Mintie

We are thrilled to announce that we are rolling out Premium accounts for The Old Reader. Since taking over the application in August we’ve made tremendous strides to improve the dependability and speed of the application. We’ve also begun the process of building and releasing heavily requested features and have worked diligently on user support. We believe The Old Reader is now truly a world-class application!

Our next goal is to ensure the long term financial viability of The Old Reader. Hosting, development, and support are not inexpensive and while it’s never been our goal to get rich off of this application, long term sustainability and growth will require revenue. So we explored several models for generating revenues including a premium offering and advertising. In the end, we’d like to avoid advertising as we feel it’s too invasive and runs counter to our strong belief in the open web. So we started working on a premium offering that would allow 90% of our users to continue on with a free account that is largely unchanged from what they are using today.

What will you get with The Old Reader Premium?
- Full-text search
- Faster feed refresh times
- Up to 500 Subscriptions
- 6 months of post storage
- Instapaper and Readability integration
- Early access to new features

What will it cost?
The Old Reader Premium will cost $3/month or $30/year. However, for the next 2 weeks (or up to 5,000 accounts) we’ll be offering the service for $2/month or $20/year and we will lock you into that price for a minimum of the next 2 years. This is our way of saying thanks to our existing users and hopefully getting the Premium service off to a great start.

Do I have to upgrade?
No! 90% of our users can continue on for free just as they are today. However, users with more than 100 feeds will need to upgrade to premium. Otherwise, all functionality will remain available to free accounts. We also offer a 2 week trial period for the premium service and will even allow that trial period to get extended for those still interested in moving to Premium.

We hope you are as excited about TOR Premium as we are. It’s a great value for a service that we know our users will love. Thanks for continuing to support us and thanks for using The Old Reader!

When primed to think that a black man is more educated, people are more likely to remember him as having lighter skin, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal SAGE Open.

Researchers conducted the study in two parts: First, they flashed images at 160 university students with either the word “ignorant” or “educated,” followed by the face of a black man. After that, the researchers showed the same students pictures of that same black man’s face, but with his skin tone altered to be lighter or darker.

When asked to identify which was the man they’d seen in the first part of the experiment, those who had seen the word ‘educated’ were significantly more likely to pick a lighter-skinned version of the man — a type of racism that the researchers characterized as “skin tone memory bias.”

“When a Black stereotypic expectancy is violated (herein, encountering an educated Black male), this culturally incompatible information is resolved by distorting this person’s skin tone to be lighter in memory and therefore to be perceived as “Whiter,” main researcher Avi Ben-Zeev said.

The results of this study also gel with similar studies on the subject, along with previous research that shows people have a bias against “Afrocentric” facial characteristics — including “hair texture, skin tone, facial features, cheek bone structure, height.” The effects of the subconscious biases can play out on juries, for example, where studies have found that darker skinned women get longer prison sentences.

(HT: National Journal)

The post Study: People Remember ‘Educated’ Black Men As Lighter Skinned appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Last night we introduced another new feature called Send To. Like Starred items, this has been a frequently requested addition and something we’ve been itching to get into the application. Send To allows you to share posts from The Old Reader to external services such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Evernote, Google+, or email. By default, email, Facebook, and Twitter are available in your Send To list but you can add others or configure custom options in Settings under the Social tab. We’ve put together a short page with some common services you might want to add to your Share To list here. Email us with any you think would be a good fit for this list.

Also, there’s another small feature that went out last night. We added pubsubhubbub to the user’s profile RSS feed (http://theoldreader.com/profile/[USERNAME].rss), so profile RSS feeds now provide near real time updating. Small, but it might be worthy of mention.

We hope you like these new features as much as we do.

Thanks for using The Old Reader!

Photo Credit: 

http://wordsmoker.com/blog/2009/01/15/welcome-to-the-happy-baby-kitten-club/

oswaldofguadalupe:

The Twitter Mandela Hall Of Shame

When the right side of history doesn’t forget.

PLANO, TX—At a meeting this morning with the snack brand’s research and development department, Frito-Lay Senior Vice President George Legge wondered aloud if people would eat Doritos snack chips with M&M’s on top of them, sources co...

