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
Noblemen in Russia murder Gregory Rasputin; Wounded Knee massacre takes place; Texas joins the United States as the 28th state; Dissident playwright Vaclav Havel is elected president of Czechoslovakia; First YMCA opens in Boston.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.
Breakfast News
Iran Hands Over Stockpile of Enriched Uranium to Russia
A Russian ship left Iran on Monday carrying almost all of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium, fulfilling a major step in the nuclear deal struck last summer and, for the first time in nearly a decade, apparently leaving Iran with too little fuel to manufacture a nuclear weapon.
The shipment was announced by Secretary of State John Kerry and confirmed by a spokesman for Russia’s civilian nuclear company, Rosatom. Mr. Kerry called it “one of the most significant steps Iran has taken toward fulfilling its commitment,” and American officials say that it may be only weeks before the deal reached in July takes effect.
Elephant seal repeatedly tries to cross California highway
Wildlife experts and law enforcement officials on Monday worked to keep a determined elephant seal off a Northern California highway that it has repeatedly tried to cross, snarling traffic in the area.
California Highway Patrol spokesman Officer Andrew Barclay said callers first reported the 500-pound mammal was trying to climb the divider wall of Highway 37 near Sears Point in Sonoma.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crews and CHP officers managed to usher the adult seal back into the San Francisco Bay. But instead of swimming away, the animal got back on land at least twice, Barclay said.
3,000-year-old burial ground may reveal secrets of Polynesian migration
Evidence from an ancient graveyard has begun to illuminate one of the great mysteries of the human journey: the peopling of the Pacific. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that the shape and contours of the earliest skull in a 3,000-year-old burial ground in Vanuatu, a group of islands once known as the New Hebrides,suggests a starting point for the great Polynesian migration.
This enduring question was directly framed by Captain Cook, the great 18th century navigator, on his third voyage, when he stopped at the Hawaiian islands. He wrote in his journal: “How shall we account for this Nation spreading itself so far over this Vast ocean? We find them from New Zealand to the South, to these islands to the North, and from Easter Island to the Hebrides.”
2015: the year of dangerous selfies
If 2013 and 2014 were the years when the selfie craze took hold, then 2015 was when we discovered how dangerous they are.
In January, three Indian college students were killed by a train when they stopped on the road to Agra and tried to take a photograph of themselves in front of it. A fourth friend survived to tell the tale. In the same month, two men in the Ural mountains died while taking a selfie with a hand grenade – after they had removed the pin. In March, seven young men drowned in Nagpur, India, after capsizing a boat while posing on one side.
In May, Eri Yunanto was killed when he fell into a crater up Mount Merapi in Java, Indonesia; in Bali a Singaporean tourist, Mohamed Aslam Shahul, was killed when he was swept off a cliff by a wave. In Romania, 18-year-old Anna Ursu was killed while climbing on top of a train for a picture. In Ryazan, Russia – still in May – another teen died doing the same thing.
Palmyra arch that survived Isis to be replicated in London and New York
Replicas of an ancient monument in Palmyra that has apparently survived attempts by Islamic State to demolish it are to be erected in London and New York.
The 15-metre structure is one of the few remaining parts of the 2,000-year-old Temple of Bel in the Syrian city. Isis fighters all but razed the temple as they systematically destroyed Palmyra over the past year.
The construction of the replicas will be the centrepiece of events for world heritage week, planned for April with a theme of replication and reconstruction. It has also been characterised as a gesture of defiance against religious extremists’ attempts to erase evidence of the Middle East’s pre-Islamic history.
Man dies in Germany after blowing up condom machine
A man died on Christmas Day in Germany after he was hit in the head by a flying piece of metal from a condom machine that he and two accomplices blew up in an apparent robbery attempt, police said on Monday.
The 29-year-old man was taken to hospital in the western town of Schöppingen, near the Dutch border, by the two other men who fled the scene of the explosion in a car, leaving behind condoms and money scattered around the gutted vending machine.
Good Lord, Look What They Asked Bernie Sanders on Meet The Press Charles Pierce, Esquire Poltics New Wall Street Bubble Putting The Hurt On Workers Dan Wright, ShadowProof Forces Backed by America and Russia Make Progress Against ISIS Joanne Leon, ShadowProof Behind the Ronald Reagan myth: “No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed” William Leuchtenburg, Salon DOJ’s Equitable Sharing Program Takes $1.2 Billion Hit, Much To Dismay Of Asset Forfeiture-Abusing Law Enforcement Agencies Tim Cushing, Techdirt