| 1298 | King Edward I defeats Scots under William Wallace at Falkirk. | |
| 1515 | Emperor Maximillian and Vladislav of Bohemia forge an alliance between the Hapsburg and Jagiello dynasties in Vienna. | |
| 1652 | Prince Conde's rebels narrowly defeat Chief Minister Mazarin's loyalist forces at St. Martin, near Paris. | |
| 1789 | Thomas Jefferson becomes the first head of the U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs. | |
| 1812 | A British army under the Duke of Wellington defeats the French at Salamanca, Spain. | |
| 1814 | Five Indian tribes in Ohio make peace with the United States and declare war on Britain. | |
| 1881 | The first volume of The War of the Rebellion: A compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, is published. | |
| 1894 | The first automobile race takes place between Paris and Rouen, France. | |
| 1934 | American gangster John Dillinger is shot dead by FBI officers outside a Chicago cinema. | |
| 1938 | The Third Reich issues special identity cards for Jewish Germans. | |
| 1943 | Palermo, Sicily surrenders to General George S. Patton's Seventh Army. | |
| 1966 | B-52 bombers hit the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam for the first time. |
For all the dysfunction in our political system, a healthy pattern usually takes hold when a terrible tragedy seizes the nation’s attention.
Anyone who dares to say that an event such as the massacre at a Colorado movie theater early Friday morning demands that we rethink our approach to the regulation of firearms is accused of “exploiting” the deaths of innocent people.
This is part of the gun lobby’s rote response, and the rest of us allow it to work every time. Their goal is to block any conversation about how our nation’s gun laws, the most permissive in the industrialized world, increase the likelihood of mass killings of this sort.
So let’s ask ourselves: Aren’t we all in danger of being complicit in throwing up our hands and allowing the gun lobby to write our gun laws? Awful things happen, we mourn them, and then we shrug. And that’s why they keep happening.The Boomtown Rats wrote "I don't like Mondays" in 1979, thirty-three years ago. Violence in America isn't a recent problem. It's been going on for a while now. And nothing serious is ever done about it because the gun nut lobby is ruthless, owns the repugican party, and preys on the Democrats usual fear of doing anything that isn't agreeable to 100% of the American people.
CEOs
earning millions of dollars in bonuses is not unusual, but what is remarkable
is what China-based technology company Lenovo's CEO Yang Yuanqing did
with his:Yang Yuanqing distributed $3 million from his bonus among 10,000 junior-level employees, the China-based technology company confirmed Thursday. The employees, such as receptionists, production-line workers and assistants, each received an average bonus of 2,000 yuan, which is $314, in the name of their CEO.
Shortly after last year's high-profile announcement that the 2012
Democratic National Convention would be the first in history not to rely
on special-interest money, organizers in Charlotte quietly set up a
nonprofit entity to rake in corporate cash.
Under current law, companies can deduct the cost of moving people and equipment overseas from their taxes. S. 3364 would have eliminated that deduction, and created a new 20 percent tax credit for all costs associated with moving overseas jobs back to America.According to The Hill, "repugicans were expected to support the 'insourcing' bill until Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he was unlikely to include any repugican amendments." Specifically, repugicans wanted to include an amendment repealing the Affordable Care Act. I'm thinking if their support for the Bring Jobs Home Act was contingent on getting a health care repeal vote, they didn't really support bringing jobs home and were just trying to create an excuse to vote against it. As Reid pointed out, "It's no surprise repugicans are on the side of corporations making big bucks sending American jobs to China and India. After all, their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, made a fortune outsourcing jobs, too."
In march 1999, shortly after Romney left BTO take over the troubled winter Olympics in salt Lake City, Brookside Capital Investors Inc., a Bain-related entity wholly owned by Romney, filed a report with the Securities and exchange commission that listed dozens of companies in which Brookside held a stake the previous quarter. the roster included investments in Singapore-based Flextronics International ($13 million) and Florida-headquartered Jabil Circuit Inc. ($41 million), two companies that were leaders in the fast-growing field of outsourcing electronics manufacturing and off-shoring production to low-wage countries. together, these two investments represented almost 10 percent of Brookside's $559 million portfolio. - More
Wealthy U.S. taxpayers, concerned about an Internal Revenue Service crackdown on the use of secret overseas bank accounts as tax havens, are rushing to meet a Thursday deadline to disclose those accounts or face possible criminal prosecution. The concern was triggered this summer when Switzerland's largest bank, caught up in an international tax evasion dispute, said it would disclose the names of more than 4,000 of its U.S. account holders.
The decision shattered a long-held belief that Swiss banks would guard the identities of its American customers as carefully as they did their money, and it raised concern that other international tax havens might be next. Under an amnesty program, the IRS is allowing taxpayers to avoid prosecution for having failed to report their overseas accounts.
As a result, tax attorneys across the nation have been besieged by wealthy clients who are lining up to apply even though they will still face big financial penalties.