So Al Gore is a vegan now.:

An individual familiar with Gore’s decision, who asked not to be identified because it involved a personal matter, confirmed that Gore opted a couple of months ago to become vegan. Gore’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It is unclear why Gore, one of the nation’s most visible climate activists, has given up dairy, poultry and meat products. People usually become vegan for environmental, health or ethical reasons, or a combination of these three factors.

Whatever the case, Gore is only the second-most-prominent member of the Clinton administration to go vegan. Billy C beat him to it by two years.

digg:

Turkeys twerking.
Turkeys twerking.
Turkeys twerking.
Turkeys twerking.

I’m really proud of this.

With the 19th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change underway, Japan, the world’s fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter and third-biggest economy, made unwelcome headlines by announcing that its slashing its 2020 greenhouse gas emissions reductions target from 25 percent to just 3.8 percent based on 2005 figures.

While countries like Canada and Australia have been dragging their feet at the talks, Japan is considered a world leader in confronting climate change, having hosted the signing of the Kyoto Protocol. But the unexpected announcement will now undoubtedly cast a shadow over the talks, increasing concern about the difficulty of reducing emissions and the feasibility of international negotiations to lead the way to achieving the cuts scientists say are needed.

“This move by Japan could have a devastating impact on the tone of discussion here in Warsaw,” Naoyuki Yamagishi, leader of the Climate and Energy Group at the WWF, said. “It could further accelerate the race to the bottom among other developed countries when the world needs decisive and immediate actions to “raise” ambition, not to “lower” ambition.”

Japan’s new target, announced by Minister of the Environment Nobuteru Ishihara in Tokyo, represents a 3.1 percent increase from 1990 if that year is used as a baseline. In contrast, the country’s previous commitment, set in 2009, sought to reduce emissions 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels.

Before the Fukushima disaster in 2011, which caused Japan to halt its nuclear power program, the government had expected to rely on nuclear power to achieve greenhouse gas reductions. In 2011 nuclear power provided about 30 percent of the country’s electricity, and was expected to provide at least 40 percent by 2017.

Japan imports about 84 percent of its energy requirements, which is undesirable for economic and security reasons as well as climate ones. The current government is pushing to restart certain nuclear reactors, but the timeline is unclear. Recently both Ishihara and former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, a popular national figure, spoke out against nuclear power.

“We’re down to zero nuclear; anyone doing the math will find that target impossible now,” Ishihara said after announcing the new target. He went on to say the original goal was “unrealistic in the first place.”

Climate Analytics, a think-tank, released a statement saying the shutdown of Japan’s nuclear industry cannot account for the massive degradation of ambition. According to them, replacing all nuclear production projected for 2020 with the present fossil fuel mix would reduce the original 25 percent reduction to a 17-18 percent reduction, and even a shift to coal to replace nuclear would only halve the original — far from the proposed 3.8 percent reduction.

Japan is responsible for about 4 percent of current global emissions, and the new emissions target will increase global emissions by 0.7 percent in 2020.

While China and the EU were quick to criticize Japan’s actions, Christiana Figueres, UNFCCC executive secretary, said she “understood” the problems that Japan faced following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

“I do have some understanding that Japan has been hit by several catastrophes in the past few years. My hope is that Japan understands that investment in renewable energies galvanizes investments and creates new jobs,” Figueres said.

Seemingly as compensation, Japan also announced that its public and private sectors intended to raise $16 billion by 2015 to help developing countries reduce their emissions. According to the Guardian, the aid package is thought to include supplying developing countries with “green” technologies developed by Japanese firms, including offshore wind turbines, fuel-cell vehicles, and high-tech housing insulation.

Expectations were already low for COP19, but in the days leading up to it Figueres said the meeting is a pivotal moment to advance international climate action and showcase a growing momentum to address climate change at all levels of society.

So far no major countries have announced more ambitious goals to cut emissions. Meanwhile the debate between rich and poor nations over who should cut emissions and who should pay wages on.

Su Wei, China’s lead climate negotiator at the UN talks, said “I have no way of describing my dismay” about the Japanese announcement.

That’s one thing nearly all parties at the conference can likely agree on.

The post Japan Ditches Pledge To Lower Emissions In Midst Of UN Climate Talks appeared first on ThinkProgress.

