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Daily Kos: Republicans make another unacceptable, unserious Super Congress offer
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Daily Kos: MA-Sen: Scott Brown held Bank of America stock while saving big banks $19 billion
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Airline Passengers Asked for Extra Cash for Fuel – NYTimes.com
Hundreds of passengers traveling from India to Britain were stranded for six hours in Vienna when their Comtel Air flight stopped for fuel on Tuesday. The charter service asked them to kick in more than 20,000 pounds ($31,000) to fund the rest of the flight to Birmingham, England.
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Corporate CEO: The Rich, ‘Including Me, Should Be Paying More’ In Taxes | ThinkProgress
Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength has been meeting with congressional leaders this week, continuing their push to raise taxes on the very richest Americans. “We want to pay more taxes,” said California millionaire Doug Edwards, a former marketing director for Google. …
In a speech before the U.S. Council for International Business yesterday, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris joined the tax-me-more crowd…
A survey by the Spectrem Group found that “68% of millionaires (those with investments of $1 million or more) support raising taxes on those with $1 million or more in income.”
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Daily Kos: Newt Gingrich’s firm collected at least $37 million from health care industry
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The World in Photos | Foreign Policy
Honoring veterans, commemorating wars’ end, and celebrating Islam’s holy days.
NOVEMBER 11, 2011 -
BBC News – Philippines ex-leader Gloria Arroyo arrested for fraud
Mrs Arroyo was arrested on her hospital bed in the capital Manila, accused of cheating to win a seat in the Senate for one of her supporters during the 2007 election.
Mrs Arroyo has been fighting a legal battle to be allowed to leave the country to receive medical treatment.
She denies any wrongdoing and her lawyer says the charges are fabricated.
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BBC News – Mass arrests at Occupy Wall Street protests – 18 November 2011
Thousands of demonstrators have marched across New York’s Brooklyn Bridge in one of several US rallies of support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Some 250 people were arrested in New York alone, many of them as trouble flared near the stock exchange.
Protesters accused police of brutality, with TV images showing a man with a bloodied face being arrested. At least seven police officers were hurt.
The rallies marked two months since the movement against inequality began.
The march was planned before demonstrators were swept two days ago from New York’s Zuccotti Park…
A number of protester encampments have been removed in US cities in recent days.
Scores of arrests were made as police cleared tents in Oakland, California and Burlington, Vermont.
But evictions went peacefully elsewhere, including Atlanta, Georgia; Portland, Oregon; and Salt Lake City, Utah.
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African Union May Send Ethiopian Troops to Somalia – NYTimes.com
The African Union is considering an ambitious plan to stabilize Somalia that could involve using thousands of Ethiopian troops to open a new front against the Shabab militant group…
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Former Rwandan Mayor Convicted in 1994 Tutsi Massacre – NYTimes.com
It was one of the most notorious cases in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In a normally sleepy lakeside town, more than 2,000 Tutsis driven from their homes accepted a local priest’s offer of refuge in his church. But it was a ruse, and after days of siege the building was bulldozed, killing them all.
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Once Upon a Time in Mogadishu – An FP Photo Essay | Foreign Policy
A peek into the “pleasant” colonial past of the world’s most dangerous city.
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Crackdown Clashes with Cal’s Activist Past – The Bay Citizen
The university embraces activism as part of its official history. But as the Occupy movement spreads to Berkeley, some students and faculty members said they feared that administrators were turning back the clock, using harsh tactics to suppress political advocacy protected by university policy that grew out of the Free Speech Movement. …
“The events of last Wednesday are unworthy of us as a university community,” Birgeneau wrote in another letter to the faculty and students on Monday. “Most certainly, we cannot condone any excessive use of force against any members of our community.”
University officials said their decision to take a harder line against activities like encampments could be traced to three protests in recent years:…
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Occupy Gains Focus at Cal – The Bay Citizen
The Berkeley protests have been “a transformation of the student movement, borrowing the language and tactics and methods of the Occupy movement,” Bernes said. “2009 is where it really started.” That year, undergraduate tuition increased by nearly 30 percent.
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Meals on Wheels’ Funding in Jeopardy – The Bay Citizen
“For many of them, this is the only meal they eat all day,” said Mary Louise Zernicke, senior nutrition consultant to the Alameda County Area Agency on Aging. “For many of them, the Meals on Wheels driver is the only person they see all week.”
But as Thanksgiving approaches, and with it the deadline of the congressional supercommittee to come up with a plan to slash the country’s deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, the future financing of the food program is in question.
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Kamala Harris Subpoenas Fannie, Freddie – Pulse of the Bay – The Bay Citizen
Harris, San Francisco’s former District Attorney, has made mortgage fraud one of the hallmarks of first year in office — launching a Mortgage Fraud Strike Force, prosecuting attorneys who scam troubled homeowners, and walking away from the table in national settlment talks with the nation’s largest banks because she thought the demands of other states were too weak.
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Exclusive: Breaking Bella—When Love Equals Violence – Women’s Media Center blog
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Muslim group’s suit for FBI manual hits setback – Josh Gerstein – POLITICO.com
A Muslim group’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, demanding the text of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s main investigative manual has suffered a setback as a result of a judge’s ruling last week.
Muslim Advocates is seeking access to the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, a 689-page tome that sets the rules FBI agents are required to follow when pursuing investigations and dictates when internal approvals are required for using specific tactics, such as surveillance.
