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*1. INCOME INEQUALITY
Hmmm...Interesting statistics from Bernie Sanders. "Incredibly, the wealthiest 62 people on this planet own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population — around 3.6 billion people. The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the whole of the bottom 99 percent. Meanwhile, in our country the top one-tenth of 1 percent now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Fifty-eight percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. Wall Street and billionaires, through their “super PACs,” are able to buy elections." From NYT - Bernie Sanders: Democrats Need to Wake Up
+ "It's not a question of my [Bernie Sanders] endorsement. It's a question of the American people understanding that Secretary Clinton is prepared to stand with them as they work longer hours for low wages, as they cannot afford health care, as their kids can't afford to go to college. Make it clear that she is on their side, that she is prepared to take on Wall Street, the drug companies, fossil fuel industry. Deal with the global crisis of climate change. I have no doubt that if Secretary Clinton makes that position, those positions clear, she will defeat Trump and defeat him by a very wide margin." From WaPo - Bernie Sanders just gave an amazingly condescending interview about Hillary Clinton
*2. THE SCALIA (UN)FACTOR
"For the second term in a row, the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. delivered liberal decisions at a rate not seen since the famously liberal court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s. [Recently deceased] Justice Scalia was a dominant presence on the court, and his influence could exceed the power of his single vote. But it is also possible that Justice Scalia played a role in pushing Justice Kennedy to the left. The silencing of Justice Scalia’s voice seemed to help other justices find theirs. Two weeks after Justice Scalia died, Justice Clarence Thomas broke a decade-long silence by asking questions from the bench. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, already a major presence at arguments, took on an even larger role. This month, she wrote a lashing dissent, rooted in the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement, in a case on police stops." From NYT - The Right-Wing Supreme Court That Wasn’t and WaPo - For conservatives, high court’s term was a letdown
*3. TINY HOUSE BILLIONAIRE
"With a net worth of $840 million, Tony Hsieh could have a Caribbean island or a palatial estate overlooking an ocean vista all to himself. Instead, the Zappos.com chief executive has set down roots in a less exclusive locale: a dusty Las Vegas trailer park." From WaPo - Why this CEO is worth almost $1 billion but lives in a trailer park
*4. FATTY FATTY 2x4
"The evidence is now clear: Exercise is excellent for health; it’s just not that important for weight loss. So don't expect to lose a lot of weight by ramping up physical activity alone." That's disappointing... From Vox - The science is in: exercise won’t help you lose much weight
*5. HE WHO CONTROLS THE MESSAGE...
"Should we be thinking of Facebook as a news site? Is that how Facebook thinks of itself?" I guess not. "As if to underscore the point, the company is making a tweak to its news feed ranking system to increase the prominence of content from your friends and family over posts by news companies and other organizations. It is also warning news companies that their traffic might decline as a result of the change. Publishers have little choice but to deal with the changes that Facebook makes, given the dependent relationship news media companies have with the social network." This is interesting considering "social sharing" (posting updates about yourself) is declining on the site. From NYT - Facebook, a News Giant That Would Rather Show Us Baby Pictures and Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family
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Thursday, June 30, 2016
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
THE STONEWALL INN
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*1. THE STONEWALL INN
Besides a Greenwich Village bar recently named as a National Historic Landmark, what is the Stonewall Inn? "Truth be told, the Stonewall Inn was nothing special. Just a dive bar where drag queens and drag kings gathered with others from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. But how many Americans today would know what the acronym LGBT meant if not for what happened there in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969? For the police, a raid on a joint like the Stonewall had been, until June 1969, a no-brainer. It was Deputy Inspector Pine who led the police raid on the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street that night; the night that queer patrons fought back. And it was Ms. DeLarverie (her first name was pronounced “Stormy”) who may or may not have led the charge." From WaPo - The long march from the Stonewall Inn and NYT - Storme DeLarverie and Seymour Pine, on Opposite Sides of Stonewall
+ From NYT - Gay Catholic Groups Want Pope Francis to Do More Than Apologize
+ From WaPo - I’m sorry, but Pope Francis rocks when it comes to the gays
*2. TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!
The video embedded in this article is awesome. "The booster fired horizontally for just over two minutes, burning through 5.5 tons of propellant per second, shooting flames out at three times the speed of sound, with temperatures that were expected to reach 3,700 degrees. The booster test comes ahead of the rocket's first mission, planned for 2018, when it would launch the unmanned Orion spacecraft on a three-week journey that would take it around the moon." From WaPo - NASA tests the massive rocket booster it says will go to Mars
*3. HOW MUCH IS YOUR VW DIESEL WORTH
Apparently, about $10,000 if you sell it back outright. "Volkswagen will settle its emissions scandal case for $14.7 billion. More than $10 billion of the settlement will go to fix or buy back 475,000 Volkswagens. Another $2.7 billion will go into an Environmental Protection Agency trust fund for environmental remediation, and the German automaker will spend $2 billion more on American clean energy technology." From WaPo - Volkswagen agrees to pay consumers biggest auto settlement in history
*4. ARE YOU PASSIONATE?
