Headlines from December 31, 1969

The GI Rights Hotline provides free information services to military members confronting confusing policy matters.
Season of Sharing provides one-time grants to Bay Area residents in critical need.
Doctors Without Borders—apolitical, international health organization for a world that still has cholera outbreaks.
The Innocence Project—dedicated to exonerating wrongly convicted individuals through DNA testing and legal reform.
Free the Slaves works with on-the-ground liberators to free people around the world.
And may we remind you with a winsome video, giving feels great. #video
Support Magdalene/Thistle Farms, a residential program for women who have survived violence, prostitution, and addiction.
Stand with Planned Parenthood and protect women’s health.
Find your local food bank.
Boise’s Learning Lab: Helping people apply for jobs, balance checkbooks, learn English, and read to their children.
Girls Write Now: Pairing at-risk teenage girls in NYC public schools with women mentors.
Fisk University, top producer of minority Ph.D.s in science and technology, faces losing accreditation if it doesn’t raise funds.
Lamda Legal Defense performs concrete, powerful work by addressing gay rights as civil rights.
The British Heart Foundation—because heart disease is a bitch.
The Environmental Working Group employs experts to identify and attack threats to public health and the environment.
The Animal Legal Defense Fund—“winning the case against animal cruelty.”
The National Immigration Law Center works for low-income immigrants, showing them the good side of the U.S. justice system.
Remember when you used to hide under your bed and get lost in a book? Room to Read.
Learn how these and other groups use your donations at Charity Navigator.
Good Intents: Facts for wise aid-giving.
Scientists develop new approach to achieving coldest temperature ever recorded: removing hottest atoms from “optical lattices.”
Mexico City to close one of the world’s biggest dumps; city has halved its garbage through recycling and composting.
Behind-the-scenes photos of police patrolling New York in the 1970s.
Life of the Baghdad Country Club, bar founded in the middle of the war zone of 2006 Iraq.
“Nicest place on the internet” features videos of strangers trying to hug you.
Plans to give Thatcher a state funeral insult many honest, patriotic people. #opinions
Brit: “In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation.”
Economics of college football’s widely unpopular bowl system explained.
Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors is the perfect framework for a holiday discussion of bells and change-ringing.
Christmas classic: The year Darth Vader made Matthew Baldwin cry and killed Christmas.
From 2003, perhaps our favorite Christmas Times op-ed: Zadie Smith’s “Scenes From the Smith Family Christmas.”
The internet weighs two ounces, or as little as a single grain of salt.
Studies show: No matter how many Facebook statuses you post, you won’t convince others to like your favorite band.
Five centuries before Facebook, how Luther’s “95 Theses” went viral.
Miéville on “the hauntological”—“something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it”—and quantum vampires.
Short film: Prison Photography on the Road. #video