Tag Archives: saturday

Ireland Is Latest Country to Approve Gay Marriage

by KishaMoncrieff Posted on May 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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I don’t have anything profound to say about this, but it’s just a nice piece of good news. And I could use some good news these day:

Irish voters have resoundingly backed amending the constitution to legalize gay marriage, leaders on both sides of the Irish referendum declared Saturday after the world’s first national vote on the issue.

As the official ballot counting continued, the only question appeared to be how large the “yes” margin of victory from Friday’s vote would be. Analysts said the “yes” support was likely to exceed 60 percent nationally when official results are announced later Saturday.

Congratulations to Ireland. This is both a human and humane gesture in a world that could use more of them.

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Ireland Is Latest Country to Approve Gay Marriage

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Why CNN Wouldn’t Cut Away From White House Shindig To Cover Huge Freddie Gray Protest

by DonetteCoughlan Posted on April 26, 2015

Mother Jones

As politicians, celebrities, and journalists gathered for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night in D.C., just miles away in Baltimore, Maryland, a big crowd marched to protest the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. By Saturday evening, 12 people were reported arrested as some in the largely peaceful crowd threw rocks and smashed windows, and the jumbotron at the Baltimore Orioles game warned fans to stay inside.

But you wouldn’t have known any of that from CNN, which chose to stick with live coverage of every second of the White House dinner. “The most powerful man in the world is going to tell some jokes,” contributor Errol Louis explained, with scenes of the gala in the background. If you wanted to know what was going on with the rallies, you could “find a live feed” somewhere, he said—just not, evidently, on America’s 24-hour news network.

“We sort of make our best choices, and we’ll catch up,” Louis said. “They’ll find out all of what happened in the streets of Baltimore by this time tomorrow.”

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Why CNN Wouldn’t Cut Away From White House Shindig To Cover Huge Freddie Gray Protest

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Obama Just Burned GOP Climate Deniers In “Anger Translator” Rant

by FredQXHHqvqfj Posted on April 26, 2015

Mother Jones

Towards the end of his annual speech to the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in the nation’s capital Saturday night, President Obama got “angry.” Aided by Luther, his “anger translator” (a character played by Comedy Central’s Keegan-Michael Key, from the TV show Key and Peele), President Obama launched into an epic tirade against climate deniers on Capitol Hill.

For those who aren’t familiar with the set-up of the skit featured on Key and Peele: “No-drama Obama” (played by Jordan Peele) can’t risk getting angry in public, so Luther translates what he’s really thinking, behind all the political soft-ball rhetoric. It’s quite brilliant.

When the real Obama got around to mentioning the big challenge of climate change on Saturday, Luther chimed in, filling in Obama’s supposedly unspoken rage: “California is bone-dry! It looks like the trailer for the new Max Max movie. You think Bradley Cooper came here because he wanted to talk to Chuck Todd? He wanted a glass of water! Come on!”

Eventually, though, Obama didn’t need his anger translator anymore:

“Look at what’s happening right now. Every serious scientist says we need to act,” Obama said, pitch and volume rising. “The Pentagon says it’s a national security risk. Miami floods on a sunny day, and instead of doing anything about it, we’ve got elected officials throwing snowballs in the Senate! It is crazy! What about our kids?! What kind of stupid, short-sighted, irresponsible…”

Luther finally intervenes:

“With all due respect, sir? You don’t need an anger translator. You need counseling.”

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Obama Just Burned GOP Climate Deniers In “Anger Translator” Rant

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Boko Haram Attack Kills Dozens in Nigeria

by forskolindiet1 Posted on January 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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This week, Boko Haram, the Islamist terror group based in northern Nigeria, launched a massive attack on the town of Baga, killing dozens, according to Reuters. Other initial reports put the number of dead in the hundreds or thousands. The attack is the latest in the group’s increasingly bloody campaign to establish an Islamic state in the West African country. The group attained international infamy last April after it abducted some 300 girls. More than 200 of them are still missing.

Over the course of this Tuesday and Wednesday, the militants set fire to buildings in Baga and shot indiscriminately at civilians. Nearly the entire town was torched, according to the BBC. Baga, which had roughly 10,000 residents, is now “virtually non-existent,” Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official, told the British news agency.