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How Sons of Anarchy Got Racism Right | Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop culture
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Abolish the Death Penalty in 4 Simple Steps
Despite the common assumption that the death penalty has been a constant throughout American history, the practice has fallen in and out of public favor, with a spotty presence over the years. In the wake of 1972′s Furman v. Georgia case, which involved a black man convicted of armed robbery and murder, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that death sentences are handed down arbitrarily, thus violating the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment. The high court suspended capital punishment in the country from 1972 to 1976, with no executions during this period. …
For the past 15 years, anti-death-penalty advocates have taken a gradual, state-by-state approach to prove that capital punishment is cruel and unusual. The less it’s used, the argument goes, the more unusual it becomes. And if it’s outlawed in a simple majority of 26 states, then the case of unconstitutionality could be viably made to the Supreme Court. With 16 states having already abolished the death penalty, there are 10 to go.
Based on a legal “evolving standards of decency” doctrine, the same strategy has been effectively used in the past decade to abolish the death penalty for juveniles and the mentally disabled.
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Herman Cain: ‘I’m Not Supposed To Know Anything About Foreign Policy’
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CDC Report: Blacks Hit by STDs More Than Whites
The infection rate for sexually transmitted diseases among African Americans and Hispanics, particularly young people, continues to be greater than that of whites, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual report. …
“These trends reflect the harsh realities of socioeconomic disadvantages that are taking place as a result of the economic downturn. The people contracting the diseases likely do not have access to health care. Other factors include employment. All of these things need to be addressed through education in the community.”
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Penn State: Did It Hide Death Threats Against Black Students?
Brentin Mock at Loop 21 is reporting that black students and football players at Penn State University received hate mail in 2000, and they charge that officials did nothing about it.
…”Ultimately, a black man’s dead body was found by police near Penn State as one of the death threats said it would. And some black students had to attend their graduation the following May with bulletproof vests on in fear of their life.”
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Alleged White House Shooter ‘Hates’ Obama
He has a record of arrests on minor counts in Texas, Utah and Idaho, authorities said, but he has not been linked to any radical organizations. Peaceful Occupy D.C. protesters will be relieved to know the alleged Obama hater doesn’t seem to have any connections to them, either.
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U.S. moves to withdraw troops from Iraq weeks ahead of schedule
The United States is accelerating the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq and is expected to pull out all its approximately 40,000 troops by early December, weeks ahead of schedule, sources told Al Arabiya in Washington.
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BBC News – Syria ‘to accept’ Arab League monitoring mission
The UN says more than 3,500 people have died since protests started in March. Syrian authorities blame the violence on armed gangs and militants. …
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe warned opposition groups on Friday “to avoid recourse to an armed insurrection”.
“A civil war would of course be a true catastrophe,” he said.
The warning comes days after a group of army defectors called the Free Syrian Army attacked a building belonging to the country’s air force intelligence, killing a number of troops.
Russia warned afterwards that the situation was “similar to a civil war”.
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Steven A. Cook: From the Potomac to the Euphrates » Turkey: From Zero Problems to Cok Problems
With the sharp deterioration of Turkish-Syrian relations over the last two days, some Turkish and Western observers have declared Ankara’s “zero-problems” foreign policy dead and buried. …
The combination of deft public relations, the help of some parts of the national press all too willing to engage in national self-aggrandizement, and an emerging consensus among international foreign policy elites about the benefits of the “Turkish model,” has rescued the AKP’s foreign policy from the gap between Ankara’s principles and its actual conduct in the region.
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Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood holds their first congress in Benghazi after 25 years
Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood, repressed under the regime of fallen strongman Muammar Qaddafi, has opened its first public congress inside the country for almost 25 years. …
The Brotherhood supports the idea of a “civil” state but founded on Islamic values, he said. “This country belongs to all its people and everybody must participate in its construction.”
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Arab freedom of expression: The right to be hidden | The Economist
Soon after the liberation of Tripoli, the Libyan capital, this correspondent met a woman sporting a niqab, or face veil, along with a floor-length black dress and black gloves. Her eyes, all that could be seen, gleamed as she revelled in a new-found freedom. For 40 years under what she disdainfully termed the “liberalism” of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the niqab had been forbidden. “But now we can wear what we like!”
Aliaa el-Mahdi, a 20-year-old university student in Cairo, has found a very different way to celebrate the Arab spring. She recently posted an alluring photograph on Facebook, Twitter and her personal blog. It showed herself standing unclothed, bar thigh-length stockings and a pair of bright-red shoes.
The public airing of a nude self-portrait, an act of almost unheard-of daring in a conservative Arab country, stirred instant controversy, as well as more than a million page views. Ms el-Mahdi, who describes herself as an atheist, says she meant to echo “screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy”.
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Thousands protest in Egypt’s Tahrir against army rule | Reuters
A parliamentary election set for November 28 could be disrupted if political parties and the government fail to resolve a row over the proposal that would deny parliamentary oversight of the army, potentially allowing it to defy an elected government.
Over 39 political parties and groups said in a joint statement they would rally “to protect democracy and the transfer of power” after negotiations broke down between Islamist groups and the cabinet.
Deputy Prime Minister Ali al-Silmi showed a constitutional draft to political groups earlier this month which would give the army exclusive authority over its internal affairs and budget.
Salafi parties and movements who follow strict Islamic teachings were the earliest to galvanize support for the Friday protest, with the Muslim Brotherhood and a number of liberal parties following suit.
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