It doesn't really matter, because in most cases it won't pay the bills. "There's just one problem with all this advice about passion-following: It's terrible — and probably harmful. One recent chart from 80,000 Hours, a group promoting a kind of data-driven approach to career decisions, starkly illustrates the issue: The things people are passionate about and the things that they can make a living from are usually not the same things." 90% of students are passionate about sports, arts, leisure or music. Only 3% of the jobs come from those fields. From WaPo - Why Harvard’s career advice for its students is totally wrong
*5. BENGHAZI - THE STORY THAT KEEPS GIVING
Maybe this will put this well-tread story to rest. "A final report issued by the Republican-majority committee that investigated the 2012 attacks in Benghazi found fault with virtually every element of the executive-branch response to the attacks but provided no new evidence of specific wrongdoing by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton." From WaPo - House Republicans issue report on Benghazi attacks but find no new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton
*BOTTOM OF THE NEWS
- The Marines just took ‘man’ out of 19 job titles, and people are losing their minds
- Clever Attack Uses the Sound of a Computer’s Fan to Steal Data
- What to Do When a Wild Animal Attacks
- Erase Lady Gaga from the internet, China’s censors say, after her Dalai Lama meeting
Sign up for email distribution of the Day's Most Compelling News below or by visiting Top of the News
*1. THE STONEWALL INN
Besides a Greenwich Village bar recently named as a National Historic Landmark, what is the Stonewall Inn? "Truth be told, the Stonewall Inn was nothing special. Just a dive bar where drag queens and drag kings gathered with others from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. But how many Americans today would know what the acronym LGBT meant if not for what happened there in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969? For the police, a raid on a joint like the Stonewall had been, until June 1969, a no-brainer. It was Deputy Inspector Pine who led the police raid on the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street that night; the night that queer patrons fought back. And it was Ms. DeLarverie (her first name was pronounced “Stormy”) who may or may not have led the charge." From WaPo - The long march from the Stonewall Inn and NYT - Storme DeLarverie and Seymour Pine, on Opposite Sides of Stonewall
+ From NYT - Gay Catholic Groups Want Pope Francis to Do More Than Apologize
+ From WaPo - I’m sorry, but Pope Francis rocks when it comes to the gays
*2. TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!
The video embedded in this article is awesome. "The booster fired horizontally for just over two minutes, burning through 5.5 tons of propellant per second, shooting flames out at three times the speed of sound, with temperatures that were expected to reach 3,700 degrees. The booster test comes ahead of the rocket's first mission, planned for 2018, when it would launch the unmanned Orion spacecraft on a three-week journey that would take it around the moon." From WaPo - NASA tests the massive rocket booster it says will go to Mars
*3. HOW MUCH IS YOUR VW DIESEL WORTH
Apparently, about $10,000 if you sell it back outright. "Volkswagen will settle its emissions scandal case for $14.7 billion. More than $10 billion of the settlement will go to fix or buy back 475,000 Volkswagens. Another $2.7 billion will go into an Environmental Protection Agency trust fund for environmental remediation, and the German automaker will spend $2 billion more on American clean energy technology." From WaPo - Volkswagen agrees to pay consumers biggest auto settlement in history
*4. ARE YOU PASSIONATE?
It doesn't really matter, because in most cases it won't pay the bills. "There's just one problem with all this advice about passion-following: It's terrible — and probably harmful. One recent chart from 80,000 Hours, a group promoting a kind of data-driven approach to career decisions, starkly illustrates the issue: The things people are passionate about and the things that they can make a living from are usually not the same things." 90% of students are passionate about sports, arts, leisure or music. Only 3% of the jobs come from those fields. From WaPo - Why Harvard’s career advice for its students is totally wrong
*5. BENGHAZI - THE STORY THAT KEEPS GIVING
Maybe this will put this well-tread story to rest. "A final report issued by the Republican-majority committee that investigated the 2012 attacks in Benghazi found fault with virtually every element of the executive-branch response to the attacks but provided no new evidence of specific wrongdoing by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton." From WaPo - House Republicans issue report on Benghazi attacks but find no new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton
*BOTTOM OF THE NEWS
- The Marines just took ‘man’ out of 19 job titles, and people are losing their minds
- Clever Attack Uses the Sound of a Computer’s Fan to Steal Data
- What to Do When a Wild Animal Attacks
- Erase Lady Gaga from the internet, China’s censors say, after her Dalai Lama meeting
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