Here’s more from the BBC:

Those who fled reported that they had been unable to bury the dead, and corpses littered the town’s streets, he said.

Boko Haram was now in control of Baga and 16 neighbouring towns after the military retreated, Mr Bukar said.

While he raised fears that some 2,000 had been killed in the raids, other reports put the number in the hundreds.

The attack follows an assault by Boko Haram on a military base in Baga on Saturday.

The AFP reported late Thursday that the terror group also decimated over a dozen towns and villages surrounding Baga:

Boko Haram launched renewed attacks around a captured town in restive northeast Nigeria this week, razing at least 16 towns and villages, a local government and a union official told AFP.

‘They burnt to the ground all the 16 towns and villages including Baga, Dorn-Baga, Mile 4, Mile 3, Kauyen Kuros and Bunduram,’ said Musa Bukar, head of the Kukawa local government in Borno state.

Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigeria for more than five years. Over the past year, the group has killed more than 10,000 people, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Boko Haram Attack Kills Dozens in Nigeria

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A Majority of Cop Killers Have Been White

by Aracely82H Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

As officials continue to investigate Saturday’s tragic killing of two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, details have surfaced about the suspect, 28 year old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who allegedly shot a woman in Baltimore before traveling to New York. Anti-police posts he appears to have published on social media sites prior to the killings have lead many to connect his crime to protests that occurred in previous weeks, and some commenters have cast blame on officials including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Attorney General Eric Holder, and President Obama, all of whom have condemned the violence. (Read my colleague Kevin Drum’s response to that.)

But, while every killing of an officer is a tragedy, it is worth noting, as my colleague Shane Bauer reported in the context of another story, assaults and felony killings of police officers in the US are down sharply over the past two decades. Attention has also been focused on Brinsley’s race, but FBI data shows that, though African Americans are arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate than whites, the majority of assailants who feloniously killed police officers in the past year were white.

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A Majority of Cop Killers Have Been White

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Here Is President Obama’s Statement on Today’s Tragedy In New York

by KathyIIRCgvpm Posted on December 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Two NYPD officers were murdered in cold blood Saturday by a gunman who then killed himself before being apprehended. Details are still sketchy, but New York is at fever pitch right now. Some people are trying to blame this horrendous tragedy on Bill de Blasio, Eric Holder, Barack Obama, and the thousands of protestors who have taken to the streets over the last few weeks to protest the decisions of the Eric Garner and Michael Brown grand juries.

Here’s President Obama’s statement from tonight making clear that he “unconditionally condemns today’s murder of two police officers.” The fact that he has to make that clear at all—as though there was a chance he may have been undecided on the issue—is surreal.

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Here Is President Obama’s Statement on Today’s Tragedy In New York

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Here’s How Much the Storm Is Helping California’s Epic Drought

by ntgjujljb Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the midst of the most intense drought in hundreds of years, Northern California is being bombarded with rain (here are some crazy photos). In a state that produces roughly half of the country’s fruits and veggies, the water is more than welcome. The storm is expected to dump 2-8 inches of water in the Bay Area, and 2-5 inches in Southern California. But California would need 18-21 more inches of rain over the next six months in order to make up for the drought, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The state usually gets about 23 inches of rain per year.

Check out the similarity between a drought intensity chart from two weeks ago, when California was still pretty dry, and two days ago, after several days of rain.

Compared with the levels two weeks ago, there’s been a small but noticeable increase in the state’s reservoir water; California’s two largest reservoirs, Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville, have both seen a three percent rise. The image below, updated on December 10th, compares how much California’s reservoirs can hold (in yellow) with how much they’re currently holding (in blue).

California Department of Water Resources

Some experts are worried that the rain will make people forget about the fact that California’s still in a drought. “Thursday it’ll rain, and people will say, ‘Oh, I’m very excited,’ and Saturday it’ll rain, and ‘Oh, drought’s over.’ Not even close,” Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow with Public Policy Institute of California focused on water, told KQED. “This has been three consecutive years of extreme dryness, and that extreme dryness translates to much lower groundwater levels, and very dry soils. It’s going to take a lot of rain to break this drought.”

