With only 292 days until New Year’s Eve, today is also the birthday of Sci-Fi writer and charlatan L. Ron Hubbard, born on this day in 1911. It was his dying wish that people read the Headlines Du Jour of yesteryear:

• 624 – Battle of Badr: a key battle between Muhammad‘s army – the new followers of Islam and the Quraish of Mecca. The Muslims won this battle, known as the turning point of Islam, which took place in the Hejaz region of western Arabia.
• 1781 – William Herschel discovers Uranus.
• 1862 – American Civil War: The U.S. federal government forbids all Union army officers to return fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
• 1865 – American Civil War: The Confederate States of America agree to the use of African American troops.
• 1930 – The news of the discovery of Pluto is telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory.
• 1943 – The Holocaust: German forces liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Kraków.
• 1963 – Police in Phoenix, Arizona arrest Ernesto Miranda and charge him with kidnap and rape. His conviction is ultimately set aside by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona
• 1964 – American Kitty Genovese is murdered, reportedly in view of neighbors who did nothing to help her, prompting research into the bystander effect.
• 1991 – The United States Department of Justice announces that Exxon has agreed to pay $1 billion for the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
• 2013 – Pope Francis is elected in the papal conclave to succeed Pope Benedict XVI.

Let’s get right to today’s Headlines Du Jour:

Black Man Sentenced To Death By All-White Jury Freed From Louisiana Prison After 30 Years

Mississippi, Louisiana,
Georgia top list of gay-
porn watching states

Conservative Intellectuals
Fear the GOP Is Out of Ideas

Fracking suspended after earthquakes rock Ohio

NSA posed as Facebook to infect computers with malware

Report on CIA Black Sites and Torture May Provoke a Constitutional Crisis

The war on black intellectuals:
What (mostly) white men
keep getting wrong
about public scholarship

Cash, gun and pot seized in
L.A. marijuana dispensary raids

Michigan medical marijuana patients, families speak out in support of dispensary, edible bills

WSJ Poll: Candy Is Dandy
But Pot Is Less Harmful

With marijuana bills under
consideration in Legislature,
Jefferson Parish group joins debate

Brian Kolfage and Jan Vrotsos

◄ A duped writer defends the cyber-bullies ►
Left-wing trolls launch vile attack on Iraq war veteran and triple amputee

◄ The Not Now Silly cyber-bullies ►
The Mark Koldys-Johnny Dollar Cyber-Bully Comments of the Day

City of Seattle creates priority parking for musicians

Bill O’Reilly: Abraham Lincoln Would Never Have Appeared
on Funny or Die

Chris Matthews to O’Reilly: Abraham Lincoln ‘Would Not Have Worked for Fox’

Galaxies in the early universe mature beyond their years

Astronomers find faint strings of galaxies inside empty space

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