30 Astonishing Photos Of The Mass Protests In Turkey

What could have been a peaceful sit-in to preserve the trees of a public park in Istanbul quickly escalated and took the entire country of Turkey by storm following a violent police crack down on May 31. Since then, Turkey has been embroiled in frantic protests, distressing amounts of police brutality and vociferously vocalized fears that Prime Minister Erdogan–holding that position for ten years now–poses a threat to Turkey’s greatly-treasured secularism and democracy, two things relatively uncommon within the region. There’s been some staggering photojournalism–by professionals and civilians alike–in the month that followed. In case you’ve missed it, here’s some of the best.

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A Liberal Mole At FOX News Speaks Out

The Article: I was a liberal mole at Fox News: From Bill O’Reilly to Roger Ailes, here’s all the inside dope by Joe Muto in Salon.

The Text: People would often ask me about how Fox pushes a message.

And I would always tell them the message isn’t so much pushed as it is pulled, gravitationally, with Roger Ailes as the sun at the center of the solar system; his vice presidents were the forces of gravity that kept the planet-size anchors and executive producers in a tight orbit; then all the lesser producers and PAs were moons and satellites and debris of varying sizes.

An organizational flow chart at Fox would be tough to draw up, as title alone was not the ultimate signifier of status. Sometimes the anchors outranked their executive producers, as was the case with “The O’Reilly Factor.” (In fact, Bill had procured an EP title for himself, but he outranked the two other EPs on the show, both Stan, who oversaw TV, radio, and the website, and Gayle, who focused on television and also served as a fact-checker.) Sometimes the anchors were relatively weak — as was the case with a lot of weekend shows, and maybe some of the newswheel hours — and a strong senior producer or producer outranked, or at least pretended to outrank, the host. (For example, Lizzie from “The Lineup,” who was only a producer but was tough enough that she probably could have bossed around Ailes himself had she been left alone in a room with him for more than five minutes.)

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Candidate Obama Versus President Obama On Civil Liberties

Obama-the-candidate’s youthful idealism, noble ambitions or pure politicking aside, the only thing consistent in DC is how quickly it will make a politician’s story change.

The Internet’s Best Responses To NSA Surveillance

Americans have had a field day with the latest, no-good, dirty-rotten revelation that the National Security Agency has been legally able to pry into everything from pathetic e-mails to your mom to your drunkest, most mundane tweets for some time now–and rightly so. As some try to take their revenge on the NSA via trolling, a tidal wave of cynical, Star Trek-saturated memes and cartoons has hit to entertain those of us with a little less time on our hands. Here’s the best stuff we’ve caught so far.

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Charitable Donations? Not For The Poor

The Article: Only a third of charitable contributions go the poor by Dylan Matthews in The Washington Post.

The Text: Sussing out who gets what from various tax breaks is tricky enough, but it’s nearly impossible for the charitable tax deduction. On the most basic analysis, it seems to help the rich. After all, they are more likely to itemize their tax returns, and the deduction is worth more for people in higher tax brackets. That’s why the CBO found that $33 billion of the $39 billion deduction went to the top quintile, and that the top one percent gets more out of it than any other group, as a share of income.

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