Новости за 22.09.2023

The Supreme Court’s threshold for bribery these days is almost indistinguishable from a Thomas Nast cartoon. Corruption, in the justices’ eyes, is when a railroad tycoon hands a politician a burlap sack with a big dollar sign on it. But that extraordinarily high hurdle allegedly didn’t stop New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez from leaping over it.

Ron DeSantis’s struggles on the campaign trail have eroded his influence back home in Florida, and even once-close allies are revolting against his control.

Medical implant company Neuralink killed at least a dozen monkeys through animal testing, after first subjecting the primates to horrifying conditions, despite founder Elon Musk’s claims otherwise, according to a new WIRED report.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has been indicted on federal bribery charges, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

Thursday night on his MSNBC show, Chris Hayes offered up a provocative thesis for why the House Republicans appear to be ready to shut down the government. Yes, there’s their general raging hatred of government and desire to blow the place up. But there is also, Hayes noted, a very specific reason: It’s an attempt to spare Donald Trump from prosecution.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tends to get a lot of grief whenever she offers her opinion about how the country needs a “strong Republican Party,” but I think that what’s currently happening on the GOP side of the House of Representatives is probably what she had in mind. There, the scene has devolved over the past week into the parliamentary equivalent of a Superfund site. It’s become rivetingly clear that Kevin McCarthy’s charges are hurtling toward a spectacular self-own—and a government shutdown. Читать дальше...

At the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Katarina Witt, the figure skater once dubbed “the most beautiful face of socialism,” took to the ice to perform a routine set to Bizet’s opera Carmen. Dressed in a black and red flamenco-inspired suit, Witt outperformed her rivals, including American Debi Thomas, who was also skating to Carmen. Triumphing in the “Battle of the Carmens,” Witt became the second woman in Olympic history to collect back-to-back gold medals in figure skating. 

Blowing up the government is a standard Republican talking point. And not just a talking point; the headlong rush to a government shutdown has been embraced by a number of House radical Republicans, who are driving the strategy—believing, against all experience, that Americans will be perfectly happy to go without the intrusive government programs oppressing them.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell investigation into ExxonMobil’s internal strategy to downplay the role of fossil fuels in causing climate change. The investigation offers shocking details of how Exxon executives worked behind closed doors to push narratives that would help them drill more oil; funded “science to support [their] business” as the consensus around man-made global warming grew; and adopted ludicrous tactics such as trying to influence the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change... Читать дальше...

Donald Trump staunchly refused to wear a mask during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a big reason why is that he didn’t want to smudge his makeup, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson has revealed.