From Democracy Now (Bradley Manning Verdict)

Bradley Manning has been found not guilty of aiding the enemy. 

He has been found guilty of five espionage charges, as well as, five theft charges. (Click here to go to Democracy Now)

Watch live streaming video from democracynow at livestream.com

From The Telegraph (Stephen Hawking)

Stephen Hawking: doctors offered to turn off life support 27 years ago

Professor Stephen Hawking was once so close to death that doctors had offered to switch off his life-support machine, but his wife refused.

The documentary is to be released in September to coincide with the publication of Stephen Hawking's memoirs Photo: Rex Features

By Hayley Dixon

2:57PM BST 28 Jul 2013

In a new film, the renowned physicist tells how there was little hope when he contracted pneumonia in 1985 as he was writing A Brief History of Time, but his first wife, Jane, refused to give in and insisted he was returned to Cambridge from Switzerland.
 

Professor Hawking recovered to finish his book, which went on to sell 10 million copies.

Motor neurone disease kills most victims in five years, but the cosmologist has defied the odds and survived with the condition for five decades.

The new documentary, Hawking, shows his constant struggle with the possibility of death, the Sunday Times reported.

He was in a drug induced coma on a life support machine when his wife of 20 years joined him in Geneva.

Professor Hawking, 71, says: "The doctors thought I was so far gone that they offered Jane to turn off the machine.

“Jane refused to turn it off. She insisted I be flown back to Cambridge."

But he admits: "The weeks of intensive care which followed were the darkest of my life.”
The illness left him on a ventilator, unable to speak, and needing constant care from nurses.

Their presence in his home was “life changing”, he says, and when he and Jane divorced in 1995 he married Elaine Mason, one of his former nurses.

The first Mrs Hawking, the mother of his three children says that his fame and illness sent them spiralling into a "black hole" of despair.

In the documentary, to be released in September to coincide with the publication of his memoirs, Professor Hawking says: “Because every day could be my last, I have a desire to make the most of every single minute.”

His assistant Niki Pigeon confirms that they will do all they can to help him, “but if he is in a total state we will have to let him go.”

PBS: Dancing at Jacob's Pillow

If you missed "Dancing at Jacob's Pillow" last night on PBS you can click here and watch the entire show.

 

Watch Dancing at Jacob's Pillow: Never Stand Still on PBS. See more from Great Performances.

From Notorious RBG

Guess Who this is?

If you guessed Ruth Bader-Ginsburg as a senior at Cornell in December, 1953, you'd be right.

From PBS News Hour: Helen Thomas Dies

Pioneering White House Reporter Helen Thomas Dies at 92

By: Associated Press

Helen Thomas questions President Ronald Reagan during a press conference at the White House March 19, 1987. Thomas died Saturday at age 92. Don Rypka/AFP/Getty Images

WASHINGTON -- Covering 10 presidents over five decades, Helen Thomas aged into a legend. She was the only reporter with her name inscribed on a chair in the White House briefing room -- her own front row seat to history.

Starting as a copy girl in 1943, when women were considered unfit for serious reporting, Thomas rose to bureau chief.

Working at a news service, where writers expect obscurity, she became one of journalism's most recognized faces. Thomas embraced her role as a Washington institution, doing cameos in movies, giving lectures, writing books about her life until the spotlight landed on inflammatory remarks she made about Israel.

The uproar pushed her out of the White House press room at age 89.

Thomas, 92, died surrounded by family and friends at her Washington apartment on Saturday, the family said in a statement. A friend, Muriel Dobbin, told The Associated Press that Thomas had been ill for a long time, and in and out of the hospital before coming home Thursday.

Thomas made her name as a bulldog for United Press International in the great wire-service rivalries of old, and as a pioneer for women in journalism.

She was persistent to the point of badgering. One White House press secretary described her questioning as "torture" -- and he was one of her fans.

In her later years, her refusal to conceal her strong opinions, even when posing questions to a president, and her public hostility toward Israel caused discomfort among colleagues.

In 2010, that tendency ended her storied career at the White House. She told a rabbi making a video that Israeli Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to Germany, Poland or the United States. The video circulated on the Internet and brought widespread condemnation of Thomas, forcing her to quit her job as a Hearst columnist.

Months later, in January 2011, she started a column for a free weekly paper in a Washington suburb.
In her long career, Thomas was indelibly associated with the ritual ending White House news conferences. She was often the one to deliver the closing line: "Thank you, Mister President" -- four polite words that belied a fierce competitive streak.

Her disdain for White House secrecy and dodging spanned five decades, back to President John Kennedy. Her freedom to voice her peppery opinions as a speaker and a Hearst columnist came late in her career.

