Front Page - June 10, 2013
1. Snowden: I Don’t Expect to Go Home: Edward Snowden, the man who leaked top-secret information about the National Security Agency’s widespread spying program, told the Guardian that he thinks “nothing good” will happen to him.
2. George Zimmerman Trial to Begin: Jury selection for George Zimmerman’s trial for second-degree murder is set to begin Monday, more than one year after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin.
3. ‘Kinky Boots’ Wins Best Musical: After leading much of the night, Cyndi Lauper’s Kinky Boots took Best Musical at Sunday night’s Tony Awards, and Pippin won Best Revival.
4. Mandela Still in Serious Condition: Nelson Mandela remained in “stable, but serious” condition on Monday after spending the weekend in a Pretoria hospital for a lung infection.
5. 20,000 Flee German Flood: More than 20,000 people were evacuated from their homes in Germany and Hungary on Monday after a dam burst on the River Elbe in Magdeburg this weekend.
Photo: Protesters clash with police during the blockage of the Venice Tourist Port on June 9, 2013 in Venice, Italy. Three days of protests are being organized by Venetians and environmentalists, who are opposed to cruise ships crossing the St. Mark’s Basin. By Marco Secchi/Getty.
“We hadn’t even heard of PRISM before yesterday.” — Mark Zuckerberg claims Facebook wasn’t a part of PRISM either.
“We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.” — Apparently Google didn’t know about PRISM, writes CEO Larry Page in a post titled “What the…?”
The Front Page - June 7, 2013
1. National Intelligence Director Condemns Leaks: “The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.”
2. Jobs Report Shows Hiring is Steady: A new report from the Labor Department out Friday shows the U.S. added 175,000 jobs in May and the unemployment rate rose from 7.5 percent in April to 7.6 percent, which apparently is actually a good thing because it means people are looking for work.
3. Turkey’s Prime Minister Won’t Cave to Protestors: “These protests that are bordering on illegality must come to an end as of now.”
4. IRS Regrets Lavish Conference Spending: A few years after spending $50 million on a series of training conferences, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted that the expenditures were probably “not the best use of taxpayer dollars.”
5. Japan’s Birth Rates Fall to Record Low: In 2012, the number of babies born fell to a record low of 1.03 million, according to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.
Photo: Passenger ships float near buildings in the flooded town of Passau, Germany. Mass evacuations continue throughout central Europe and Germany as the death toll rose to 15. By Armin Weigel/EPA, via Landov.
On the heels of reports that the NSA has been collecting meta-data about phone calls from Verizon, The Washington Post reports that the agency has far wider data-mining abilities on the Internet through a program called PRISM.
PRISM allows the NSA to search data from companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. Above is a slide from the NSA’s explanation of the program.
Article / NSA’s slideshow explaining PRISM.
“Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.” — The New York Times editorial is NOT PLEASED about the news broken by The Guardian about the federal government’s data collection on phone calls through Verizon (essentially everything but the actual conversation). The anger in the editorial is visible and sharp, and is an excellent interrogation of the necessity and effectiveness, as well as the morality, of measures like this one. (via thepoliticalnotebook)
Former speechwriter Jon Favreau parses the rhetoric and the reality of the Obama administration. http://on.cc.com/122NlzE
Oh heeeyyyy
The Front Page - June 6, 2013
1. Obama Defends Spying on Your Calls: Apparently, the Obama administration’s go-to response when it comes to scandals is simple: “We did this for you.”
2. Woman Rescued from Philly Rubble: A 61-year-old woman was pulled from the debris of a collapsed Philadelphia building, bringing the toll of survivors up to 14.
3. West: Holder Scarier Than Al Qaeda: Who poses a bigger threat to U.S. security: Attorney General Eric Holder or Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current head of Al Qaeda? According to former congressman Allen West, the answer is easy.
4. U.S. Condemns Syrian Army: The Syrian Army is wreaking havoc on a number of villages surrounding Qusair, a strategic border town it seized from rebels after two weeks of fighting that reportedly left no building undamaged.
5. Girl, 10, Moved to Adult Transplant List: A 10-year-old girl dying of cystic fibrosis has been moved to an adult transplant list after a federal judge in Philadelphia granted the temporary request due to her severe condition.
Photo: Islamabad, Pakistan. Pakistanis are silhouetted against vehicle headlamps while walking on street darkened by power cuts, on the outskirts of Islamabad. By Muhammed Muheisen/AP.
digg:
MTV snapped a photo of Daft Punk shooting a music video in Manhattan today.
How late do you think they’ll be up tonight?
npr:
(via 22 Maps That Show The Deepest Linguistic Conflicts In America)
Joshua Katz, a Ph. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of a linguistic survey that looked at how Americans pronounce words.
Among the words he maps are crawfish, syrup, caramel, lawyer, mayonnaise and pecan. He also maps regions by how they refer to a carbonated beverage (the age-old soda or pop question) and how people address groups of two or more people — though as someone who spent time in Pittsburgh, yinz seems to be conspicuously absent. — heidi
Check it out, Y’ALL.
[video]
Sketch based on photo @paulmasonnews sent me from #OccupyGezi. Will try and do lots more
(via thepoliticalnotebook)
This is the perfect Pinterest picture, according to Science.
Well, Google Glass may have just lost the teenage-boy demographic…
digg:
Protesters in Istanbul helping a dog affected by tear gas. There are a lot of incredibly emotional photos from this protest.
There’s yoga and books and hammocks!