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My first Thanksgiving with white people – Eatocracy – CNN.com Blogs
It was a real eye-opening experience for me in that up to this point, I thought we had pretty much navigated across the sea of cultural differences between us. I taught him how to play spades, he taught me gin rummy, it was all good. But now there was this string bean casserole with dried up onions on my plate and a dish of naked potato salad in my face and I was beginning to think we wouldn’t make it.
It’s Thanksgiving. Why isn’t there any paprika on the potato salad? How come there isn’t any hot sauce out on the table? How come there’s nothing to put hot sauce on?
I was willing to do anything for love. But I wasn’t ready to do that.
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7 December 1993 – Death of Félix Houphouët-Boigny
Félix Houphouët-Boigny was the first president of Côte d’Ivoire, from 6 August 1960 until his death in office.
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UDI Comes to an End – 11 December 1979 | About.com African History
Rhodesia once again falls under British rule after the country’s government voted itself out of office through the Constitution of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia Bill. Ian Smith’s government had announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, heralding 14 years of white settler-rule. …
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This Day in African History – Kenya Achieves Independence
December 12, 2011
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Mao’s China Invades Bhutan | About.com Asian History
In 1959, Mao Zedong ordered his troops into Tibet. This invasion crushed resistance to China and drove the ruler of Tibet, the 14th Dalai Lama, into exile in India.
This event is well-known because it brought down the Dalai Lama’s government. However, the Chinese also invaded several enclaves controlled by Bhutan…
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Today in Asian History: U.N. Partition of Palestine
On November 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed a Partition Plan for Palestine.
General Assembly Resolution 181 was meant to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict by dividing Palestine into separate Jewish and Arabs states: Israel and Palestine.
The partition plan was never fully enacted, since all of the neighboring Arab states attacked Israel as soon as it declared its independence.
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Not Just Pearl Harbor – The Southern Expansion | About.com Asian History
In what is called the “Southern Expansion,” Japanese forces took the British colony of Hong Kong, and invaded the US-controlled Philippine Islands as well as Thailand. Captured Thai territory served as a springboard for an attack on the British colony of Malaya and Dutch-controlled parts of what is now Indonesia. They would also take Burma and Singapore in the following months.
Japan’s leaders had two main motivations for this sudden grab of much of eastern Asia: they needed reliable supplies of commodities such as oil, rubber and jute for rope for their war effort in China and elsewhere, and they wanted to push the European colonial powers out of Asia.
At first, many people in the former colonies welcomed the Japanese as liberators.
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Deb Roy, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, gives a talk on how he’s wired his house for video and recorded everything said around his infant son for three years, giving him the ability to analyze (for instance) exactly what enabled him to learn the word water. Then he explains how he used similar techniques to analyze the relationship between everything available on TV and what people say in social media. It’s pretty mind-boggling stuff, and if you have twenty minutes to spare it’s well worth your while.
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500px / Photo “Pencil Vs Camera – 4″ by Ben Heine
This is the legendary “Tram 28″ in Lisbon, Portugal. It runs through the narrowest and steepest streets of the Alfama district. I drew the sketch and took the photo.
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Tweeking uses Twitter handles to generate amusing ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder text
Anyone who has ever worked in design is probably at least a little familiar with lorem ipsum, the placeholder text that occupies designs until the real copy is ready to go. If you’re sick of staring at Latin you can’t decipher, check out Tweeking — this site turns any Twitter handle’s Tweets into a surprisingly readable stream of conscious block of text you can drop into your designs, or just send around to your friends for fun.
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Protesters March To UN In “Stand For Freedom” – NY1.com
Protesters marched to the United Nations Saturday and spoke out against what the NAACP calls an aggressive attack against voting rights across the country.
Laws either proposed or adopted in 34 states require prospective voters to provide extensive documentation in order to get a voter ID card.
The protesters likened such laws to poll taxes and other tactics that were once used in the Jim Crow south.
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The case of the 500-mile email
I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. “We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.” “What’s the problem?” I asked. “We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.
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What we plan to do with your donations | Ada Initiative
We’ve identified five major projects we’d like to work on in 2012. In order from easiest to hardest, they are: …
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What we did with your donations | Ada Initiative
We planned and began work on several of our projects, AdaCamp, Ada’s Advice, and Ada’s Careers. AdaCamp is a series of small unconferences bringing together people interested in women in open technology and culture from across many different communities. …
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Gingrich’s take on poverty – chicagotribune.com
About half of all the nation’s poor working-age…adults work full-time jobs, …and about half of the rest work part-time jobs.
And here’s the irony: A lot of those working poor are working as a result of one of Gingrich’s crowning achievements, the 1996 welfare-reform law that as speaker he pushed through Congress and pressured President Bill Clinton to sign.
