Britney Spears news

• We’re not the “good guys”: American drone warfare is terrorizing the Middle East

  23-04-2016 22:45 via salon.com
  
  In a trio of recent action-packed movies, good guys watch terrorists mingling with innocent women and children via real-time video feeds from halfway across the world. A clock ticks and we, the audience, are let in on the secret that mayhem is going to break loose. After much agonized soul-searching about possible collateral damage, the good guys call in a missile strike from a U.S. drone to try to save the day by taking out a set of terrorists.Such is the premise of Gavin Hood’s Eye in th
  
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• Who gets to borrow white privilege? This is what happens when an Asian-American cop kills an unarmed African-American

  23-04-2016 21:30 via salon.com
  
  In November 2014, Peter Liang, a New York City police officer, discharged his weapon in a dark stairwell. The bullet ricocheted off of a wall before it hit Akai Gurley in his chest.Peter Liang is Chinese-American. Akai Gurley is African-American.As Gurley lay on the ground bleeding to death, Peter Liang, panic stricken, was texting his union representative for guidance about how to proceed after the shooting.Liang did not render any aid to Gurley.Two years later, Liang would be convicted of mans
  
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• The night Mark Twain brought Huck Finn alive

  23-04-2016 20:00 via salon.com
  
  Livy had some choice advice for her husband, Mark Twain: Make it less funny. Give the audience a chance to catch its breath.Never a champion of his vaudeville tendencies, she now wanted him to show off his narrative talents. Lesser men could tell that christening joke; she suggested that he insert at least one long, moving emotional story into his program, maybe Huck Finn and runaway slave Jim on the raft floating down the Mississippi. He could build to the key scene when the poor undereducated
  
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• It was so great to see these beautiful ladies the other night!! Hope you all had fun at the show @fifthharmony 😘💋 https://t.co/rBPH7q4oEV

  23-04-2016 19:44 via twitter.com
  
  It was so great to see these beautiful ladies the other night!! Hope you all had fun at the show @fifthharmony 😘💋 https://t.co/rBPH7q4oEV
  
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• It’s so much worse than just Paul Ryan vs Nancy Pelosi: This is why Congress is a disaster

  23-04-2016 18:00 via salon.com
  
  Congress can’t be anything we want it to be. It is a constitutionally engineered institution, programmed to have certain features and behave in certain ways within the larger separation-of-powers system. Since the founding, the nation has been stuck with this increasingly archaic creation. To be sure, Congress has changed over the last two hundred years. It is no longer the dominion of party machines and spoils but a realm of entrepreneurial politicians with their own campaign organization
  
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• Donald Trump feels your anger and anxiety: How neuroscience helps explain Trump’s triumphs

  23-04-2016 17:59 via salon.com
  
  Despite desperate opposition from the Republican establishment, Trump has dominated the primary process, most recently with his decisive victory in New York. Mainstream politicians and commentators who use traditional frameworks to analyze the situation struggle to explain Trump’s success with voters. Turning to neuroscience helps provide a more accurate explanation, by revealing that Trump’s popularity stems from his masterful ability to resonate with the emotions of many Americans.
  
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• Our voices are not all equal: Inequality, your vote — and some surprising common ground between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders supporters

  23-04-2016 16:45 via salon.com
  
  This noisy and confusing election season has demonstrated that many Americans feel that their voices are not being heard in politics.  In fact, as long as we have had the tools to measure it, American democracy has been characterized by unequal political voice.  Is there anything that can be done about the fact that, when it comes to politics, some people -- in particular, the well-educated and affluent and, therefore, non-Latino whites -- have a megaphone and others speak in a whisper
  
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• “You can teach a chimp to ride a tricycle — for a little while”: Bill Maher is not buying Trump’s “presidential” act

  23-04-2016 16:40 via salon.com
  
  During his monologue Friday night, "Real Time" host Bill Maher trashed Donald Trump's supposedly cleaned-up act.Following his double-digit victory in New York, Trump called Ted Cruz "Senator Cruz" instead of "Lyin' Ted." And his new team of advisors, headed by Paul Manafort, is now trying to market Trump as a well-intentioned performance artists."So let me get this straight: the last 30 years as the world's biggest douchebag," Maher said, "that was just to get us ready?""This idea that
  
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• Bill Maher might have just ticked off a lot of liberals: In tirade against left-wing PC police, Maher says, “it’s so white”

  23-04-2016 16:14 via salon.com
  
  "Real Time" host Bill Maher last night railed against the liberal PC police during his "New Rules" segment."White people need to find some middle ground between racists and people who see racism everywhere," he began. "Because, at this point, I can't tell who's more annoying, conservatives who don't care about anyone who isn't white or liberals who hate themselves because they are white."Maher added that on the political spectrum, there has to be "some sweet spot between the PC police
  
