Plus, California farmworkers leverage new labor bill, New York will seal criminal convictions, regulators aim to crack down on overdraft fees, and workers strike on Cyber Monday.
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Free at last! George Santos is Rep. Santos no more. In a bipartisan vote that handily exceeded the two-thirds requirement, the U.S. House voted to expel the mutiply indicted Santos on Friday morning. Not to worry, George Washington Anthony Elizabeth Taylor Devolder Kitara Julius Caesar Santos will land on his feet, even if he has (for now) denied he is in talks with “Dancing With the Stars.” He’ll have no trouble staying busy. Facing 23 felony charges (he has pleaded not guilty) Santos has a full schedule planning for his trial in September next year: The schemes laid out by prosecutors are wide ranging. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York say he falsified campaign reports with fake donations and fictional personal loans to artificially bolster his standing. They say he stole from donors, using their credit cards without authorization and through a Florida company called Redstone Strategies. And they have charged him with collecting more than $20,000 in unemployment payments when he was, in fact, employed. Prosecutors say that Mr. Santos used the money on personal expenses, including designer goods and credit card payments.
With only hours to go until the next Doctor Who 60th Anniversary episode, the BBC released a new set of "Wild Blue Yonder" preview images.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: The Rookie, Bill Maher, Rick and Morty, George Santos, The Boys, Doctor Who, HOTD, Chappelle/Boebert & more!
As Israel resumes its bombing of Gaza, the risk of a wider regional war grows. Mouin Rabbani analyzes the military and propaganda battles between Hamas and Israel.
The post Two Months That Shook the World: The First Phase of the Gaza War appeared first on The Intercept.
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened … And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper […]
Polar bear babies! Mierlo, November 30, 2023 – A healthy polar bear has been born in Dierenrijk. The delivery took place peacefully in the Frimas polar bear maternity. Mother and the newborn are doing well. Head animal caretaker Stephan Rijnen: “In early November, we noticed that the mother was retreating to the maternity room. From this, we could deduce that the mating we observed in March was likely successful! A polar bear gestation lasts about eight months, so we had to wait a bit. Tuesday morning, we reviewed the camera footage and discovered good news! A young polar bear the size of a guinea pig was lying with mother Frimas.” The maternity room is a separate enclosure connected to the indoor enclosure of the polar bears in Dierenrijk. This space is built so that pregnant polar bears can withdraw for childbirth. When designing the maternity room, the natural behavior of female polar bears in the wild was also taken into account. Rijnen: “In the wild, the expectant mother goes into winter hibernation, in the snow den she has dug herself. First, the mother eats to fullness so that she is strong enough to survive the winter.
Some rules to help journalists avoid the mistakes of 2016 in 2024: – Ban repeat liars from live interviews – Never put a lie in the headline – Use a truth sandwich when reporting on lies – Don’t take the bait (stop rewarding drama with visibility) – Abandon the social media algorithm (don’t let Xitter […]
The signs of American collapse are everywhere. The Russians are out-producing not just the US, but the West in missiles, tanks and drones. The Chinese have a larger navy than the US and can build three ships in the time it takes the US to build one, and yes, their domestic arms industry is larger and more productive than America’s. They and the Russians are also ahead technologically in missiles, and arguably drones. (America has more expensive larger ones, but Ukraine shows what works is swarms of smaller ones.)
What’s really damning is the Western inability to ramp up production for the Ukrainian war. The Russians vastly increased production, the West hasn’t and can’t. De-industrialization is real.
When leaders ignore threats, they should pay a price That August 6th memo to George W. Bush with a big warning that “Al Qaeda determined to strike inside the United States” which he and others in his administration ignored, may be the moment that permanently destroyed Bush’s reputation, (There were a lot of them, of course. Mission Accomplished” was also one of the worst.) It looks like Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was similarly warned and did nothing about it, which they wouldn’t, since they believed Hamas was contained and that the real issue was giving the extremist Israeli wingnuts on the West Bank everything they wanted. Oy vey. The NY Times reported today: Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.
The media refuses do it Kevin Drum: On a monthly basis, core PCE inflation was down to 2.0%, which is the Fed’s target rate. Headline inflation was even better, clocking in close to zero. On a year-over-year basis, headline inflation came in at 3.0% and core inflation at 3.5%. POSTSCRIPT: Now that inflation is going down instead of up, I notice that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post even bothers to report it on their front page. Even the Wall Street Journal mentions it only under a headline about consumer spending slowing down. And we wonder why people don’t seem to know that inflation is way down? I’m very sick of hearing excuses that the reason people say the economy is bad is because they just don’t “feel” it. They do. They’re spending like crazy. The problem is that when people are polled they reflect the conventional wisdom which they get from the media. The right wing media will never tell the truth about this. But there is no excuse for the way the MSM is covering this story.
Hookay, Christian Ziegler, the Chairman of the Florida GOP, has been accused of committing sexual violence against a woman who was in a longstanding, consensual sexual relationship with him AND his wife. And the wife, Bridget Ziegler, is the co-founder of Moms For Liberty, an organization that treats LGBTQ people, especially Trans people, like they are sexual predators. They were in a bisexual threesome relationship and the husband is accused of sexually predator behavior. Oh, and they’re big Christians. MAGA… sigh.
One had fun, the other one not so much. Guess which was which. Even big GOP influencer “Catturd” notices. (I’m no joking , he’s the leader of MAGA twitter.) When Florida Gov. Ron Desantis agreed to debate California Gov. Gavin Newsom it’s unlikely he knew his presidential campaign would be flailing to the extent it is. But he still should have thought twice. Whatever his political skills might be, he is terrible on the debate stage. He managed to barely hold his own in the sad Trumpless GOP primary debates that have been dominated by his rival former S. Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. He did himself no favors on Thursday night when he finally met with Newsom on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. Any Trump fan, which would include virtually all Fox viewers, were primed to watch him be humiliated. Trump spokesman Steve Cheung either taking dictation from the boss or channeling him perfectly, put out this humdinger of a statement in advance of the event: “Ron DeSanctimonious is acting more like a thirsty, third-rate OnlyFans wannabe model than an actual presidential candidate.
Dear members of the University community,
The University administration respects all student protests, just not this one. Students have fought for many important causes over the years, and their right to protest is sacrosanct. In this case, however, we must arrest and slander them.
We will not look back and regret this decision. Although we were wrong about not admitting women, abolitioning racial quotas, US involvement in Vietnam, and divesting from apartheid South Africa, we are confident that this time is different.
Rules are rules, and the rules never change.
Past protests inspired the very assets that make our school great. When students marched for wheelchair-accessible buildings, we called the cops and threatened to expel them. Today, we brag about our ADA-compliant dorms on every campus tour.
Those brave students are part of the fabric of our community. And now that they are gone, we can happily assimilate them into our PR strategy.
The Canadian private equity fund Brookfield’s bid for Origin Energy has the sole aim of delivering unconscionable profits to investors. But the rest of us have to know we are in the company of the masters of the universe and click our heels whenever we are given the cue from their obedient investment banks. Origin Continue reading »
Defence Minister Marles, always singing from the same tired US song book, fails to recognise the difference between international law and ‘a rules based international order’ (RBIO) that the US preaches. And there is a big difference. RBIO is code for US rules. In February this year he told us that ‘the rules-based order that Continue reading »