Although critics, including me, feared that the bill’s strong work requirements would throw millions of children into poverty, quite the opposite happened. Helped along by a strong economy, welfare caseloads dropped in half in five years. Child poverty also dropped to 16.9 percent from 20.8 percent in 1996, the lowest since the 1970s, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
And black child poverty fell to its lowest rates in American history, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation, which assisted in drafting the welfare-reform legislation.
With that in mind, Gingrich’s remarks “really do a disservice to the conservative movement,”…
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Exclusive: At UN Climate Talks, Highly Trained Women Play Critical Role – blog
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Is Zwarte Piet Racist? | The Root
His original story varies, but most accounts have Piet being either a page for St. Nicholas or a devil whom Nicholas vanquished and enslaved. In keeping with the already negative imagery, Piet is sometimes used as a motivator to keep children in line. But this isn’t Santa Claus’ naughty-and-nice list; some versions of the Zwarte Piet myth have him kidnapping bad children and whisking them off to Spain.
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Horrible Christmas Gifts for the Children of People You Hate
After you have children, you quickly learn to fear birthdays and holidays. More dreadful than even the sugar psychoses and attention tantrums is the destabilizing influence of gifts: Into your carefully calibrated world of punishment and reward are thrust these wrapped mysteries from clueless relatives and negligent friends.
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Daily Kos: Michele Bachmann thinks there may be sexism at work after all
It’s funny that a candidate who prides herself on her “consistency” would go from assuring us that it’s “normalized” to see a woman running for office to declaring it “unusual” and to even claim it’s never been done before. (I wonder what Elizabeth Dole, Republican presidential candidate in 2000, would have to say about that.)
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Daily Kos: Occupy Los Angeles Raid Aftermath: Extra-Judicial Punishments R Us
First, credible reports, supported in some cases by video footage, have now emerged that Occupiers were beaten and otherwise brutalized by LAPD officers on the grounds of City Hall park or its close environs. In most cases, this physical abuse occurred after the LAPD had given its final order to disperse and was only allowing its selected ‘embedded’ pool reporters access to the park and its environs.
Second, once in custody, arrestees were held on Sherriff’s Department buses for up to 8 hours with no access to bathroom facilities or to prescribed medicines. …
As one Occupier put it, now middle class white protesters are learning some of what minority communities in LA have had to put with for many years.
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I finally got home Thursday afternoon after spending two nights in jail, and have had a hard time getting my bearings…
…There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD’s attack on Occupy LA–not unless you think that people peacefully protesting against the power of the financial oligarchy deserve to be treated the way I saw Russian cops treating the protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were demonstrating against the oligarchy under Putin and Yeltsin, before we at The eXiled all got tossed out in 2008. Back then, everyone in the West protested and criticized the way the Russian cops brutally snuffed out dissent…
While people are now beginning to learn that the police attack on Occupy LA was much more violent than previously reported, few actually realize that much—if not most—of the abuse happened while the protesters were in police custody, completely outside the range of the press and news media.
…I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.
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Democrats Bet the Senate on Women – Josh Kraushaar – NationalJournal.com
Democrats have accomplished the rare feat of convincing more women than men to run in leading Senate races next year. Include the six women up for reelection, and it’s the largest crop running for the Senate—ever.
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Citing Paul, he described a struggle, not against “flesh and blood,” but “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” …
Perry has signaled his desire not just to ban abortion, but to restrict access to contraceptives as well.
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Apple Says Siri’s Abortion Answers Are a Glitch – NYTimes.com
Apple said Wednesday that the apparent inability of Siri, the virtual assistant in the iPhone 4S, to retrieve information about abortion clinics and women’s health services in some areas was not intentional or deliberate.
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San Diego Lifeguard Wins Gender Discrimination Lawsuit – Working In These Times
Alison Terry is one of the best swimmers to come out of San Diego, setting numerous high school records and competing in the Olympic Trials. She also received national attention as one of relatively few successful African American swimmers in a largely white sport, and for her outreach efforts with inner-city kids. But after more than a decade working summers as a lifeguard in San Diego, she couldn’t get hired for a full-time year-round lifeguarding job. …
Physical strength had nothing to do with the gender imbalance—women made up more than a quarter of the seasonal summer force (46 women compared to 126 men) that actually do the most physical work saving swimmers and patrolling beaches, and earn hourly wages with no benefits. …
Terry was the fifth female San Diego lifeguard to sue the city and the first to win a case, as the others settled out of court. Attorney Mike Conger represented all five women. He told me that not only are women who apply for full-time positions being denied, most are not even applying because of the boys-club atmosphere and the way top male guards prevent them from taking necessary classes.