After she quit UPI in 2000 -- by then an outsized figure in a shrunken organization -- her influence waned. The Bush administration marginalized her, clearly peeved with a journalist who had challenged President George W. Bush to his face on the Iraq war and declared him the worst president in history.

Thomas was accustomed to getting under the skin of presidents, if not to getting the cold shoulder.

"If you want to be loved," she said years earlier, "go into something else."

There was a lighter mood in August 2009, on her 89th birthday, when President Barack Obama popped into in the White House briefing room unannounced. He led the roomful of reporters in singing "Happy Birthday to You" and gave her cupcakes. As it happened, it was the president's birthday too, his 48th.

Thomas was at the forefront of women's achievements in journalism. She was one of the first female reporters to break out of the White House "women's beat" -- the soft stories about presidents' kids, wives, their teas and their hairdos -- and cover the hard news on an equal footing with men.

She became the first female White House bureau chief for a wire service when UPI named her to the position in 1974. She was also the first female officer at the National Press Club, where women had once been barred as members and she had to fight for admission into the 1959 luncheon speech where Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev warned: "We will bury you."

The belligerent Khrushchev was an unlikely ally in one sense. He had refused to speak at any Washington venue that excluded women, she said.

Thomas fought, too, for a more open presidency, resisting all moves by a succession of administrations to restrict press access.

"People will never know how hard it is to get information," Thomas told an interviewer, "especially if it's locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they'd stamp TOP SECRET on the color of the walls."

Born in Winchester, Ky., to Lebanese immigrants, Thomas was the seventh of nine children. Her family moved to Detroit, and it was in high school there, after working on the student newspaper, that she decided she wanted to become a reporter.

After graduating from Detroit's Wayne University (now Wayne State University), Thomas headed straight for the nation's capital. She landed a $17.50-a-week position as a copy girl, with duties that included fetching coffee and doughnuts for editors at the Washington Daily News.
United Press, later United Press International, soon hired her to write local news stories for the radio wire. Her assignments were relegated at first to women's news, society items and celebrity profiles.

Her big break came after the 1960 election that sent Kennedy to the White House, and landed Thomas her first assignment related to the presidency. She was sent to Palm Beach, Fla., to cover the vacation of the president-elect and his family.

JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, complained that he learned of his daughter Luci's engagement from Thomas's story.

Bigger and better assignments would follow for Thomas, among them President Richard M. Nixon's breakthrough trip to China in 1972.

When the Watergate scandal began consuming Nixon's presidency, Martha Mitchell, the notoriously unguarded wife of the attorney general, would call Thomas late at night to unload her frustrations at what she saw as the betrayal of her husband John by the president's men.

It was also during the Nixon administration that the woman who scooped so many others was herself scooped -- by the first lady. Pat Nixon was the one who announced to the Washington press corps that Thomas was engaged to Douglas Cornell, chief White House correspondent for UPI's archrival, The Associated Press.

They were married in 1971. Cornell died 11 years later.

Thomas stayed with UPI for 57 years, until 2000, when the company was purchased by News World Communications, which was founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church.

At age 79, Thomas was soon hired as a Washington-based columnist for newspaper publisher Hearst Corp. No longer a straight news reporter, she was freer to spout her opinions, but allowed to keep her front-and-center seat in the briefing room in deference to her long service. Hers was the only chair inscribed with the name of a reporter, instead of news organization.

"What made Helen the 'dean of the White House press corps' was not just the length of her tenure, but her fierce belief that our democracy works best when we ask tough questions and hold our leaders to account," Obama, the last president she covered, said in a statement.

A self-described liberal, Thomas made no secret of her ill feelings for George W. Bush, a Republican. "He is the worst president in all of American history," she told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif.

Thomas also was critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, asserting that the deaths of innocent people should hang heavily on Bush's conscience.

"We are involved in a war that is becoming more dubious every day," she said in a speech to thousands of students at Brigham Young University in September 2003. "I thought it was wrong to invade a country without any provocation."

Some students walked out of the lecture. She won over others with humorous stories from her "ringside seat" to history.

In March 2006, she confronted Bush with the proposition that "your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis" and that every justification for the attack proved false.

"Why did you really want to go to war?" she demanded. When Bush began explaining his rationale, she interjected: "They didn't do anything to you, or to our country."

Her strong opinions finally ended her career.

After a visit to the White House, David Nesenoff, a rabbi and independent filmmaker, asked Thomas in May 2010 whether she had any comments on Israel.

