Aug
22
2013
President Obama plans to announce a set of ambitious proposals on Thursday aimed at making colleges more accountable and affordable by rating them and ultimately linking those ratings to financial aid.
A draft of the proposal, obtained by The New York Times and likely to cause some consternation among colleges, shows a plan to rate colleges before the 2015 school year based on measures like tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the …
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Aug
22
2013
August 21, 2013 |
New rule (as Bill Maher would say): If you make billions of dollars a year selling unhealthy food, you don’t get to tell us to work out.
It was one thing when Cookie Monster began telling kids to eat vegetables. Cookie Monster doesn’t earn a living by selling cookies, and vegetables are a fantastic alternative to cookies.
But it was a totally different story when Ronald McDonald went all …
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Aug
22
2013
TOKYO: The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant said on Thursday new spots of high radiation had been found near storage tanks holding highly contaminated water, raising fear of fresh leaks as the disaster goes from bad to worse.
The announcement comes after Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said this week contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation was leaking from a storage tank.
A tsunami crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi power plant north …
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Aug
22
2013
When I first met Reverend Rick Hoyt he said, “You don’t have to call me Reverend – just Rick is fine.
The bespectacled and youthful pastor sporting a salt-and-pepper beard, certainly didn’t look like a conventional “man-of-God.” In fact, the Unitarian Universalist church to which Rick belongs is known for defying Christian theological convention. And, Rick’s home at the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles also has a history of defying political convention.
The church, according to …
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Aug
21
2013
Manning will send a personal plea to Barack Obama next week for a presidential pardon after he was sentenced on Wednesday to 35 years in prison for passing hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks.
The sentence was more severe than many observers expected, and is much longer than any punishment given to previous US government officials who have leaked information to the media.
Manning showed no emotion, neither when the sentence was delivered, nor …
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Aug
21
2013
As of today, Wednesday 21 August 2013, Bradley Manning has served 1,182 days in prison. He should be released with a sentence of time served. Instead, the judge in his court martial at Fort Meade, Maryland has handed down a sentence of 35 years.
Of course, a humane, reasonable sentence of time served was never going to happen. This trial has, since day one, been held in a kangaroo court. That is not angry rhetoric; the …
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Aug
21
2013
A soldier wrongly beaten and arrested by Jorge Mercado — the Miami Beach police officer who Tasered teenage tagger Israel Hernandez before he died — says he and another service member were forced to quash their complaint in order to save their families and careers.
Luis Maldonado says he and buddy Randy Vega faced a painful choice: either drop their complaint against Mercado and three other Miami Beach cops, or drop out of the military in …
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Aug
21
2013
A military judge on Wednesday morning sentenced Army Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
Manning, 25, was convicted last month of multiple charges, including violations of the Espionage Act for copying and disseminating the documents while serving as an intelligence analyst at a forward operating base in Iraq. He faced up to 90 years in prison.
Manning is required to serve one-third …
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Aug
21
2013
There will be special programming on KPFK during the 8-9 am hour (PST) for the duration of the summer fund drive. Uprising will be back live on Monday morning. …
Aug
21
2013
TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has an unprecedented plan to boost economic growth and shore up his country’s shrinking labor force — help more women return to work.
About two-thirds of Japanese women leave the workforce after the birth of their first child. Most do not return for years, if ever. It’s a major reason the employment rate of Japanese women is one of the lowest in developed economies, particularly among those married and …
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