Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.
I don’t have words for how disgusting this is. This is an important read.
‘Not every opinion is valid:’ Carleton University free speech wall torn down within hours
Only hours after students installed a “Free Speech Wall” at Carleton University to prove that campus free speech was alive and well, it was torn down by an activist who claimed the wall was an “act of violence,” against the gay community.
“What we wanted to promote was competition of ideas, rather than ‘if I disagree with you I’ve got to censor you,’” said Ian CoKehyeng, founder of Carleton Students for Liberty, the creators of the wall.
Installed on Monday in the Unicentre Galleria, one of campus’ most high-traffic areas, the wall was really more of a 1.2 x 1.8 meter wooden plank wrapped in paper and equipped with felt markers.
By Tuesday morning the wall was gone, destroyed in an act of “forceful resistance,” by seventh-year human rights student Arun Smith.
Interesting story here but I am dying at the last line.
“….destroyed in an act of “forceful resistance,” by seventh-year human rights student Arun Smith.”
I can’t tell if the National Post is sass-shaming an actual seven-year bachelor’s student or if they’re talking about a graduate student.
Accompanied by her daughter Chelsea and husband, Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leaves New York Presbyterian Hospital after undergoing treatment for a blood clot that was caused by a concussion she suffered in mid-December. Photograph: Joshua Lott/Reuters
Well thank god for that. :)
Under this law, more than 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small business will not see their income taxes go up. Millions of families will continue to receive tax breaks to help raise their kids and send them to college. Companies will continue to receive tax credits for the research that they do and investments they make and the clean energy jobs that they create. And two million Americans who are out of work — but out there looking, pounding the pavement every day — are gonna continue to receive unemployment benefits as long as they’re actively looking for a job. But I think we all recognize this law is just one step in the broader effort to strengthen our economy and broaden opportunity for everybody. The fact is the deficit is still too high. And we’re still investing too little in the things that we need for the economy to grow as fast as it should. That’s why Speaker Boehner and I originally tried to negotiate a larger agreement that would put this country on a path to paying down its debt, while also putting Americans back to work, rebuilding our roads and bridges, and providing investment in areas like education and job training. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough support or time for that kind of large agreement in a lame-duck session of Congress. And that failure comes with a cost, as the messy nature of the process over the past several weeks has made business more uncertain, and consumers less confident. But we are continuing to chip away at this problem, step by step. Last year, I signed into law $1.7 trillion in deficit reduction. Tonight’s agreement further reduces the deficit by raising $620 billion in revenue from the wealthiest households in America, and there will be more deficit reduction as Congress decides what to do about the automatic spending cuts that we have now delayed for two months. … As I’ve demonstrated throughout the past several weeks, I am very open to compromise. I agree with Democrats and Republicans that the aging population and the rising cost of healthcare makes Medicare the biggest contributor to our deficit. I believe we’ve gotta find ways to reform that program without hurting seniors who count on it to survive. And I believe there’s further unnecessary spending in government that we can eliminate. But we can’t simply cut our way to prosperity. Cutting spending has to go hand-in-hand with further reforms to our tax code so that the wealthiest corporations and individuals can’t take advantage of loopholes and deduction that aren’t available to most Americans. And we can’t keep cutting things like basic research and new technology and still expect to succeed in a 21st-century economy. So we’re gonna have to continue to move forward in deficit reduction, but we have to do it in a balanced way — making sure that we are growing, even as we get a handle on our spending. … While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed. Let me repeat: we can’t not pay bills that we’ve already incurred. If Congress refuses to give the United States government the ability to pay these bills on time, the consequences for the entire global economy would be catastrophic — far worse than the impact of the fiscal cliff. People will remember back in 2011, the last time this course of action (over the debt ceiling) was threatened, our entire recovery was put at risk: consumer confidence plunged; business investment plunged; growth dropped. We can’t go down that path again.
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President BARACK OBAMA
I want to kiss him on the mouth. Ugh.
French beekeepers blame M&M’s candy for mysterious blue and green honey
MULHOUSE, France — Bees at a cluster of apiaries in northeastern France have been producing honey in mysterious shades of blue and green, alarming their keepers who now believe residue from containers of M&M’s candy processed at a nearby biogas plant is the cause.
Since August, beekeepers around the town of Ribeauville in the region of Alsace have seen bees returning to their hives carrying unidentified colourful substances that have turned their honey unnatural shades. (Vincent Kessler/Reuters)
This is awful. Unless you’re in to green and blue coloured honey. :s Even then though, it can’t be 100% natural honey cause there are now traces of some chemical colour in it. I wonder if it still tastes the same?
