In yet another chilling video, the terrorist group ISIS is seen murdering another American journalist, Stephen Sotloff, in the name of Islam.
In the video, which lasts for just under three minutes, ISIS murders Sotloff and threatens the life of David Haines, a British citizen.
Sotloff, 31, was kidnapped in 2013 while reporting on the bloody civil war in Syria. He had been a freelancer for outlets such as Time magazine and Foreign Policy.
Recently, the New York Times ran a profile of Sotloff. Friends of his told the paper that he was a “selfless,” “loyal” and “caring” person.
Last week, his mother, Shirley, recorded a video intended for ISIS. She pleaded with the group to be “merciful” towards her son.
The video comes weeks after ISIS released a video in which it beheaded another American journalist, James Foley. In that video, the militants threatened to murder Sotloff next if the US bombing of ISIS targets continued.
ISIS is believed to be holding several more journalists in captivity.
At one point in our short history, voting was a right. A right people fought and died for. But thanks to Republicans and their massive voter suppression drives, encouraging people to vote these days is now seen as a crime, a crime that landedTy Turner behind bars on Monday.
The stars of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement took the stage on Labor Day at Charlotte’s Marshall Park to condemn the state’s record on voter suppression and racial profiling, and urge the community to organize and turn out at the polls this November. Just a few hundred feet away, police cuffed and arrested local LGBT activist and former State Senate candidate Ty Turner as he was putting voting rights information on parked cars.
“They said they would charge me for distributing literature,” Turner told ThinkProgress when he was released a few hours later. “I asked [the policeman] for the ordinance number [being violated], because they can’t put handcuffs on you if they cannot tell you why they’re detaining you. I said, ‘Show me where it’s illegal to do this.’ But he would not do it. The officer got mad and grabbed me. Then he told me that I was resisting arrest!”
When you are overwhelmed with all the negative news going on on today’s world, it’s time to take a break, take a deep breath and exhale when good news like this is shared.
Tammy Duckworth, the Democratic congresswoman who lost multiple limbs in war, is expecting her first child in December.
In a heart-warming segment on NBC’s Today show, the Illinois Democrat talked about her pregnancy in an interview with three other Iraq War veterans — all of them amputees who are either expecting or just had children. Duckworth calls the women her “Band of Sisters” and they have dubbed themselves the “Band of Mothers.”
At “Shoot Straight,” the bullet went straight through one man’s finger and another man’s leg. You cannot make this stuff up.
Two friends were injured Sunday afternoon at Shoot Straight, a Casselberry gun range, when one tried to unjam a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun and wound up shooting himself in the finger and his friend in the thigh, police reported.
Neither man suffered a life-threatening injury, said police Sgt. Mark Stein, but both were taken to the hospital.
Stein did not release the names of the victims, two men who worked together.
“One of them, I guess, thought he could teach the other he could shoot,” Stein said.
The man acting as instructor tried to unjam the 9mm Smith & Wesson, which was owned by someone else at the range, Stein said, when he inadvertently pulled the trigger.
“He shot himself in his own finger,” Stein said. The bullet then went through his friend’s thigh and embedded itself in a wall.
We all know that Republicans are against all policies that help the middle class and the average, hard-working American. If a millionaire or billionaire is not being helped by such policies, Republicans are just not interested.
President Obama used his Labor Day speech on Monday to highlight this fact about Republicans and their opposition to an increase in the minimum wage, equal pay for women, affordable health care and more.
“Republicans in Congress love to say ‘no.’ Those are just facts, they’re facts of life. They say ‘no’ to everything,” Obama said to the crowd gathered at Milwaukee’s Laborfest.
The president began to outline his goals for working-class families, saying that he has “put [his] money down” on the middle class.
“I want an economy where your hard work pays off with higher wages, and higher income and fair pay for women, and workplace flexibility for parents, and affordable health insurance and decent retirement benefits,” Obama said. “I’m not asking for the moon, I just want a good deal for Americans.”
He continued, “Most of the policies I’m talking about have two things in common: They’re going to help more working families get ahead, and the Republicans who run our Congress oppose almost all of them.”
As the crowd began to boo, Obama responded, “Don’t boo, vote,” a motto he has used before when directing speeches against Republicans as midterm elections approach in November.
“If we had a Congress that cared about policies that actually help working people, I promise you we could get everything done that we’ve talked about doing,” Obama said. “But until we have that Congress, it’s up to us to fight for these policies.”
