The latest revelation from the Snowden documents is that the NSA “is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.”
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Given that president Obama and the other government leaders are still in office today, we can assume that Operation American Spring over the weekend was a total bust. Even though the weather improved, it appears that at most about 300 to 400 people showed up. Dennis Lynch has a report and photographs of the non-event.
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We have all heard (I hope!) of Rosa Parks and her refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white person and move to the back of the bus, triggering the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and strikes and walkouts and other forms of civil disobedience that highlighted the racial discrimination of those times and eventually led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But there were other lesser-known people who also showed courage and determination in expanding the right of everyone to be treated equally and with dignity.
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The New York Times has been at the receiving end of much media attention following the unceremonious dumping to Executive Editor Jill Abramson, with all manner of stories being floated as reasons for her canning. Was it due to poor management style? Was it because she complained that she was being paid less than her male predecessors? Was it because those who worked for her were complaining about her? Was it because, as Michelle Goldberg writes, she sent a reporter to London to investigate the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal and the way that the BBC failed to cover it, which might have implicated NYT CEO Mark Thompson who was the head of the BBC at that time? Was it because, as Ken Auletta says, she was planning to bring in a deputy managing editor to work alongside managing editor Dean Baquet, the person who replaced her, and that he was unhappy with this move?
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Recently I watched three films in rapid succession: Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), and The World’s End (2013). Although they are all distinct films with different characters and the stories are unrelated, they form a trilogy in that all three were written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, were directed by Wright, and starred Pegg and Nick Frost who plays Pegg’s sidekick. They also featured appearances by Martin Freeman (all three films), Bill Nighy (two films), Steve Coogan (one film), and two ex-Bonds Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton (one each).
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Recall the story of how the NSA was intercepting the shipment of US-made routers and secretly installing backdoors in them that would enable the NSA to gain access to their entire traffic and users before re-sealing the packages and forwarding them to the unwitting recipients.
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The longest serving president of the US was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who held office from 1933 until his death in 1945. He was elected president four times, before the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1951 that limited a president to two elected terms in office. He was a surprise Democratic party nominee for vice president in the 1920 election that he lost before becoming governor of New York in 1929.
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It turns out that when people are asked by phone about the regularity of their attendance at religious services, they report higher figures than when they are asked on the internet. It is speculated that the internet with its anonymity creates a greater willingness to tell the truth. According to the survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute:
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Today is the 60th anniversary of the landmark US Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that said that ‘separate but equal’ practices were unconstitutional in the field of public education. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the unanimous opinion:
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The massive Indian election is over with the ruling Congress party utterly routed, winning perhaps just 60 seats in the 543-seat parliament. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader Narendra Modi have swept into power with possibly 350 seats, a clean majority that will enable them to govern that sprawling country without having to form a coalition.
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