DragonI

Eddie Murphy Returns to ‘Saturday Night Live’

Murphy, who helped keep ‘S.N.L.’ alive in the ’80s, hosted for the first time in 35 years, with help from his old characters and a ton of special guests.

www.nytimes.com

It took 35 years, but Eddie Murphy came back to host “Saturday Night Live.”

The last time Murphy hosted the show, it was Dec. 15, 1984, just a few months after this one-time wunderkind (who joined “S.N.L.” when he was 19 years old) quit the program to focus on his flourishing film career. 

In the sketches that aired that night, he revisited several of his beloved characters, including Buckwheat, Gumby and Mr. Robinson.

“I was gone for a bit, but now I’m all right. My neighbors was all black, but now they white. The check cashing place turned into a bank. Elevator works and the stairs they don’t stink. The white people came and changed everything, But I am still your neighbor.”

“My neighborhood has gone through so much. It has gone through something called gentrification. Can you say that? It’s like a magic trick. White people pay a lot of money and then poof! All the black people are gone. But where do they go, boys and girls? Back to where they come from, of course: Atlanta. Now it’s just me by myself. You’re all probably wondering how Mr. Robinson can afford to live in this neighborhood. That’s the word of the day: squatters rights. It’s like finders keepers but for other people’s houses.”

• Articles of Impeachment are REAL
• Trump was Impeached on Dec. 18, 2019

Greta Thunberg Takes Trump's Insult, Fires It Right Back At Him

The 16-year-old environmental activist had a sassy response to Trump's "Chill Greta" attack.

www.huffingtonpost.com

Greta Thunberg has once again mocked President Donald Trump with his own insulting words about her.

Trump on Thursday used Twitter to criticize the 16-year-old after Time magazine named her over him as Person of the Year.

“So ridiculous,” wrote the president, who has repeatedly called the climate crisis a “hoax” and whose administration is pursuing an anti-environmental agenda.

“Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend,” Trump added. “Chill Greta, Chill!”

Thunberg hit back the same way in September, when Trump sarcastically called her “a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.” 

She changed her Twitter bio to read: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

Elizabeth D. Herman and Celeste Sloman photographed nearly all of the record number of women in the 116th Congress.

Clockwise from top left: Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat from Arizona; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat from New York; Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican from Washington; and Lauren Underwood, Democrat from Illinois.

The Year in Pictures 2019

Sifting through images of conflict, triumph and catastrophe from around the world, our editors chose photos to represent the year.

www.nytimes.com

5.6 million. That’s roughly the number of images photo editors of The New York Times sift through each year to find the perfect photographs to represent the news for our readers. This collection of images is a testament to a mere fraction of the conflicts and triumphs, catastrophes and achievements and simple but poignant moments of everyday life in the past 365 days.

Elizabeth D. Herman and Celeste Sloman photographed nearly all of the record number of women in the 116th Congress. 

Washington, Jan. 2-3: Clockwise from top left: 

• Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat from Arizona
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat from New York
• Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican from Washington
• Lauren Underwood, Democrat from Illinois.

Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, applauded President Trump at his State of the Union address. It was a clap that resonated around the world. Doug Mills/The New York Times

Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist, skipped school to protest at the Swedish Parliament. Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

Donald Trump Jr walks out of Triggered book launch after heckling – from supporters

Event at University of California is cut short amid anger at his refusal to take questions from the audience

www.theguardian.com|Andrew Gumbel

The audience was angry that Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, would not take questions.

The fiasco pointed to a factional rift on the Trump-supporting conservative right that has been growing rapidly in recent weeks, particularly among “zoomers” – student-age activists. On one side are one of the sponsors of Trump Jr’s book tour, Turning Point USA, a campus conservative group with a track record of bringing provocative right wing speakers to liberal universities.

On the other side are far-right activists – often referred to as white supremacists and neo-Nazis, although many of them reject such labels – who believe in slamming the door on all immigrants, not just those who cross the border without documents, and who want an end to America’s military and diplomatic engagement with the wider world.

‘Watchmen’ Is a Spectacular Assault on White Supremacy

The stunning new HBO series from Damon Lindelof (“Lost,” “The Leftovers”) envisions a future where masked vigilantes square off against a cartel of murderous white supremacists.

www.thedailybeast.com

Watchmen is set in 2019, but these opening 10 minutes depict the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre of 1921. The massacre was pure malevolent violence committed on Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” undertaken by white citizens who killed dozens and wounded even more (exact totals are unknown) while burning black property to the ground. It is widely considered one of the most shocking acts of racial violence in American history, and it’s core to what Watchmen is saying about America today.

— Vox

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.”

"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.”

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.”

"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.”

"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.”

"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.:

"There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.”

• At U.N. Climate Summit, Few Commitments and U.S. Silence, NYTimes
• Greta Thunberg stares down Trump at UN Climate Summit, The Guardian
• Fox News Guest Calls Greta Thunberg ‘Mentally Ill Swedish Child’ as Right Wing Unleashes on Climate Activist, Daily Beast
• Trump trolls and mocks Greta Thunberg after her UN climate speech, Vox

Shep Smith Torches Trump Over Dorian Map: ‘It Was Fake News Defined’

“Some things in Trumplandia are inexplicable,” an exasperated Shep said Thursday.

www.thedailybeast.com

With President Donald Trump continuing to double down on his bizarre false claim that Alabama was at one point in the path of Hurricane Dorian, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith took the president to task on Thursday afternoon for his days-long obsession of insisting he’s right over obviously inaccurate information.

Noting that the president has since spent days using “fake visual aids” to prove he was right all along, Smith then pointed out that the whole kerfuffle began on Sunday morning when the president erroneously said on Twitter (and in comments later that day) that Alabama was in danger of getting hit by the storm.

“That was wrong,” Smith stated, explaining that Trump’s goof was serious enough to warrant a correction by the National Weather Service at the time.

The Fox News anchor, who is known for his methodical fact-checks of the president, went on to highlight Trump’s refusal to admit his mistake which climaxed with him flashing a doctored hurricane map during a White House briefing on Wednesday.

How dare you, Donald Trump?

You have blood on your hands. You’ve incited white supremacist terrorism in America. 

Don’t think you can take 3 steps towards white supremacy and one step back. You aren’t fooling anyone. You’ll be remembered as a stain on this country.

So careless losing track of those children that you’re pretending to care for, it’s a human rights abuse. And you’ll never live it down.

If I can see you. I would stare down at you. It doesn’t matter how tall you are, You’ll always be small.