In May 2010, two months after the Affordable Care Act squeaked through Congress, President Obama’s top economic aides were getting worried. Larry Summers, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, and Peter Orszag, head of the Office of Management and Budget, had just received a pointed four-page memo from a trusted outside health adviser. It warned that no one in the administration was “up to the task” of overseeing the construction of an insurance exchange and other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page statute into reality.

Summers, Orszag and their staffs agreed. For weeks that spring, a tug of war played out inside the White House, according to five people familiar with the episode. On one side, members of the economic team and Obama health-care adviser Zeke Emanuel lobbied for the president to appoint an outside health reform “czar” with expertise in business, insurance and technology. On the other, the president’s top health aides — who had shepherded the legislation through its tortuous path on Capitol Hill and knew its every detail — argued that they could handle the job.

In the end, the economic team never had a chance: The president had already made up his mind, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid. Obama wanted his health policy team — led by Nancy-Ann De­Parle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform — to be in charge of the law’s arduous implementation. ...

Three and a half years later, such insularity — in that decision and others that would follow — has emerged as a central factor in the disastrous rollout of the new federal health insurance marketplace, casting doubt on the administration’s capacity to carry out such a complex undertaking.

“They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” said David Cutler, a Harvard professor and health adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign, who was not the individual who provided the memo to The Washington Post but confirmed he was the author. “It’s very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills.”

This is the new Snarkmarket. I want to welcome you inside, and tell you how we got here.

Five years ago today, I joined Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson at Snarkmarket.com, a two-person site they’d built to write about media, the future, and everything else. It was the site’s fifth anniversary. (It was also the day Barack Obama was first elected President of the United States.) For five years, I’d haunted the comments at Snarkmarket, writing responses longer than the posts themselves; now I was being asked to join the show.

It may be a strange thing to wrap our minds around now, but being a member of a popular but noncommercial blog in 2008 was a very big deal. Nobody was getting paid, and nobody was doing what was recognized as “work,” but it was a platform that brought two things with it:

1. Writing for the best, smartest, most playful community of commenters on the internet;
2. Access to the wider Snarkmatrix, the readers who’d followed the blog from the start, back before there had been so very many of us, and many of whom had fallen upwards to positions of influence and responsibility.

Snarkmarket gave me a fighting chance of writing about something besides university books for a university audience. I felt like I’d won a lottery ticket. And for the next two years, that kicked off my favorite period in the history of the site: when we made New Liberal Arts, when Robin improbably became a bestselling novelist, when Matt returned from the midwest to help reinvent blogging for NPR, when I even more improbably became a technology journalist at Wired and then The Verge.

But as the three of us were pulled into our thirties, and that decade’s corresponding commitments, and as much of the discussion around news and ideas began to shift away from user-owned blogs to new media properties and superheating social networks, Snarkmarket entered a new phase. During this time, Robin called Snarkmarket “a hardy desert ecosystem.” The site proved infinitely adaptable, but its visible flourishing diminished.

As we approached our tenth anniversary, Matt and Robin and I had an idea. We would make the Snarkmatrix — our community of readers, commenters, friends, well-wishers, lurkers, and musers — manifest. We would assemble at the Poynter Institute, where it all began, as Matt and Robin decided to start a blog. We would celebrate Snarkmarket’s tenth birthday with the people who’d made it possible.

But — and this is where the hardy desert ecosystem metaphor becomes especially useful — we also took the Snarkmatrix underground. We started doing weekly meetings — a Snarkseminar — where different members would bring to the group ideas, problems, texts, videos, questions for the group to discuss and respond to. The whole thing was Powered By Google; we’d doodle on a Google Doc each week with marginal notes, conduct a live hangout. Whoever could come was welcome; if you couldn’t make it, no harm, no foul. And it was exciting to see what we could do with those tools, in that smaller space, with two or three dozen people actively collaborating on an idea rather than two or three guys (however skilled we three might be).

And for a while, we thought that would be where it would end. A victory lap for the community we brought together, a reward to people who’d found us, whenever or however they found us. And a reward for the three of us, a big party in Florida with our best friends and biggest fans.

We thought we’d get a little Kindle single out of it — here are the products of our labors, a set of final projects for the Snarkseminar, created by the community online, hammered out face-to-face. And that was exciting.

But then we thought: what if we go bigger?

