Midday open thread: Gun background checks hit record on Black Sunday; Sandy Berger dead at 70
Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Ah, election season!
Donald Trump lands prestigious spot on MAD magazine's annual "dumbest" feature.
Zuckerberg to give 99% of Facebook shares to charity:
Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that he and his wife would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during our lives” — holdings currently worth more than $45 billion — to charitable purposes.
The pledge was made in an open letter to their newborn daughter, Max, who was born about a week ago.
NOTE: See this correction.
Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger dead of cancer at 70:
President Barack Obama paid tribute to Berger's legacy with the Clinton administration, remarking in a statement that he was personally grateful for his advice and counsel.
"From his service in President Carter's State Department to President Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy devoted himself to strengthening American leadership in an uncertain world," Obama said. "Today, his legacy can be seen in a peaceful Balkans, our strong alliance with Japan, our deeper relationships with India and China."
Solar and wind will supply more energy between now and 2020 than shale oil:
New wind turbines and solar panels worldwide will provide more energy over the next five years than U.S. shale-oil production has over the past five, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
The leading renewable-energy technologies will add the equivalent of 6.2 million barrels of oil a day to the global energy mix, exceeding the 5.7 million barrels a day pumped from U.S. shale oil wells since 2010, analysts including Brian Lee and Jaakko Kooroshy said in a research report Monday.
Black Sunday saw more federal background checks for gun buys than on any single day ever:
Black Friday shoppers—put off by crowds, hitting the Internet, perhaps fearing terrorism—came out in fewer numbers this past weekend. Yet the lack of enthusiasm for standing in line in dark parking lots did not prevent a historic spike in firearm background checks on Nov. 27, when 185,345 were processed—a record.
"This was an approximate 5 (percent) increase over the 175,754 received on Black Friday 2014," Stephen Fischer, the FBI's chief of multimedia productions, wrote to USA Today. "The previous high for receipts were the 177,170 received on 12/21/2012"—a week after Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Liz Taylor ran an AIDS safe house where the infected could get drugs to save their lives:
Just in case you didn’t already think Elizabeth Taylor was completely fabulous, she ran an underground safe house during the AIDS crisis.
The Hollywood legend helped patients access life-saving medication. [...]
According to model and AIDS activist Kathy Ireland, the Cleopatra actress broke the law and received death threats for her selfless activism.
House passes bill to name wildlife refuge after American Indian activist Billy Frank, Jr.: The fishing-rights activist, who died in 2014 received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama last month.
In a near-unanimous vote, the House on Monday passed a bill to rename a wildlife refuge in honor of the late treaty rights activist Billy Frank Jr.
H.R.2270, the Billy Frank Jr. Tell Your Story Act, designates the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge as the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. The measure also establishes the Medicine Creek Treaty National Historic Site to mark the signing of the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek, which Frank fought to protect.
On today’s Kagro in the morning show: Gun rules? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Greg Dworkin rounds up polling, the media’s Trump dumping & Rubio vs. Cruz. Armando calls in to disagree with Greg, and preview his upcoming Sunday post on competing polciy models for college tuition assistance.
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