Free Syria exists along Syria’s borders with Turkey and Iraq. The Free Syrian Army, somewhat to my surprise, is beginning to take and hold territory, acting more like a conventional army than like a guerrilla movement. Admittedly, the territory is in the boondocks. But these boondocks are crucial because they control border areas and roads between Syria and Turkey on the one side, and Syria and Iraq on the other.There is some dispute about the significance of holding these outposts since the Syrian border was porous and the FSA had little trouble getting weapons across before the border posts fell. But the real significance of this development is not what supplies the FSA has access to but the supplies it can deny the government. Cole again:
The significance of the FSA taking Abu Kamal, the border crossing with Iraq along the Euphrates road, is that 70% of the goods coming into Syria were coming from the Iraq of PM Nouri al-Maliki, who had refused to join a blockade of Syria because of his new alliance with Iran. But al-Maliki’s attitude is irrelevant if the revolutionaries have Abu Kamal.An insurgency can function very successfully with a few truckloads of weapons a week. An army needs fuel, parts, uniforms, food to fight at maximum efficiency. Creating shortages is also a form of information engagement: A government can lie about the progress of the war on the front lines but they can't hide a lack of food in the shops.
Cruelty on the borderIn his nine years working the border near Tucson, Ariz., and earning the rank of senior agent, Cruz says he frequently saw agents physically abusing detainees and denying food and water to those who were in obvious need. He also saw “individuals being crammed into cells twice beyond the posted capacity. Standing room only. I mean, you couldn’t even lie down on the floor.” This was done, he says, even when empty cells were available nearby. In 2003, he began warning his supervisors of this pattern of abuse. When his spoken complaints didn’t elicit a response, he began to write letters. “I started at the unit level,” Cruz says. “I went to the sector chief, office of inspector general — via phone calls and faxes of those memorandums. Went on to the commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection, who’s over the U.S. Border Patrol Agency. And then felt the need to move on to Congress.” Cruz left the force in 2007 without ever hearing a response.
At
the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, competitors took part in a water event
called the distance plunge. That was the only year it was part of the
games.The event required athletes to dive into the pool and coast underwater without moving their limbs. After 60 seconds had passed – or competitors had floated to the surface, whichever came first – referees measured the distance the athletes had drifted.Yes, it certainly sounds more like a pool game for kids than a real sport. Distance plunging is just one of a gallery of 9 Really Strange Sports That Are No Longer in the Olympics. More
Olympic
sponsors are so adamant about protecting their rights that spectators
wearing certain kinds of clothing may be turned away from the games.Games boss Sebation Coe warned anyone wearing a Pepsi T-shirt is likely to be booted out because it would upset sponsors Coca-Cola.The story at the Daily Record details other measures already taken, like food vendors being told to sell their wares in clear plastic bags so there is no confusion about breaking the branding rules. More
And he only said spectators in Nike trainers “could probably” be allowed in although Adidas are also backing the event.
Coe defended the draconian move and said it was to protect corporate sponsors who have paid a fortune to be involved.
I started to wonder why I had been so opposed to government mandated Universal Health care. Here in Canada ... People actually went in for routine check-ups and caught many of their illnesses early, before they were too advanced to treat. People were free to quit a job they hated, or even start their own business without fear of losing their medical coverage. In fact, the only real complaint I heard about the Universal Health Care from the Canadians themselves, was that sometimes there could be a wait time before a particular medical service could be provided. But even that didn’t seem to be that bad to me, in the States most people had to wait for medical care, or even be denied based on their coverage. ... The only people guaranteed immediate and full service in the USA, were those with the best (and most expensive) health coverage or wads of cash they could blow. In Canada, the wait times were usually short, and applied to everyone regardless of wealth ... Personally, I never experienced excessive wait timesThis story is hitting particularly close to home for me, right now, as I have started to receive bills in the mail for medical costs incurred by my recent miscarriage. The anesthesia for my abortion, alone, ran more than $1500. I have high-deductible insurance (which brought the cost down to about $650) and a health savings account (which allowed me to cover the rest). I'm not in trouble. But I am very, very aware of how lucky and privileged I am in this.
Ekblad-Olson suffers from “wet” macular degeneration, an end-stage form of the common, chronic disease, where blood vessels are leaking and destroying central vision.
“I can’t see the faces of the people across the table from me,” she said. “I can’t see the food on my plate.”
She wants to finish a memoir of teaching seminary in Hong Kong, and being limited to a sliver of peripheral vision makes writing a challenge.
The device, called CentraSight, is placed behind the iris. It projects and enlarges central images onto the still-healthy peripheral portions of the retina.
June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation – in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.
Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.
Talk
of climate change in the mainstream media is primarily limited to
abstract discussions about carbon dioxide emissions, melting ice ... 
Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) – the main cause of global warming – increased by 3% last year, reaching ...