What if the point of the tenth anniversary of Snarkmarket wasn’t to present its tombstone, but to bring it back to life, bigger and stronger and bolder than ever? And what if the mechanism for its resurrection was right in front of us — the core community of Snarkmarket readers and commenters, to many of whom the site (and the ideas animating the site) meant as much as it did to us?

What if the tools we needed to create a fun, participatory, community-driven blog were available to us, and what if this time, right now — the age of social media, the age of the new, big-business online media company, driven by ads and scale and Hadoop nodes and dataviz and all that marvelous crap — was to double the fuck down on the enthusiast, curated, small-n multiuser blog? What if it was time to go full MetaFilter?

So that’s what we’re doing. Five years ago, Snarkmarket went from two editors to three. Now our community is growing by dozens. You’re going to see a lot of new writers here — but if you’ve been a long-time reader, they won’t be strangers. You’ve been seeing them in the comments for years.

We’re also building new tools and interfaces to try to take advantage of this newfound swarm of talent. We’re going to have collaborative stories, inline glosses, conversational forks. We’re going to try to reimagine (with the robust tools we already have, tweaked by some of our design geniuses) what a group blog looks like, and what it can do for the reader.

And that’s just the beginning. If we do this right, is a collective that will be continually throwing off new objects like sparks from a hammer on hot steel. Some of those will be objects you can participate in making. But for now we’re settling in, seeing what this new Snarkmarket can do.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few months as new sites have launched, also trying to do new experiments in online writing and reading in 2013. “Is ______ a platform or a media company?” is the new “Are bloggers journalists?”

Snarkmarket is proudly neither a platform nor a media company. It is a community of friends and colleagues, allies and advocates, learners and thinkers, who have gathered together for mutual aid, support, and encouragement, and experimentation. The visible expression of that community is now, as it has been, what you see at Snarkmarket.com. We want you to join us as a commenter. We want you to cheer us on. We want to cheer you on. We want to know what you think. We’re ready to try anything. We’re ready to see what’s possible.

Let’s light this candle.

Asian-Americans have been moving steadily toward the Democrats and away from the GOP. In 2012, Asians supported Obama by a staggering 73-26, compared to 62-35 in 2008. This is a remarkable trajectory for a group that, back in 1992, supported George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton by a strong 54-30 margin. In every election since then, Asians have increased their support for the Democratic candidate, including elections like 2004 where most other groups, even progressive ones, were going in the opposite direction:

Why is this? One reason is the GOP’s dreadful record on immigration, an issue of considerable importance to the Asian-American community. Another is that Asian-Americans are a strongly pro-government constituency. In a massive Pew study of Asians, released last year, Asians endorsed a bigger government providing more services over a smaller government providing fewer services by 55-36. That’s a sharp contrast with the public as a whole, who endorsed smaller over larger government by 52-39.

A new poll from CAP and PolicyLink provides another reason why this group would find today’s GOP unpalatable: Asians are the most enthusiastic and unafraid supporters of America’s rising diversity.

In the poll, respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with 16 statements about rising diversity in America, evenly divided between “diversity concerns” and “diversity opportunities.” The level of agreement with each statement was recorded on a 10-point scale, with maximum agreement being 10 and maximum disagreement being zero.

From these statements, we created a 160-point index measuring openness to diversity, with zero being the least open to diversity and 160 being the most open to diversity. The overall public received a mean score of 86.5 on our composite openness measure. By comparison, Asians scored 97, followed by African Americans with 93, Latinos with 90 and whites with just 84. And white conservatives, about all that’s left in the GOP these days, scored a mere 71.

The poll also found that openness to diversity varied by age and education, generally going down with age and up with education. Reflecting these patterns, Asian Millennial generation college graduates received a stunningly high 108 score on the openness to diversity index. On some of the diversity opportunity statements in the index, this group came close to unanimous agreement (scores 6-10). For example, 97 percent of Asian Millennial college graduates agreed that “diverse workplaces and schools will help make American businesses more innovative and competitive.”