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• The simplest ways Americans can dramatically reduce their carbon footprint

  23-04-2016 16:00 via salon.com
  
  If Americans made changes to their diets and stopped wasting food, they could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help conserve global natural resources, experts say.Cutting down on milk and meat protein are top ways to lower an individual’s carbon footprint, said Janet Ranganathan, vice president of science and research at the World Resources Institute.She is the lead author of a report published today that explores how dietary changes in the world’s wealthiest nations can affect t
  
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• Gutless Democrats fear fights: Why triangulating neo-liberal Clintonites back big business over people

  23-04-2016 15:30 via salon.com
  
  As the Democratic primary heated up to the boiling point, one particular line of attack on Bernie Sanders had the distinctively Karl Rove-ian stench of attacking Sanders’ strength. Vox, Slate and AEI all bought the spin and struck the same theme: "If Bernie Sanders cares about poor people, how come he doesn't want to trade with them?"But even more than Rove, we can catch a distinctive whiff of Thatcherism here: There is no alternative; either we do trade on neoliberal terms
  
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• They dumbed down conservatism: How extreme right-wing market fundamentalism captured the GOP — and endangered the environment

  23-04-2016 15:29 via salon.com
  
  The “Republican Revolution” launched in 1995 drove the party hard to starboard by crystallizing and embedding in American conservative culture a new orthodoxy, much of which was deeply hostile to environmental goals.Most enduringly, it succeeded in adding “the environment” to a political litmus test for Republicans that endures to this day: the true conservative must embrace the conviction that environmentalism is an elitist movement whose goals come at the cost of jobs a
  
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• One part Nixon, two parts Wallace: Donald Trump represents the worst of a bygone America

  23-04-2016 15:00 via salon.com
  
  Violence flared up again at a “New York Values” Donald Trump rally on April 10, as backers of the Republican candidate reportedly assaulted a black protestor. Several hundred protesters milled about near another Trump rally in Berlin, Maryland, on April 20. They were ready to face off with their Trump-supporting advesaries that had poured into a local high school for a rally. On the face of it, aberrations – but these sorts of episodes are now so common at Trump events that the
  
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• Elizabeth Warren’s big win: The new, much-needed rule that could rein in Wall Street slime

  23-04-2016 14:00 via salon.com
  
  Are you in the market for some good news? While everyone is being told to follow the excitement of the 2016 campaign to the exclusion of all else, out of the spotlight but not far away, the Obama administration is calmly trying to enact lasting progressive change. In the Labor Department earlier this month, consumer advocates won a big battle, as the vast middle class was “gifted” with a new requirement being placed on the financial services industry. As Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth
  
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• America’s frightening oligarchy: Thomas Piketty on our widening inequality and the right-wing billionaires who profit from it

  23-04-2016 12:30 via salon.com
  
  Will oligarchy, or plutocracy, be America’s future? A recent Supreme Court decision striking down all limits on private funding for political campaigns has rekindled that fear. The hundreds of millions doled out by the hyper-Republican billionaire Koch brothers for TV ads and think tanks backing the farthest-right candidates have become the symbol of all-powerful wealth. The specter of a slide into hyper-inequality and a politics increasingly captured by the “1 percent” is anim
  
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• The Prince song too hot for the strip club: Why the Purple One is always a go-go bar DJ’s go-to jam

  23-04-2016 01:00 via salon.com
  
  Not only did the lyrics to “Darling Nikki” – with its reference to a girl in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine – get Tipper Gore’s knickers in such a twist that she founded the Parents Music Resource Center, they got the song banned from a South Jersey gentleman’s club called The Playhouse in 1996. I’ll never forget where I was when I got the shocking news: in the DJ booth at said go-go bar, cueing up a CD for one of the dancers working the
  
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• Patrick Wilson’s dark side: “I have a real fascination with prison and crime”

  23-04-2016 01:00 via salon.com
  
  Need an actor to play amoral? Patrick Wilson seems to have cornered the market, having misbehaved on screen as a pedophile in “Hard Candy,” an adulterer in “Little Children” and a family man obsessed with hookers in “Zipper.”But Wilson can also play noble: Check out his impressive turn as State Trooper Lou Solverson in season two of TV’s “Fargo.”In his latest film, “A Kind of Murder,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festi
  
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• Prince and the queer body: Our dirty patron saint of pop gave me permission to think outside the gender binary

  23-04-2016 00:24 via salon.com
  
  The musical virtuosity of Prince was rivaled only by his status as a sex symbol. A paragon of eroticism, not only did he give us soundtracks for every kind of romp, he embodied sexual possibility. His look, his body, his movement, his beyond-he-ness was a cooing, screeching example. Sex is good. Bodies are good. Gett Off. He was, for this queer woman and so many others, a Big Fucking Deal.“I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, I am something you will never understand.” The line
  
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