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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Starbucks hopes customers will be willing to pay at least $5 more when they stop in for their morning cup of Joe.
Starting Nov. 1, Starbucks will begin collecting donations of $5 or more from customers to stimulate U.S. job growth through its “Jobs for USA” program. The Seattle-based coffee chain is collaborating with the Opportunity Finance Network, a nonprofit that works with nearly 200 community development financial institutions to provide loans to small businesses and community groups. Starbucks says 100 percent of the donations will go toward loans for firms and organizations that can add jobs or stem job losses.
Starbucks, which pioneered how Americans drink coffee, declined to estimate how much money it plans to raise, but millions of people visit its nearly 7,000 company-owned U.S. stores each day. Customers who give will get a red, white and blue wristband that says “Indivisible.”
“This is about using Starbuck’s scale for good,” said Howard Schultz, Starbucks Corp.’s CEO.
Trust them….Starbucks is going to take your donation, give it to a collection of banks who will then loan it to small business. Sounds like a great scam.
The latest case involves Lori Dorn, a 44-year-old New York woman who learned in March that she had breast cancer. After tests revealed a high genetic risk for cancer, Ms. Dorn underwent a bilateral mastectomy in April as well as a grueling chemotherapy treatment that just ended in September. As part of her breast reconstruction, tissue expanders were implanted to stretch her skin before placement of a permanent breast implant.
But…last week, on her way to San Francisco to visit friends, she was treated with hostility and humiliated after the tissue expanders were detected by a body scanning machine at Kennedy Airport in New York. She said the workers from the Transportation Security Administration would not let her retrieve a medical card explaining the implants, a situation she wrote about on her blog:
I told her that I was not comfortable with having my breasts touched, and that I had a card in my wallet that explains the type of expanders, serial numbers and my doctor’s information and asked to retrieve it. This request was denied. Instead, she called over a female supervisor who told me the exam had to take place. I was again told that I could not retrieve the card and needed to submit to a physical exam in order to be cleared. She then said, “And if we don’t clear you, you don’t fly,” loud enough for other passengers to hear. And they did. And they stared at the bald woman being yelled at by a T.S.A. supervisor.
I have been through emotional and physical hell this past year due to breast cancer…. I understand the need for safety when flying, but there is also a need for those responsible to be compassionate and sensitive to each situation…
The T.S.A. e-mailed a statement about the incident, saying that proper screening procedures were followed.
Constitutional protections against behavior common to kingdoms and dictatorship were originally instituted for the same reasons they need to be revived.
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In case you needed further proof of the American education system’s failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That’s the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio’s Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.
An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher’s license she had been working on.
Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher’s license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.
[…]
Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.
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The man credited with creating Doritos will be buried along with some of his beloved snack chips…
Arch West died September 20 of natural causes at a Dallas hospital. He was 97. His remains were cremated, and the family plans to bury the urn inside a burial box at a local cemetery on Saturday.
The family requested that friends and relatives who attend the graveside service be allowed to toss Doritos around the box as a tribute.
“He would think it is hilarious,” said his daughter Jana Hacker, a resident of the Dallas area. “The cemetery does not mind because they are biodegradable…”
West, a marketing executive for the Frito-Lay, as eager to produce a salty snack chip after sampling a crunchy, “tortilla-type chip” at the roadside stand while on vacation in Southern California in the early 1960s, Hacker said.
“The company didn’t really like the idea, but Dad managed to direct some (research and development) money into the project,” Hacker said.
Rock on, Arch!
Just like how Cap and Trade isn’t really about reducing global warming, so too is immigration reform really about making money. It all makes sense now!
The men showed up in a small town in Australia’s outback early last year, offering top dollar for all available lodgings. Within days, their company, Serco, was flying in recruits from as far away as London, and busing them from trailers to work 12-hour shifts as guards in a remote camp where immigrants seeking asylum are indefinitely detained.
It was just a small part of a pattern on three continents where a handful of multinational security companies have been turning crackdowns on immigration into a growing global industry.
Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.
Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.
But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.
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DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – Call it another sign of our difficult economic times: Hallmark has taken a cue from the nation’s 9.1 percent unemployment rate and released a line of cards for people who’ve lost their jobs. Caring or insulting?
“It’s says something about the economy I suppose. But it also says something about that folks are still loving and caring and want to encourage folks along the way,” Emily Louis said. Louis was in a Dallas Hallmark store looking for a birthday card. Asked if she would give someone who lost a job one of the new cards, she said, “Yeah, I think I would.” Frank Fernandez, who owns Monica’s Hallmark in Dallas, said, “The cards are flying off the shelves.”
Call it caring with a twist. The kind that tells you, “When life gives you a lemon, go ahead and make a martini with it,” as one so boldly suggests.
Confucius say: Never let a good crisis go to waste…Or was that Rahm Emanuel?
Facebook has admitted that it has been watching the web pages its members visit – even when they have logged out. In its latest privacy blunder, the social networking site was forced to confirm that it has been constantly tracking its 750million users, even when they are using other sites. The social networking giant says the huge privacy breach was simply a mistake – that software automatically downloaded to users’ computers when they logged in to Facebook ‘inadvertently’ sent information to the company, whether or not they were logged in at the time.
Most would assume that Facebook stops monitoring them after they leave its site, but technology bloggers discovered this was not the case. In fact, data has been regularly sent back to the social network’s servers – data that could be worth billions when creating ‘targeted’ advertising based on the sites users visit. The website’s practices were exposed by Australian technology blogger Nik Cubrilovic and have provoked a furious response across the internet. Facebook claims to have ‘fixed’ the issue – and ‘thanked’ Mr Cubrilovic for pointing it out – while simultaneously claiming that it wasn’t really an issue in the first place. On technology blog CNET, however, users were outraged at what was going on.
Don’t tell me you actually expected your vote to count!
Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.
“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.”
[…]
Indeed, the Argonne team’s attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine’s proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive “alien electronics” into the machine.
[…]
“The cost of the attack that you’re going to see was $10.50 in retail quantities,” explains Warner in the video. “If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that’s another $15. So the total cost would be $26.”
From a modern technology point of view, there just ain’t much to a voting machine. It should be ridiculously easy to make it invulnerable. So, the only reason it isn’t has to be it is supposed to be insecure and easily hackable.
6 Billion proposed to equip airliners with missile defense systems
U.S. officials had once thought there was little chance that terrorists could get their hands on many of the portable surface-to-air missiles that can bring down a commercial jet liner. But now that calculation is out the window, with officials at a recent secret White House meeting reporting that thousands of them have gone missing in Libya.
“Matching up a terrorist with a shoulder-fired missile, that’s our worst nightmare,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D.-California, a member of the Senate’s Commerce, Energy and Transportation Committee. The nightmare has been made real with the discovery in Libya that an estimated 20,000 portable, heat-seeking missiles have gone missing from unguarded Army weapons warehouses.
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