Source: 

Here’s How Much the Storm Is Helping California’s Epic Drought

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This guy’s typhoon tweets make the climate crisis urgent, touching, and funny all at once

by JeanettHowie Posted on December 4, 2014

This guy’s typhoon tweets make the climate crisis urgent, touching, and funny all at once

By on 4 Dec 2014 1:15 pmcommentsShare

The worst storm of 2014 is moving across the Western Pacific, headed for the Philippines. There’s a chance it will just graze the island nation — but there’s also a chance that Super Typhoon Hagupit is headed straight for the area hit so hard last year by Super Typhoon Haiyan.

Writes USA Today:

Hagupit strengthened into a typhoon Tuesday and continued to strengthen Wednesday, with sustained winds of 150 mph, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center said.

That is equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane. A typhoon is the same type of storm as a hurricane but is called a typhoon in the western Pacific Ocean.

The storm was about 800 miles east of the Philippines and could be near the island nation by Saturday.

When Haiyan struck last year, 7,000 were killed or went missing, and, more than a year later, the country is still recovering. Many people still live in temporary shelters, made homeless by the most powerful typhoon to ever hit land.

At the time, there was also a U.N. climate conference underway in Warsaw, Poland. The Philippines’ climate change commissioner, Yeb Saño, had his hometown destroyed, and went on a hunger strike during the conference in hopes of spurring “meaningful” progress.

Now, as Hagupit bears down, there’s another U.N. climate conference underway, in Lima, Peru. This time, Saño is at home. He is again trying to raise awareness about his vulnerable country’s plight in the face of climate change. Notably, on Twitter:

And sometimes, with a sense of humor about the whole thing:

Fingers crossed that this year’s summit won’t get the same kind of deadly and urgent reminder of the threat of climate change that Haiyan delivered in 2013.

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This guy’s typhoon tweets make the climate crisis urgent, touching, and funny all at once

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Everything You Need to Know About Ebola in America, in One Fantastic Quote

by ErnestCanady Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Meet a man made of very stern stuff indeed:

Peter Pattakos spent 20 minutes Saturday in an Akron bridal shop, getting fitted for a tux for his friend’s wedding. Thursday, his friend sent a text message, telling him that Ebola patient Amber Joy Vinson had been in the store around the same time.

…

Pattakos, 36, a Cleveland attorney who lives in Bath Township, called the health department, which told him to call back if he exhibits any Ebola symptoms. He called a doctor, who told him not to worry.

“I didn’t exchange any bodily fluids with anyone, so I’m not worried about it,” he said. “I’m much more likely to be mistakenly killed by a police officer in this country than to be killed by Ebola, even if you were in the same bridal shop.”

Yep.

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Everything You Need to Know About Ebola in America, in One Fantastic Quote

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Will it Take a Keg Stand for Mary Landrieu to Get Reelected?

by SimaMajorh Posted on September 21, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s game day in Baton Rouge, and the bro in the purple shirt wants Mary Landrieu’s help doing a keg stand.

Landrieu, elected three times by the narrowest of margins, is once again locked in a tight re-election campaign, this time against GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy. With six weeks until Election Day, every moment counts. She spent her Saturday morning at a beach near Lake Charles, in the state’s southwest corner, taking part in a cleanup effort co-sponsored by Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company, pegged to the anniversary of Hurricane Rita. As a member of the President’s party in a state where the President is deeply unpopular, this event neatly encapsulates Landrieu’s strategy: keep it local. She’ll fight for coastal restoration, but she’ll also fight for the oil and gas industry, and with her seniority and connections, she’ll cut deals to help out both.

The other part of her pitch is that she is an independent-minded daughter of Louisiana who is in touch with the needs and traditions of her constituents. Over the last month or so, that part of her messaging has taken a hit. First, the Washington Post reported that Landrieu listed her primary residence as her parents’ New Orleans home but spent most of her time in Washington, D.C. Seeing an opportunity, a one-time Republican challenger filed a lawsuit to have her taken off the ballot (that suit was thrown out). Thus, here we are on the edge of the LSU’s quad, four hours before the Tigers kick off against the Mississippi State Bulldogs, contemplating keg stands.

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Will it Take a Keg Stand for Mary Landrieu to Get Reelected?

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