You’d think Fox News had nothing to do with the loss of credibility they’re complaining about. Just if you haven’t been paying attention lately, Fox News has led the way in making sure the media is not credible. So they assembled a panel and began discussing why the media is not credible, why the media “don’t have a sense of shame,” one panelist said.
Pure insanity indeed! You cannot make this stuff up!
Howard Kurtz and his guests on this Sunday’s Media Buzz took a walk down bizarro-lane and made believe they themselves and the network they work for are not exactly what’s wrong with our corporate media these days.
Aside from the December holiday season, the back-to-school late August and early September rush has the most profound effects on the United States. Shopping patterns change, traffic gets worse, and the general tenor of every community shifts to accommodate the children and adults who work in education.
Welcome to this year’s edition. Some things have changed, and other have stayed the same.
In most polls, a majority of Americans say that they respect their school’s teachers and consider them, aside from parents, to be the most influential voices their children will encounter every day. The problem is that the evaluation systems that most states have set up do not accurately measure how effective the teachers are. Standardized tests have not proven to be reliable and systems that use Value Added measures, such as in California, are notoriously unstable. In addition, most Americans don’t like the tenure system as it is applied to teachers and we’ve had one court weigh in and declare the California system to be unconstitutional. In Wisconsin, Indiana and a host of other states, teachers, and other public employees, have lost significant contract negotiation rights that impact their pay, benefits and work rules. Add all of these up and you get a picture of an education system that wants to change, but is ignoring or minimizing the very people who can affect that change most specifically. Teacher morale is low nationally. That’s not good.
Most Americans also value education and consider education to be the major stepping stone to a better economic, social and democratic life. But the truth is that just below that surface, a roiling debate is under way about how much money schools should spend and on what materials, and what should schools actually teach anyway. This year is no different.
The most pressing issue in the poll is the reaction to the Common Core Curriculum Standards which is opposed by most of the respondents. A good deal of that opposition is related to the idea that Americans are wary about a national curriculum, especially one that seems to be prescriptive about what teachers can teach, and that local communities will have little say in what their children will learn. The Common Core is also the basis for national tests, which are anathema to many parents and strike most teachers as a waste of good instructional time.
While the standards are new, they are not as dangerous as many people would make them out to be. They do focus more on having students read nonfiction and analyzing in greater depth what they read, but otherwise, they give schools and teachers the leeway to choose reading materials and to tailor instruction to address local concerns. They ask that all students be conversant in research tools and to determine the reliability of sources, an especially important skill in the electronic era.
The mathematics standards are proving to be especially vexing since they ask students to explain their answers in both numbers and words. My experience with younger students is that they have a difficult time explaining how they came to an answer. Some do the calculations in their heads and others are not as articulate with explanations. This has lead to some famous YouTube videos of parents excoriating school board members for turning their child off to school and making homework time a tear-filled exercise in screaming and running away from the table.
As with anything new in education, and there have been many new programs in the thirty years that I’ve been teaching, the Common Core Standards will need some alterations, but in the long run, they will provide a useful map for student progress. The other advantage is that as students move from one town to the other, the standards will remain the same. That hasn’t happened in the United States, and it’s a major step forward.
We’ll have to wait until October for more polling answers on questions relating to teacher evaluation and spending.
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth saying again: The United States succeeds because its teachers succeed in educating generations of children with the resources we have available. Where schools do not have the resources or community support or high levels of social dysfunction, the job becomes that much more difficult. If we can equalize the curriculum, we should be able to equalize the educational opportunities for every child in this country.
And so to my teaching colleagues I say, have a wonderful school year. You do one of the most important paid jobs in this country and you deserve respect and appreciation.
At least five people were shot, one fatally, near the route of Brooklyn’s West Indian Day Parade in a string of early morning shootings Monday, the New York Daily News reports.
A gunman opened fire into a crowd that had already begun parade festivities in Crown Heights about 3:30 a.m., police said, hitting three people and an unmarked police vehicle.
A 55-year-old man, shot in the midsection, died at the scene at the corner of Empire Blvd. and Rogers Ave. — about six blocks from the route of the parade that kicked off at 11 a.m.
A 22-year-old woman was shot in the ankle and a 22-year-old man was shot in the leg, cops said. Both were taken to Kings County Hospital in stable condition.
