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Cutting down on "wasteful" car ownership will help to avert a "climate apocalypse," says the WEF Washington Moves Forward with Plan to Ban Non-Electric Cars by 2030 The World Economic Forum (WEF) is calling for an end to private car ownership. A recently published paper calls for an end to “wasteful” private vehicle ownership in favor of public transportation and communal cars. “The average car or van in England is driven just 4% of the time,” the WEF paper states. It then calls on car owners to sell their vehicle because, “Car sharing platforms such as Getaround and BlueSG have...

The robbery occurred around 1 a.m., while the two hotel guests were waiting in the hotel’s valet area for an Uber. The two thieves emerged from a dark sedan and took around $100,000 worth of jewelry and other items while threatening the victims at gunpoint, then took off. The robbery is the latest in a series of what the Los Angeles Times has called a spate of “brutal, brazen crimes” across the city.

A New York Times star columnist has lashed Barack Obama for axing people who helped him to the top from his lavish 60th birthday guest list in favor of A-list stars. Maureen Dowd branded Obama 'Barack Antoinette' - a reference to the out-of-touch renaissance queen - and likened him to Jay Gatsby, the shallow people-pleaser from F Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby in her scathing piece, published Saturday. She highlighted how the former president cut his ex-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and former campaign strategist David Axelrod from the original 600-person guest list, despite both helping him secure his...

Officials have taken down flags for POW and MIA veterans and replaced them with gay pride rainbow flags outside an executive office building at a memorial plaza in Maryland, causing outrage.The move was spearheaded by Montgomery County Council member Evan Glass, the council's first LGBTQ member, who helped raise the pride flag Monday morning at Veterans Memorial Plaza in Rockville.Vietnam veteran John “Bill” Williams said the flags are meant to honor soldiers still missing, saying he was upset to see them taken down.

The Koch brothers’ — the billionaire plutocrats and GOP mega-donors — network of organizations are railing against President Trump’s tariffs on China to protect American workers and U.S. industry. This month, Trump hiked tariffs to 25 percent on about $200 billion worth of Chinese manufactured goods. Trump has also ordered trade officials to begin reviewing the process of increasing tariffs to 25 percent on an additional $300 billion worth of Chinese goods. In the wake of the latest round of tariffs, the Koch brothers’ organizations like the Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and the Libre Initiative demand that the Trump administration...

LONDON (AP) — In Paris, the Eiffel Tower went dark. In London, a kaleidoscope of famous sites switched off their lights — Tower Bridge, Big Ben, Piccadilly Circus, the London Eye.~~SNIP~~It lasted for just an hour and its power is purely symbolic. But in countries around the world, at 8:30 p.m., people were switching off their lights for Earth Hour, a global call for international unity on the importance of addressing climate change.

EarthFirst Mourning Loss of a Tree - Crying & Screaming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElJFYwRtrH4 a golden video to remind us why we're not crazy liberals and why Earf Day is stupid

Perhaps they should have talked to some people who work with them. "A documentary being screened in cities around the country, and shown here to the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT), purports to show how our public schools — and public schools everywhere — are being forced to close because charter schools are stealing 'their' money," Anthony Williams, David Hardy & Sharif El-Mekki write in Real Clear Education. "The notion that the closure of several Philadelphia schools was caused by greedy charter school operators is ludicrous." "The primary culprit was a long-accumulating budget deficit (totaling $1.35 billion), brought on by...

A Brooklyn federal judge said in court on Tuesday that he cannot make a decision regarding the status of young undocumented immigrants in the country on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program without considering President Donald Trump’s “incendiary” anti-Latino comments. “The statements that were made during the election cycle were extremely volatile,” said Judge Nicholas Garaufis in court, referring to Trump’s recurring comments that had painted Latinos with a broad negative brush. “This came from the top. This isn’t ordinary,” Garaufis added while DACA recipients in the audience nodded. “It’s not what we see from our leaders, I...

A professor of religious studies at Michigan State University recently argued that white people who practice yoga are guilty of enjoying a “system of power, privilege, and oppression.”