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Fordham Students Protest Hidden Anti-Birth-Control Policy [Updated]
Students at Fordham University complain that the Catholic school won’t prescribe birth control at its campus clinics — and that this policy isn’t made clear to incoming students. Now they’re hosting an off-campus clinic as an alternative.
…one student was denied birth control although she had an “ovarian cyst (that they had sonogram records of on file) and irregular periods.”
…has asked the administration multiple times to make its birth control policies clearer so that incoming students will be aware they won’t be able to get their prescriptions filled on campus. As of now, the university appears to have ignored their requests.
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Noted Catholic theologian and advocate Peter Kreeft claims that Catholics who support a woman’s right to choose are worse than the Catholic Church’s pedophile priests and are “straight from the devil.” …
Kreeft reportedly received a standing ovation.
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Daily Kos: Occupy LA:One Marine’s Account of Intimidation by LAPD Video
They showed a picture of his child to him that was not taken by the family. They arrested him for jaywalking even though he is a conscientious pedestrian. He gives names and badge numbers.
“They said if I do return something will happen to my family”
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Daily Kos: America’s ‘toughest sheriff’ Joe Arpaio ignored sex crimes and child abuse
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Daily Kos: Newt Gingrich assures Republicans he is too an anti-choice extremist
…isn’t it sweet that Newt wants those fertilized eggs to be protected by law? Of course, once those eggs are born, well, he’d like to do away with the laws that protect them—like those “truly stupid” child labor laws—and put those lazy bastards to work.
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The Milky Way galaxy continues to devour its small neighbouring dwarf galaxies and the evidence is spread out across the sky.
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In the quantum world, diamonds can communicate with each other
Researchers working at the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford in England have managed to get one small diamond to communicate with another small diamond utilizing “quantum entanglement,” one of the more mind-blowing features of quantum physics.
Entanglement has been proven before but what makes the Oxford experiment unique is that concept was demonstrated with substantial solid objects at room temperature.
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Four reasons why the quantum vacuum may explain dark matter
The idea rests on the hypothesis that particles and antiparticles have gravitational charges of opposite sign. As a consequence, virtual particle-antiparticle pairs in the quantum vacuum form gravitational dipoles (having both a positive and negative gravitational charge) that can interact with baryonic matter to produce phenomena usually attributed to dark matter.
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X-ray techniques help art historians verify Rembrandt sketch
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Heart attack risk differs between men and women
…the risk for major adverse cardiac events was significantly higher in women than in men when extensive plaque of any kind was present or when more than four artery segments were narrowed. …
However, when analyzing risk factors associated with the presence of individual types of plaque, the risk for major adverse cardiac events was greater in men, compared to women, when their artery segments contained non-calcified plaque.
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Livermore and Russian scientists propose new names for elements 114 and 116
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UAF News and Events » Blog Archive » Survey: Abrupt permafrost thaw increases climate threat
As the Arctic warms, greenhouse gases will be released from thawing permafrost faster and at significantly higher levels than previous estimates, according to survey results from 41 international scientists published in the Nov. 30 issue of the journal Nature.
Permafrost thaw will release approximately the same amount of carbon as deforestation, authors write. However, the effect of thawing permafrost on climate will be 2.5 times greater because emissions include methane, which is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
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Pitt Researchers Invent a Switch That Could Improve Electronics | University of Pittsburgh News
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have invented a new type of electronic switch that performs electronic logic functions within a single molecule. The incorporation of such single-molecule elements could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient electronics.
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Potentially Earth-Like Planet Has Right Temperature for Life | Wired Science | Wired.com
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Daly: Wage gap proves that women are deemed less valuable than men
A woman graduating with a bachelor’s degree last year earned a median starting salary of $36,451. For a man, it was $44,159. When you calculate a lifetime of percentage raises and compound interest, that nearly $8,000 difference is staggering.
As demoralizing as the findings of “Gender and College Recruiting” might be for this year’s female grads, its implications for future generations of women in the workplace are downright alarming. NACE’s analysis, which painstakingly isolates a systematic gender effect by taking into account the differential salary levels among majors and then comparing salaries within the same major, gives lie to the conventional wisdom that paycheck parity will somehow materialize for women with the mere passage of time. …
So, in case you’re still in search of the perfect gift for your favorite female grad, I’ll recommend a book. Give her a copy of ‘Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want,’ by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever.
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GOP candidate Rick Perry’s campaign team wasted no time getting its hate on after Tuesday’s historic speech in Geneva on gay rights by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The speech and a presidential memorandum laid out a U.S. initiative to assist human rights organizations fighting for the rights of gays, lesbians and transgendered people around the world. The Perry team quickly released a statement: …
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We already know the drug is perfectly safe for over-the-counter use, as it’s already sold over the counter. And the concern isn’t that it’s dangerous for girls under 17 to take the pill—just that they won’t understand how to read the label. Which of course is why girls under 17 are also prohibited from obtaining, say, over-the-counter diet pills.
