Eww!

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Do they still make children’s books with sad endings? Like The Velveteen Rabbit? Because I think I’ve got a doozy here.

I made a donation to the EFF in honor of John’s birthday. Please join me in wishing him a happy birthday, and make a donation too!

–Desiato

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An attack on a drug rehabilitation centre in northwestern Mexico has left at least 11 people dead and nine others wounded, according to police…

The assault took place nearly a year after an attack on a similar rehabilitation centre in Torreon, located in Coahuila state, that left 11 people dead and two wounded.

In 2010, five drug rehabilitation centres – all in the north of the country – were attacked.

More than 50,000 people are believed to have been killed in drug-related violence in the Central American country since 2006.

I think this gets a high score for both irony and true capitalism; drug customers get killed for being in drug rehab by (probably) a drug lord’s henchmen.

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What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams.

So the Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed.

For some reason, however, neither the press nor Mr. Obama’s political team has done a very good job of exposing the con.

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Days before Bank of America shareholders approved the bank’s $50 billion purchase of Merrill Lynch in December 2008, top bank executives were advised that losses at the investment firm would most likely hammer the combined companies’ earnings in the years to come. But shareholders were not told about the looming losses, which would prompt a second taxpayer bailout of $20 billion, leaving them instead to rely on rosier projections from the bank that the deal would make money relatively soon after it was completed.

[..]

One bank executive attending that meeting was Timothy Mayopoulos, then Bank of America’s general counsel. In testimony noted in the court filing, Mr. Mayopoulos expressed surprise at the size of the loss, which he said he had not been told about. He testified that he tried to speak with Mr. Price about possibly disclosing the losses but that Mr. Price was not available.

The next day, the filing noted, Mr. Mayopoulos was “fired without explanation and immediately escorted from the premises, without being given the opportunity to collect his personal belongings.”

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A passenger plane with about 150 people on board has crashed into buildings in a densely populated district of Nigeria’s main city of Lagos.

Nigeria’s Civil Aviation Authority said there were no survivors on board the Dana Air plane. The cause of the crash is not yet known.

I’m going with “unexpected loss of altitude” for now.

I am Barr. Phillip Butulezi, an attorney of law to a deceased Immigrant property Magnate, who was based in the U.K, also referred to as my client.

Barr. Phillip Butulezi

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In a May 30, 2012 story in The Guardian, journalist Katherine Stewart, author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children reveals that next Fall over 100,000 elementary school students in American public schools will receive explicit coaching on the scriptural justification for killing unbelievers, every last one – drawing on Old Testament scripture that, according to Pennsylvania State professor Philip Jenkins, author of Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses, has historically been used by the Pilgrims to justify slaughtering Native Americans, by Catholics and Protestants to justify slaughtering each other, and during the early 1990s in Rwanda, to justify killing Tutsis.

The genocide lessons – which emphasize that divinely-mandated instructions to kill unbelievers must be carried out thoroughly and without reservation, will be taught next year in “Good News” clubs in over 3200 public schools across America, by the Christian fundamentalist ministry Child Evangelism Fellowship.

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The famous Soviet singer Eduard Khil, known to the Western audience as “Mr. Trololo” has died in St. Petersburg after being hospitalized in coma because of a stroke in late May. The singer 77-year-old has been performing down to recent times.

Make sure you link to the original above, not to this parody dub:

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In what it is calling a mission to support a fledgling democracy in the Middle East, the United States this week sent an emergency shipment of negative ads to Cairo.

Explaining the secret mission, a State Department official said that with its first democratic elections getting underway, “Egypt had no access to the mother’s milk of any working democracy: vicious campaign ads full of lies and distortions.”

Starting at dawn on Sunday, U.S. Army paratroopers descended on the Middle Eastern nation armed with pamphlets, flyers, and DVDs of TV ads full of libelous falsehoods about Egypt’s presidential candidates.

[..]

But Mr. Dorrinson remained upbeat, saying he has seen early signs that democracy may be taking hold in Egypt: “Already, they’re calling one of the presidential candidates a Muslim.”