Before we get into the real estate ramifications portion of the GOP tax bill, let us recall and reiterate the fact that zero Democrats voted for a tax plan that cuts the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35% to make American corporations more competitive and bring more taxable income home, simplifies the tax code and eliminates some deductions, trims other deductions, and does away with a personal exemption, all of which would result in around 48% of U.S. households receiving tax relief of at least $500, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. The GOP tax bill has now...

The Portland City Council voted Wednesday to move forward with a plan to foreclose on so-called "zombie homes" for the first time in 50 years as the city grapples with a swelling population and skyrocketing home costs that are locking new homeowners out of the market. Commissioners and the mayor voted 4-0 in favor of the plan, with one member absent. The vote targets five of the city's worst abandoned properties, the first part of a long-term plan to free up housing in an overheated market while clearing out squatters who have plagued developing neighborhoods outside the city's hip core...

U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley is likely sweating it after a remark about the lack of towel service at an exclusive gym that has remained open to lawmakers during the government shutdown. The Iowa congressman defended the backlash for the gym's continued operation, while thousands of government employees are furloughed, including workers at the fitness center. He said on the "Bill Press Show:" "There's hardly anybody working down there. There's no towel service. So we're doing our own laundry down there. And we pay a fee to belong to the House gym. So this is no different than if you're working...

In a Tuesday morning puff profile on Hillary Clinton loyalist and Media Matters founder David Brock, The Politico actually manages to blame conservatives for an anti-Obama attack designed and launched by — wait for it — Mrs. Clinton’s camp. “For Brock, the attacks on Obama bear some similarities to the types of attacks on the Clinton White House,” the site tells us. “Obama has faced a range of attacks from the right, including the belief, championed in some conservative quarters, that he was not born in the United States.” Dun-dun-dunnnnnn! But the funny thing is, if we rewind The Politico...

A year after being clumsily removed from the web following complaints, a controversial paper about “the possible role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science” is being retracted. The paper, “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation,” was authored by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and Michael Marriott, and published in Frontiers in Psychology: Personality Science and Individual Differences. Here’s the retraction notice, which isn’t live on the journal’s site yet: In the light of a small number of complaints received following publication of the original research article cited above, Frontiers...

Here’s something that will definitely make that $5 cup of coffee go down a little smoother: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced Wednesday that he will be donating $30 million to help our war veterans. The donation will mostly go toward traumatic brain injury and PTSD research, he told CBS News. "[D]epending on who you’re talking to, 20, 30, 40 percent of the two million people who have served are coming back with some kind of brain trauma or [PTSD]. So we’re going to fund the opportunity for significant research and for medical practitioners and science to understand the disease...

Bell linked to a Salon article about the RNC’s new ad campaign featuring a Republican millennial. Naturally, she managed to tie that into an argument for higher tax rates for the wealthy:

Three Los Angeles City Council members want city, state and federal groups to look into whether hydraulic fracturing and other forms of oil and gas “well stimulation” played any role in the earthquake that rattled the city early Monday morning. The motion, presented Tuesday by Councilmen Paul Koretz and Mike Bonin and seconded by Councilman Bernard Parks, asks for city departments to team up with the California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, the U.S. Geological Survey and the South Coast Air Quality Management District to report back on the likelihood that such activities contributed to the 4.4-magnitude quake....

PEOPLE FROM all over Philadelphia came together Saturday to tell their stories about gentrification at the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia. Organizers had issued fliers calling for an "emergency town hall" to confront a "crisis facing black Philadelphia: the demise of our neighborhoods." In gentrification, some neighborhoods are targeted for revitalization - but the new development leads to huge rent or property-tax increases that often force longtime residents out.

Spike Lee’s obscenity-filled tirade about the gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods — caught on tape and posted online in all its mother-effing glory — perfectly captured the bitterness, confusion and circular logic that sends most conversations about New York’s ever-changing neighborhoods down a blind alley. Lee’s torrent of cussing and complaints mostly focused on how well-heeled white newcomers have allegedly ruined Fort Greene, where he grew up. Much of what he said was hilarious (“Have you seen Fort Greene Park in the morning? It’s like the mother-effing Westminster Dog Show!”). But some of it was downright offensive (“You can’t just come...