It looks like the Ninth Gay Games held in Cleveland went off without a hitch and everyone had a good time. There had been some apprehension that Cleveland did not have the long history of LGBT acceptance and hence athletes and tourists may not feel welcome. But that fear proved unfounded.
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Ryan Deveraux of The Intercept describes what happened the day that he and another reporter were picked up and arrested by heavily armed police driving around in armored cars as they were covering the protests. It is a riveting account. If this can happen to two white journalists, one can imagine what might happen to young black men.
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Now that David Gregory has been fired from his job as host of the NBC Sunday morning talk show, there have been many reasons given for why his show was awful and advice to his successor Chuck Todd on how to turn things around (see here and here). None of them will work because the underlying problem is structural and tinkering with the host and format will not help.
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I have not read her new book A Fighting Chance and likely will not do so. This is not because I do not want to but there are too many other books on my list at the moment. But I was interested in what she might have said and was pleased to find that reader Jeff (aka Hyphenman) has read it and posted an interesting review of it on his blog.
While the content of the revelations by Edward Snowden of NSA and CIA spying were disturbing, the poor quality of the internal memos and PowerPoint slides also brought the agencies some ridicule. It turns out that these agencies actually pay quite a bit of attention to style and have produced internal guides on how to write clearly and make good presentations and the style guides have now been released under Freedom of Information requests.
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Among many news watchers, the venerable CBS News program 60 Minutes is seen as a hard-hitting investigative show. I was never overly impressed with it and never watch it unless I am pointed to a segment for some reason or other. A real investigative reporter Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity that produces some excellent news stories and whose work I have long admired, recounts his own story of being hired as a producer on that show and also working at ABC News.
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I have long since ceased to be surprised that some of the best analyses of hot-button issues like what happened in Ferguson is coming from comedy shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and now with newcomer Last Week Tonight. Oliver provides valuable context and background information on what transpired and brilliantly leavens the dark matter with humor.
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There are a lot of people on the internet whose main goal seems to be to say silly and outrageous things just so that the public will pay attention to them. Ann Coulter in one such media hustler. Sarah Palin is another. The logical thing to do is to ignore them and deny them the visibility they so clearly crave and usually I do just that. But sometimes the things they say are so funnily mockable that I bend the rules.
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Ryan Devereaux reports that five people have now sued the government for infringing on their civil liberties by placing them on no-fly lists and otherwise harassing them using its massive database to put them on watch lists and used it to pressure them.
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Alex Kane writes that mounting evidence is making it increasingly hard to deny that war crimes were committed by Israel in its most recent assault on Gaza. The United Nations Human Rights Commission has sent in a three member team to investigate human rights violations in the most recent conflict.
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