Dear conservatives:
You truly, achingly suck at spin.
Love,
Us fucking liberals.
It is not worth fighting for this man if this is the kind of spokes(woman) he has. …There is no point in you doing your show. There is no point in us going to a convention and pushing for this man if he’s employing morons like this.
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Fox “News” contributor ANN COULTER, angrily reacting to Mitt Romney’s press secretary reminding people that Romney invented Obamacare, on The Sean Hannity Show.
So now we know that Fox “News,” a supposedly unbiased, “fair and balanced” “news” network, is really there to get Mitt Romney elected.
Surprise.
(via The Daily Show)
Not even the Secret Service can protect you from the Kiss Cam! The Obamas played a little tonsil hockey courtside at an Olympic men’s exhibition basketball game in Washington last night. Watch the video here.
Malia’s face in the last picture says it all.
This whole photo set and them doing the embarrassing-but-cool-parents dance in the last picture just made my day.
A protester outside David Koch’s South Hampton home where he held a fund-raiser for Mitt Romney. (photo credit: Remy McFadden)
Other noteworthy pics:
Toronto city council has voted to ban plastic bags outright by 2013.
Council had spent Wednesday at city hall debating whether to eliminate a mandatory five-cent bag fee that Mayor Rob Ford had wanted axed.
A majority of councillors decided to kill the bag fee by July 1 of this year, but Willowdale Coun. David Shiner also made a motion to eliminate plastic bags altogether by Jan. 1.
His motion passed 24-20.
Slate - Ikea Tries to Reinvent the Television
The television market is in a paradoxical place right now. As technology, television displays have never been better or cheaper. But making televisions has rarely been a worse business. Lots of companies are making good displays but few of them are succeeding at making money. One way of looking at the problem is that TVs have become “good enough” and, as a consequence, utterly commoditized. The manufacturers have been trying to fight against this trend with what amount to gimmicks—3D, clumsy web integration, USB ports—but nobody’s come up with anything that’s caught customers’ imagination.
But Ikea lives in the business of commodities, and they’re now getting into the television game by essentially embracing “good enough.” The screen, as Ikea sees it, is just an element of a piece of furniture like a handle or a screw or anything else.
Coming soon to Europe and perhaps someday to an extremely large store near you.
Scoot introduces in-flight iPad rentals to cut fuel costs … by cutting weight
Even with 40 percent more seating, the two tons shed by removing in-flight entertainment systems helped the airline cut the total weight of each plane by about seven percent. Fuel costs account for nearly 40 percent of all expenses, and with prices up 36 percent in the last two years, Scoot hopes the savings will allow the airline to continue to offer ultra-low rates. Parent company Singapore Airlines Ltd hopes that the cuts will allow Scoot to take back a portion of the 26% market share lost to fellow budget airlines Jetstar and AirAsia Bhd.
- 400 seats available on Scoot’s modified Boeing 777’s
- free iPad rentals offered to passengers in each flight’s 32 business seats
- $17.00 rental fee will be charged to other passengers that would like to rent an iPad
- $122 cost of a one-way flight from Singapore to Sydney on Scoot source
(Photo via John Karakatsanis, hat tip to The Verge)
American Students Need to Copy Canada’s Tuition Protests
In the past four months, the Canadian province of Quebec has become a hotbed of Occupy Wall Street-style protests—marches with hundreds of thousands of protesters, and battles with tear gas throwing, pepper-spraying police. And it all started over proposed tuition increases at Quebec’s public universities.
Indeed the Quebec Spring first blossomed in February when the government proposed hiking tuition from $2,168 to $3,793 over the next five years. Thousands of students went on strike and the government, led by Premier Jean Charest, decided to play hardball and crack down with the now-infamous Bill 78, a law that limits protest rights.
Since then the protests and student boycotts have only grown. Nearly 200,000 students across the province have gone on strike. And the situation has revealed deeper frustrations with the government’s willingness to bail out businesses but not help the average student—or citizen. On May 22nd nearly 400,000 people—a full quarter of Montreal’s residents—participated in a protest march.
Yep, Canadian students are outraged because each will have to pay $325 more per year, for a grand total of $1,625 for five years of higher education. Meanwhile, in the United States we don’t bat an eye over that kind of tuition jump. In-state students attending the University of Michigan saw their tuition rise to $12,590 for 2011-12 school year—$753 higher than the year before. We certainly didn’t see 27,000 undergraduates marching through Ann Arbor in protest.
Good to see an American perspective on our protests. And a positive one at that.
via 