"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she replied. "Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, it's not Poland," she continued. Asked where they should go, she answered, "They should go home." When asked where's home, Thomas replied: "Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called them "offensive and reprehensible." In a rare admonishment, the White House Correspondents Association said her words were "indefensible." Many Jews were outraged by her suggestion that Israelis should "go home" to Germany, Poland and America because Israel was settled in 1948 by Jews who had survived or escaped Hitler's attempt to kill all the Jews in Germany and neighboring conquered countries.

Within days, she retired from her job at Hearst -- and from her famous seat in the White House briefing room.

Not long after, Nicholas F. Benton, the owner and editor of the Falls Church, Va., News-Press approached her about writing again. Benton, who had published Thomas' column for years when she was syndicated, said Thomas was initially dubious about continuing to write for the free weekly paper, which at the time had a circulation around 25,000.

"She said, 'You don't want me. I'm poison," he said in a telephone interview Saturday.
He responded that he could handle any criticism, and her column started running in January 2011. She continued to write about national issues, from Social Security to the State of the Union address and the capital gains tax, which she blamed for creating "a bigger divide between the haves and the have-nots, leaving not much of a middle class in America."

Benton said he received more positive letters than negative ones by "quite a wide margin," adding that she continued to be "sharp as a tack." She wrote for the paper for a year, until her health prevented her from continuing.

Thomas is survived by three sisters, and many nieces, nephews and cousins, according to her family.

"We will always remember her for the passionate way she sought the truth, for her overwhelming love and generosity, and for her unfaltering faith in mankind," her family said in a statement.

Thomas is to be buried in Detroit, "the beloved city of her youth," the family said. A memorial service in Washington is planned for October, according Charles J. Lewis, senior editor and former Washington bureau chief for Hearst News Service.

From The Daily Show (A Must See)

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From the White House: President Obama Speaks on Trayvon Martin

Thank you Mr. President for your thoughtful commentary and your graceful leadership, for courageously trying to bridge the racial divides in our country. Your reflections are solid, true and honest.

From The best of Youtube: Awesome version of the cup song!

Trayvon's Humanity Remains Devalued

"These assholes, they always get away," are the words George Zimmerman said to a police dispatcher as he began following Trayvon Martin the evening of February 26, 2012.  How ironic these words seem considering the jury’s verdict this past weekend acquitting Mr. Zimmerman of killing Trayvon Martin, an innocent seventeen-year-old black youth.

Suppose Trayvon Martin had somehow managed to wrestle Mr. Zimmerman’s gun from him and at the end of the struggle it was Mr. Zimmerman who was dead, do you really believe that Trayvon Martin would have been found “not guilty”? Would Trayvon be free or behind bars waiting to be sentenced to death?

The statistics are clear and definitive on who “gets away” with murder and other crimes here in the so-called “greatest nation on earth,” where justice is rarely administered impartially. Black youth (and other minorities) are still far more likely to be detained, arrested, prosecuted, tried, convicted, sentenced as adults (if juveniles), and imprisoned longer than white youth suspected of similar crimes.

Let’s be honest. Even if you believe Mr. Zimmerman's story that Trayvon Martin physically attacked him rather than the opposite, George Zimmerman got away with murder or at the very least manslaughter. After all, was it Trayvon Martin or Mr. Zimmerman who initiated the tragic chain of events?  Exactly who was following whom with a gun? And, who ignored the police dispatcher’s directions to stay put and stop following the victim?

The six jurors have spoken. I respect their decision that the state did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.  With that said, I cannot remain silent on why this tragedy happen in the first place.

Race is surely at the heart of it. Granted, we’ve come a long ways in the 68 years since I was born, but far too many of us continue to see black youth like Trayvon Martin as one of "them," as a negative racial stereotype – as someone to fear.

George Zimmerman certainly did that evening. And, in doing so, he devalued Trayvon Martin’s humanity, which led to Trayvon’s tragic death.

Until we stop as a society from associating black Americans with more negative words and imagery than we do white Americans, the racial bias that still contaminates our society and distorts our perception of the world will continue to alienate and separate us from one another, will continue to perpetuate an atmosphere of fear, distrust and racial bigotry.

More Photos from Along the Little Pigeon and Porters Creek

Along the Little Pigeon and Porters Creek (Photos)

Remembering Paul

Paul would have been 26 today . . . Here he is singing "These Days."



Remember to "take a walk outside in your bare feet. Go see some live music. Sing your favorite song as loud as you can and don’t worry if it sounds amazing or terrible. Just do something that makes you happy and don’t stop even if someone tells you to, because Paul wouldn’t’ve."