As can be seen from the table below, Asians generally scored quite high on most of the diversity opportunity statements. On the top four opportunity statements, they averaged an impressive 79 percent agreement:

But it was on the diversity concerns statements that Asians really distinguished themselves. On almost every question, Asians registered lower levels of fear about the negative consequences of growing American diversity than every other ethnic group studied. For example, only 31 percent worried that there will be no common American culture and a low 34 percent believed there will be more inequality:

Only one item, too many demands on government services, generated majority agreement and even here, Asians were barely above the 50 percent mark, 9 points below the population as a whole.

So just as Republican base voters are freaking out about being forced to speak immigrants’ languages, Asian-Americans are proving themselves to be remarkably unafraid of our multiethnic future.

Unsurprisingly, then, Asians also broke with Republicans in their support for a new equity agenda to address racial and ethnic inequality. More than 8 in 10 Asians — 83 percent — supported “new steps to reduce racial and ethnic inequality in America through investments in areas like education, job training, and infrastructure improvement,” compared to the just 13 percent who were opposed. In addition, 68 percent of Asians said such steps would help the economy overall, compared to the 10 percent who think they would hurt the economy. Finally, 68 percent of Asians said they would be willing to invest “significantly more public funds to help close [the] gap in college graduation rates” between black and Latino students and white students, compared to 27 percent who said they were not willing to make such investments.

So it should be obvious why Asians voters are such a poor fit for today’s GOP — and why it’s likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

The post Why Asians Are Deserting The GOP appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Laura Prepon’s given an excellent performance on Orange Is The New Black as Alex, the former lover of the main character, Piper (Taylor Schilling), who convinced her to mule drug money, an act that long after their breakup landed Piper in prison. But as Kate Aurthur reports, Prepon’s role in the second season will be limited:

Laura Prepon has gotten fantastic reviews for her portrayal of Alex in Orange Is the New Black — but she will not be a series regular in Season 2, according to sources close to the show.
Prepon will come back for a limited number of episodes in the show’s 13-episode second season in order to resolve her story. And the door will be left often for her to return in the future. But the actress did not sign a contract tying her to the show for the upcoming season.

As much as I’ve enjoyed watching Prepon work–and frankly, as much as I think, if this is her decision, it’s a nutty one considering the other material she’s worked with recently–I actually wonder if wrapping up Alex’s storyline might be a wise decision for Orange. Series creator Jenji Kohan’s been frank about the extent to which her decision to adapt Piper Kerman’s memoir, and to focus on Piper herself, was a strategic decision, a calculation that Piper’s character would give her an opportunity tell the stories that she found more interesting. Kohan explained to NPR that:

In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it’s a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially. The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it’s relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It’s useful.

It’s a tough assessment of the television industry’s priorities. But it would also be impressive if Kohan backed it up. Piper’s character was never on a particularly long sentence. And as Piper Kerman has written, using the occasion of a show to further her prison reform advocacy, prisoners are frequently transferred to new facilities, often at considerable cost to their families and their relationships with their children. It would be creatively audacious, a gentler version of lopping off Ned Stark’s head, to run through Piper’s story, to transfer Alex to another facility, and turn Orange‘s focus to the other prisoners on the show, and to add new prisoners who aren’t as immediately relatable. This would give the women of color who are part of Orange‘s outrageously talented cast more space to work, and Kohan the opportunity to tell different–and more common–prison stories.

Orange Is The New Black is already a game-changing show. But a willingness to make it a lightly anthologized series in the vein of American Horror Story, and one that focuses more on incarcerated women of color than on white main characters could make it an extraordinary exception to the normal rules of television.

The post Could Laura Prepon’s Departure Make ‘Orange Is The New Black’ A More Interesting Show? appeared first on ThinkProgress.

“I LEARNED that my 16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman — a United States citizen — had been killed by an American drone strike from news reports the morning after he died.

The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen.

I visited the site later, once I was able to bear the pain of seeing where he sat in his final moments. Local residents told me his body was blown to pieces. They showed me the grave where they buried his remains. I stood over it, asking why my grandchild was dead.

Nearly two years later, I still have no answers. The United States government has refused to explain why Abdulrahman was killed.”

- The Drone That Killed My Grandson  - NYTimes.com

Over the Fourth of July holiday, my wife and I joined some friends for a barbecue in their backyard. ...

On a low table, they set up a small electric fan, perhaps 12 inches high, that swept back and forth, sending a gentle breeze across the grassy area where people were sitting.

