — a community organizer for RAICES, a nonprofit that provides legal aid to immigrant families. “These are women and children who have been released from family detention with no money, cell phones, and don’t speak English.”
When contacted for comment, ICE released a statement to Buzzfeed that said, “All of the aliens who were transferred to the San Antonio Greyhound bus station by ICE on Friday morning had confirmed tickets and itineraries to their destinations. Throughout the process, ICE remained in close contact with bus officials to ensure bus availability, and all aliens had confirmed bus transportation at the time at which ICE officers departed the station. Ultimately, ICE kept two additional families in custody since their bus trip had been cancelled.”
However, the spokesperson declined to answer when asked whether buses were running when the women and children were dropped off in San Antonio. …
Single-Payer Fight Fuels Primary Challengers Against Establishment Democrats
Michael Corcoran, Truthout
It has been just over a year since the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee held a vote over whether the party should endorse a single-payer, Medicare for All health care system. The committee predictably declined to put it in the platform by a 7-6 vote. The seven no votes came from delegates chosen by Hillary Clinton, whose campaign was awash in money from the for-profit health system.
Following the vote, an exasperated Michael Lightly, public policy director of National Nurses United, made an important point: “If this [policy] is controversial in this room, it is the only room of Democrats in which it is controversial.”
Indeed, the Democratic Party’s institutional opposition to Medicare for All contrasts mightily with the will of Democratic voters. According to recent polls, nearly 80 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of the public support expanding Medicare to cover everyone — the very policy the single-payer movement has been pushing for decades. …
- Did Bernie Sanders Voters Give Trump the Presidency?
Jason Le Miere
- Top 10 Misconceptions About Charlottesville
David Swanson
- The History We Leave Out of Our Public Spaces
Timothy B. Tyson
Something to think about over coffee prozac
Saudi police detain teenage boy for dancing in the street
DUBAI (Reuters) – Saudi police said on Tuesday they had detained a 14-year-old boy who was filmed dancing to the 1990s hit song “Macarena” at a street crossing in the coastal city of Jeddah, in a clip that was widely shared on social media.
The teenager, whose name and nationality were not given, was being questioned because he had shown “improper public behavior” and disrupted traffic, a statement from Mecca police said. It was not clear whether he would be formally charged.
In the 45-second video, a teenager wearing a striped t-shirt, grey sports shorts and brightly-coloured shoes strides to the middle of a crosswalk. He starts dancing to the catchy tune in front of five lanes of cars stopped at a traffic light.
Earlier this month police arrested and released a Saudi singer for using the ‘dab’ move in an onstage dance. Abdallah al-Shahani appeared on a viral video performing the dance at a music festival in the city of Taif in southwestern Saudi Arabia.
The dance had been banned in the Kingdom by the National Committee for Drug Control, on the grounds that it advocated or encouraged drug abuse, according to Saudi media.
Saudis are among the most active users of social media in the Arab world, using the Internet as an outlet for debate and interaction in their deeply conservative society.
(Reporting by Hussain Al-Sadah in Dubai, additonal reporting by Stephen Kalin in Riyadh,; Writing by Sylvia Westall; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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