A round also shattered a window of an unmarked police vehicle, showering an NYPD detective inside with glass, officials said. He was treated and released from SUNY Downstate Medical Center.
At a time of crisis in the Middle East, Congress has gone “AWOL,” Rep. John Larson said Monday.
“Congress has been off for more than six weeks,” the Connecticut Democrat said on MSNBC. “Some have said, and I can’t disagree with them, that we’re AWOL,” Politico reports.
Congress began its recess on Aug. 1 and reconvenes on Sept. 8, but as news of threats in Iraq and Syria mount, Larson said lawmakers “cannot wait till next week” to join the discussions on what should be done in regard to foreign policy.
“We ought to be back there making sure that we’re meeting as a committee of the whole and debating and defining this issue clearly,” Larson said.
Larson’s interview came on the Labor Day holiday, as members of the House and Senate enjoyed their last week of vacation.
“Today is Labor Day, where we celebrate work and we celebrate the efforts of those who labor throughout the year,” Larson said. “Congress is not at work.”
He added, “I agree with the premise that these are issues that have to be debated and the time is now, and Congress has a responsibility and an obligation to the American people.”
French police arrested her at the airport when she tried to get on a plane to Syria. They also arrested a 20-year-old man who reportedly recruiting her and paying for her plane ticket. And according to France’s interior minister, the girl’s family had no idea what she was up to.
The terrorist group ISIS has been rather notorious for recruiting Westerners, and a recent U.S. intelligence estimate says about a dozen Americans have joined the cause. (There’s nothing in the report about this teenage girl, however, that she was going to join ISIS.)
It’s not just Darren Wilson, there are multiple incidents showing police force and brutality against the people they are supposed to protect, and multiple investigations into different officers in the Ferguson police department.
Federal investigators are focused on one Ferguson, Mo., police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager, but at least five other police officers and one former officer in the town’s 53-member department have been named in civil rights lawsuits alleging the use of excessive force.
In four federal lawsuits, including one that is on appeal, and more than a half-dozen investigations over the past decade, colleagues of Darren Wilson’s have separately contested a variety of allegations, including killing a mentally ill man with a Taser, pistol-whipping a child, choking and hog-tying a child and beating a man who was later charged with destroying city property because his blood spilled on officers’ clothes.
One officer has faced three internal affairs probes and two lawsuits over claims he violated civil rights and used excessive force while working at a previous police department in the mid-2000s. That department demoted him after finding credible evidence to support one of the complaints, and he subsequently was hired by the Ferguson force.
Police officials from outside Ferguson and plaintiffs’ lawyers say the nature of such cases suggests there is a systemic problem within the Ferguson police force. Department of Justice officials said they are considering a broader probe into whether there is a pattern of using excessive force that routinely violates people’s civil rights.
Is soda really bad for you? Yes. Very bad. All of it: Pepsi, Coke, Sprite, Seven Up, Mountain Dew, Root Beer. It’s all bad for you. How do you know? Pick up a can or bottle and read the ingredients. 2-methylimidazole. Do you know what that is? You’re not supposed to know. You’re not supposed to read the ingredients.
Let’s start with how much sugar there is in soda. Except they don’t say sugar. Aspartame, cyclamate, saccharine, acesulfame-k, sucralose, by any other name it’s sugar and it’s all nutritionally empty and it all contributes to obesity and diabetes. And it’s addicting. Those soda execs are no dummies.
Consider also that all colas contain phosphates or phosphoric acid. Too much of these can lead to heart or kidney problems and trigger accelerated aging.
The artificial sweeteners don’t break down in our bodies. They end up in waste treatment facilities and then in our waterways. The bromated vegetable oil in Mountain Dew (called BVO) is an industrial chemical known to cause memory loss and nerve disorder.
Aspartame raises blood glucose levels and when your liver has too much glucose, the excess becomes body fat. Non diet sodas can cause fat build up around your liver and your skeletal muscles.
Aluminum cans are lined with a resin called bisphenol. It’s known to interfere with hormones and linked to obesity, diabetes and some kinds of reproductive cancer.
The caramel coloring in brown colas contains 2-methylimidozole and 4-methylimidazole. They have been found to cause cancer in animals.
There are so many other things you can drink besides soda. Is the health risk worth it? Read the ingredients on your next can of soda. Do you know what they are? Do you know what effect they have on your body? Do you trust the big soda companies to have your best interests in mind?
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