That was it. No citronella candles, no bug zappers, no DEET, nothing expensive or high-tech. Yet amazingly, it worked. As far as I could tell, no mosquitoes flew into the vicinity of the simulated wind; nobody was bitten. ...

Outsmarting bugs with a fan may be a poorly known strategy. But the method, it turns out, is endorsed by the American Mosquito Control Association, a nonprofit group based in Mount Laurel, N.J., that publishes a journal bearing its name.

“Mosquitoes are relatively weak fliers,” it says on its Web site, “so placing a large fan on your deck can provide a low-tech solution.” The group says mosquitoes fly slowly — from roughly 1 to 1.5 miles per hour, depending on the species.

Scientists have identified another factor. The breeze from a fan disperses the human emanations that allow female mosquitoes to zero in on us. ...

As for other popular remedies, the mosquito control association says repellent-infused mosquito coils provide only “some protection” at best, and it dismisses the candles with a shrug, saying their mild repellent action offers no significant advantage over other candles that give off lots of smoke.
--William Broad, NYT, on the power of wind

Most hitchhiker stories don’t end like this: When Emily Kraus and her boyfriend were heading towards Pennsylvania’s Hershey Park Stadium over the weekend to see her favorite band, the Dave Matthews Band, one thing they didn’t expect to do was pick up a hitchhiker. But they did anyway—which was a smart move, because Dave Matthews was stranded with a flat tire on his bike, miles away from the venue, without a cell phone. Dave, obviously appreciative, hooked up Kraus and her boyfriend with front-row seats and dinner backstage. So that’s pretty awesome. (image via Facebook)

WASHINGTON—Following Sunday’s not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, an exasperated and speechless nation could reportedly do nothing other than wish black teenagers good luck out there, saying that they’re definitely going to...

Rap history.

Screw it. Everyone else is doing it.

It’s hard to write or talk about a place like Fäviken. Not that I have trouble talking, as those around me can attest to, but making the trek top the restaurant far north of Stockholm is as much about the experience of being in a certain time and place as it is about eating the food they’re serving.

Although I don’t necessarily follow all the hype about starred restaurants and culinary “experiences”, etc, I do know that regardless of cuisine, price, and location, like a perfect glass of wine or bite of chocolate, it’s not possible to fully describe it – nor will it be the same for everyone else.

Continue Reading Fäviken...

docsorrow:

myloveinthug:

sorry

shine on you crazy diamond

Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians poured into the streets of at least 25 cities across the country Monday, blanketing the streets of major cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and climbing to the roof of the Brazilian National Congress in Brasilia, the nation’s capital. The protests, sparked last week by a smaller demonstration against fare hikes on public buses, are taking place around the Confederations Cup, the soccer tournament that began Saturday as a tune-up for Brazil’s 2014 hosting of the World Cup.

The World Cup has become a symbol of corruption and overspending in the country. Brazil, originally slated to spend less than $1 billion in private funding on soccer stadiums, has already spent more than $3 billion, most of which has come from public funds. Meanwhile, schools and hospitals are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, infrastructure is crumbling, and income inequality is rising as Brazil’s minimum wage remains low. The money spent on the World Cup, the protesters say, would be better spent on efforts to help ordinary Brazilians.

Though there were small pockets of violence during demonstrations in some cities, the vast majority of the protests remained peaceful, according to local news reports. Here are pictures from Monday’s protests:

Digg Blog: Digg Reader Update!:

rethinkdigg:

Over the last 90 days, the Digg engineering team — all 5 of them — has been heads-down building an updated take on the RSS reader. For our first public release, in time to (just) beat the shutdown of Google Reader, our aim has been to nail the basics: a web and mobile reading experience that is…

Click above for screenshots of the anticipated Google Reader replacement.

CL is so cool

What’s more musically adventurous than Animal Collective? How’s about Animal Collective pulling out Michael Winslow, the guy who makes all the crazy noises in “Police Academy,” as a special guest? That’s what they did the other night at Bonnaroo.

