US culture, religion, etc.
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On 18 April, three days after a bombing killed three and left many more wounded at the Boston marathon , a figure unknown to most Americans stepped suddenly into the national spotlight. At a nationally broadcast interfaith service addressed by President Barack Obama , a Mauritanian-born social media activist named Nasser Weddady appeared on stage as the designated representative of Boston’s Muslim community. Introduced as the chairman of the New England Interfaith Council and the civil rights outreach director for the American Islamic Congress (AIC), Weddady delivered a well-received sermon referencing Jewish and Islamic scripture on non-violence. Unlike the notable Jewish, Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Protestant religious figures chosen to speak at the service, Weddady was not an ordained clergy member, nor was he known to many members of the community he claimed to represent.
Weddady's Free Arabs, American Islamic Congress and the pro-Israel funders who helped them rise
Boston Marathon Bombing
Omar Hammami grew up in the deep south, in a town called Daphne, near Mobile. Born in 1984 to a Syrian Muslim immigrant father and a white Protestant mother, he was raised as a Christian, and described himself in his 2012 online autobiography as “a social butterfly” and “ the most popular guy in school .” Hammami began to feel culturally adrift as a teenager, especially as he began to explore his Islamic heritage, a process outlined in a riveting 2010 New York Times Magazine piece . By the time he was in tenth grade, a kid who used to dress like a suburban skater “began to feel that I was being flung into an ocean and being asked not to get wet,” he would later write. <img class="margin-left" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2013/04/dm_interview_1.jpg" alt="" />
'There's No Turning Back': My Interview With a Hunted American Jihadist | Danger Room
Inequality and the Marketplace of Ideas - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Above, I make the case that to conceive of white supremacy as a product of the Republican Party is wrong, and that it is better to think of white supremacy as one of the most powerful and attractive notions in our long history. If Republicans weren't buying, some political party would. It just means too much to us. A lot of this comes from my many discussions here with you. I don't quite know how to recap them all.
Frederick Douglass and Voter Fraud
SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing. In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now , walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on ’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to , and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838. By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name.Lockheed Campaign Cash Has Flowed to Members of House Panel Probing F-22 Problems
By JACOB WASHKURAK, JOHN PARKER and BEN FREEMAN When members of a House subcommittee convene today for a hearing on the troubled F-22 stealth fighter , they’ll have more in common than just an interest in the mysterious symptoms that caused some pilots to declare the plane unsafe to fly earlier this year. All but one of the 25 subcommittee members have received contributions in the current election cycle from individuals or political action committees associated with Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on the F-22, according to a Project On Government Oversight (POGO) analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics . The one exception, Pennsylvania Republican Todd R. Platts, is retiring from Congress. In a 2010 op-ed piece , he said that as always his campaign was being funded solely by contributions from individual citizens and that he refused to accept contributions from special-interest groups.
A Guide to Mass Shootings in America
It is perhaps too easy to forget how many times this has happened. The horrific mass murder at a movie theater in Colorado last July, another at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in August, another at a manufacturer in Minneapolis in September—and then the unthinkable nightmare at a Connecticut elementary school in December—are the latest in an epidemic of such gun violence over the last three decades. Since 1982, there have been at least 62 mass shootings * across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii. Twenty-five of these mass shootings have occurred since 2006, and seven of them took place in 2012.Public Transit Rankings
Most Walkable Cities in the United States on Walk Score - New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington D.C.
topic_food,business : The New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/
John Mackey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market, refers to the company as his child—not just his creation but the thing on earth whose difficulties or downfall it pains him most to contemplate. He also sees himself as a “daddy” to his fifty-four thousand employees, who are known as “team members,” but they may occasionally consider him to be more like a crazy uncle.