(Oh, no, wait. That’s actually perfectly fine to sell to girls who might not know how to read a label and follow directions.)
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Guest Post: Matt Strassler on Hunting for the Higgs | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Higgs boson. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “desperately seeking” in this context. We need it [link], but so far we can’t find it. This all might change soon…
…a guest post by Matt Strassler, who is an expert particle theorist, to help explain what’s at stake and where the search for the Higgs might lead.
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Daily Kos: The Complete Guide to Using Photos from the Daily Kos Photo Cooperative
The Daily Kos Photo Cooperative is an administratively initiated and facilitated archive featuring original, accredited photos by Kossacks relevant to the mission of Daily Kos, made available for online editorial discourse by other Kossacks and progressive bloggers elsewhere in the blogosphere.
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Daily Kos: GOP says they’re the true defenders of Social Security. Democrats can make them prove it
Democrats should embrace this newfound concern among Republicans for the program, and up the ante by coupling the payroll tax holiday with lifting the payroll tax cap.
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Finding a Practical Path for Afghanistan – by Linda Robinson | The AfPak Channel
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Black Access to Health Care: Affording the Sickle-Cell Cure | The Root
Medical breakthroughs in curing sickle-cell anemia and treating HIV/AIDS and prostate cancer may dramatically improve life for the millions of people struggling with these diseases, but there are significant barriers that may keep African Americans from receiving this new, high-quality care. This article is the first in a series about how health care costs, policies and even the structure of the health care system may increase, rather than decrease, the health disparities we face. To read other articles in the series, click here.
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On Black Atheism: Zaheer Ali | The Root
A recent New York Times article profiled African Americans who don’t believe in God or who have eschewed the faith that many assume is central to the black experience. …
For the fifth in the series, The Root talked to Zaheer Ali, a doctoral student in history at Columbia University who researches 20th-century African-American history and religion. He is the former project manager of Columbia’s Malcolm X Project. …
Read the other interviews here.
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The Tea Party: Is It Winding Down?
GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s recent surge in the polls is a sign that the Tea Party movement has lost its vigor, Clarence Page writes in his Chicago Tribune column. Why? The movement began in order to stamp out insiders like Gingrich, who is now riding high.
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Choosing Egypt’s Future by Yasmine El Rashidi | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
“I’ve been in line for four hours and I won’t give up,” one middle-aged woman told me as we waited. Three hours later, she had finally cast her vote—her first ever in the country’s parliamentary elections. There were 18,000 of us in that same line who voted—assigned to that voting station based on our National ID numbers and registered home addresses. My own wait was six hours, a cousin waited seven.
The road to these parliamentary elections has been bumpy. When we went out for our first ‘free and fair’ vote back in March—a Yes/No vote on a package of nine constitutional amendments—most of us expected we would already have a parliament in place by now.
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Najwa Alazabi has another first name, Tiarina, but under Muammar Qaddafi’s rule she could never use it. Tiarina is a traditional name of Amazighs, a North African ethnic minority also known as Berber, and expressions of the Amazigh culture and script were forbidden in Qaddafi’s Libya. When we met in early November, the dark eyed, 22-year-old solemnly told me I can call her either one.
Alazabi was nervous when we first sat down. She’d never spoken to a journalist before, she said — much less a Western one — and the topic we were discussing is so important to her, she doesn’t want to get it wrong. She shuffled with her papers looking for the right words and pointed to the Amazigh necklace she’s wearing — an emblem on a blue, green, and yellow background. She couldn’t wear this before, either. Now, she wears it everyday.
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Context and variation: Iron-deficiency is not something you get just for being a lady
Ladies, unless you are menorrhagic (bleeding more than 120 milliliters each cycle) your period is not doing you wrong. If you have iron-deficiency anemia and your doctor is insisting it’s because you slough off your endometrium from time to time without doing a single test to confirm it, you may want to insist on an endoscopy. It could save your life.
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If you’re wondering if all this flim-flammery and misdirection works, let me just say that my eldest told me this week that he’s going to start buying his own copies of some of his favorite books to have with him at college next year. One title he’s particularly planning on using as he studies video game design is … Machiavelli’s The Prince, which he found really useful for understanding how villains operate.
Yup, that’s my boy!
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Is Siri Pro Life? Apparently Yes. | Gizmodo
Apple iPhone 4S’ Siri can find you hookers in your neighborhood. Siri can find you Viagra. Siri can find you a local surgeon to give you breast implants. But apparently it can’t find abortion clinics.
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