What you should know about the Black Swan unpaid intern case

The ballerinas weren’t the only tortured souls on the set of Black Swan. Some of the unpaid interns on the set found themselves doing the kind of menial labor (i.e. grabbing coffee) that they didn’t go to school for. And on Wednesday, a court agreed, ruling that 1) the interns should have been paid for their time and 2) opened up the company behind the film, Fox Entertainment Group, up for a class-action lawsuit. “Judge [William H.] Pauley’s ruling might still symbolize the tipping point in the battle over unpaid internships. Unless a higher court steps in, some judges might choose to follow his lead in the future,” The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann writes, noting that the case could scare some companies off from using unpaid interns for liability reasons. (Side note: We’ve been following the unpaid internship issue lately, and I wrote a Medium post about the topic you should read.)

(thanks Sara Schwartz)

JC Penney's 'Hitler Tea Kettle' Sold Out in Hours Because This Is the Internet - The Atlantic:

Did a Murderer Just Give Himself Away on Yelp?

Image via Yelp

On May 3rd, a 36-year-old Iraq war veteran and college student named Maribel Ramos (pictured above right) was reported missing by her family, after failing to turn up to several events in Santa Ana, California. 

A couple of days later, a friend of Maribel’s named Emily C started a Yelp thread called “My friend Maribel Ramos is missing!!” in an effort to track her down. 

Somebody posted asking if Maribel’s roommate had been questioned by police yet. 

This is where the roommate, KC Joy (who is pictured at the very top of this post with Maribel), joined the conversation. Posting that Maribel was his BFF, and giving details of the police’s search of the apartment they shared. 

Then a user called Grant K joined the thread, pointing out that it was suuuuuuuuuper suspicious that KC was referring to Maribel in the past tense. 

Continue

Oh, Farah Abraham! I try to keep our lives separate, I try to let you live yours the way you see fit while letting me live mine without having to know what you see as fit, but you keep forcing your way into my brain! I DON’T WANT TO KNOW, FARRAH! AND NOW I HAVE TO SHARE IT WITH INNOCENT PEOPLE, SO I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE SUFFERING! LOOK WHAT YOU DID! From Zap2It:

Making yet another in an insanely long line of wise decisions, Farrah Abraham already knows when she plans to show her daughter the now-infamous sex tape she made with porn star James Deen. According to Farrah, 13 or 14 years old will be the age when she shows her daughter all of the things that have defined her “career” so far.

In an interview with King Mac Radio, Farrah says she’s compiled a “baby box” filled with all kinds of goodies to pass onto her daughter when she’s old enough. What’s in the box, you ask? All the episodes of “Teen Mom” on DVD, her book, and naturally a copy of the new porn video. Farrah says she plans to share these treasures with her daughter “when she’s around 13 or 14, gets on her period, and is like, ‘Oh, I kinda’ want a boyfriend.’”

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! WHAAAAAAAAAAT? WHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY????? Like, absolutely why show it to her EVER, but then also why show it to her at such an early age, and then also why when she wants a boyfriend?! FARRAH! I’m sure she’ll understand the devastating effects having a daughter, being on a reality show about it, and then starring in porn have on a young girl, since the results of which add up to be THE LIFE SHE WILL BE LIVING. She doesn’t actually have to watch them! Farrah, girl! Life is hard enough! As it has been in the past, it’s up to you now to choose whether you’d like to talk about this or whether you’d like to forget it, bury yourself in warm dirt, hum to yourself until the memories fade away, and then talk about what you’re having for lunch. CHOOSE WISELY!

“In the circumstances in which bullets are flying like rain and wind, the soldiers are running around at the risk of losing their lives. If you want them to have a rest in such a situation, a comfort women system is necessary. Anyone can understand that.”

- Toru Hashimoto, Mayor of Osaka, Japan • Claiming the necessity of Japan’s World War II-era so-called “comfort women,” a collection of 200,000 or so females (many Chinese, South Korean and Indonesian), forced into sex slavery for soldiers. Hashimoto’s statement of apparent sympathy with forced prostitution has been decried internationally, with Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei speaking in condemnation: “The conscription of sex slaves was a grave crime committed by the Japanese military. We are shocked and indignant at the Japanese politician’s remarks, as they flagrantly challenge historical justice.” Hashimoto, age 43, is leader and co-founder of the nationalist Japan Restoration Party. source

Seth Meyers is officially is the new host of NBC’s “Late Night,” replacing the Leno-replacing Jimmy Fallon and proving one thing: “Weekend Update” is a farm system. (AP photo)