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Rep.-elect George Santos’s early life — odd jobs, bad debts and lawsuits

Rep.-elect George Santos’s early life — odd jobs, bad debts and lawsuits

The New York Times reports: The polite young customer service agent at the Dish Network call center in Queens spoke English and Portuguese, so when Brazilian immigrants had trouble with their billing or their satellite dish, their calls would be routed his way. It was around 2012, and the man was George Santos, a son of Brazilian immigrants who, more than a decade later, would win a crucial election to Congress. But on the campaign trail, Mr. Santos, 34, told…

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North Korea sending arms to Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group fighting in Ukraine, U.S. says

North Korea sending arms to Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group fighting in Ukraine, U.S. says

The Wall Street Journal reports: North Korea has sent a large arms delivery to the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary force whose influence and operations in Ukraine are growing, according to the Biden administration. North Korea last month shipped infantry rockets and missiles to the Wagner Group, which paid for the weaponry, John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, said Thursday. The shipment comes as Moscow’s war in Ukraine enters another critical stage, with…

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Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas

Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas

Jennifer Raff writes: The debate over how people first arrived in the Western Hemisphere continues to roil archaeology in the United States – and to capture public attention. Today, the scientific community is contending with significant amounts of new genetic and archaeological data, and it can be overwhelming and even contradictory. These data are coming from new archaeological excavations but also from the application of newly developed tools to re-analyse prior sites and artefacts. They’re coming from newly sequenced genomes…

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Trump and his White House ‘ethics lawyer’ accused of tampering with witness Cassidy Hutchinson

Trump and his White House ‘ethics lawyer’ accused of tampering with witness Cassidy Hutchinson

CNN reports: The final straw for former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson with her first attorney, paid through allies of former President Donald Trump, came when he told her to stop cooperating with the January 6 House select committee even if she risked a contempt of Congress charge, transcripts of her interviews and sources familiar with her testimony tell CNN. Hutchinson made the comments when she returned to the select committee in September to discuss the pressure campaign she…

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IRS routinely audited Obama and Biden, raising questions over delays for Trump

IRS routinely audited Obama and Biden, raising questions over delays for Trump

The New York Times reports: The I.R.S. subjected both President Donald J. Trump’s predecessor and his successor to annual audits of their tax returns once they took office, spokespeople for Barack Obama and President Biden said on Wednesday, intensifying questions about how Mr. Trump escaped such scrutiny until Democrats in the House started inquiring. Late Tuesday, a House committee revealed that the I.R.S. failed to audit Mr. Trump during his first two years in office despite a rule that states…

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Ukrainian resistance and American support prevented a wide range of horrors

Ukrainian resistance and American support prevented a wide range of horrors

Anne Applebaum writes: Had the Russian plan been carried out as it was written, Kyiv would have been conquered in just a few days. Zelensky, his wife, and his children would have been murdered by one of the hit squads that roamed the capital city. The Ukrainian state would have been taken over by the collaborators who had already chosen their Kyiv apartments. Then, city by city, region by region, the Russian army would have fought the remnants of the…

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Afghanistan’s Taliban ban all education for girls

Afghanistan’s Taliban ban all education for girls

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Taliban banned girls from attending elementary school, effectively instituting a total ban on the education of girls and women and dealing one of the most dramatic blows yet to women’s freedoms since seizing power last year. In a gathering in Kabul with private-school directors, clerics and community representatives, Taliban officials on Wednesday also barred female staff, including teachers, from working in schools, closing off one of the few professions that had remained open to…

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Henry Ford, Elon Musk, and the dark path to extremism

Henry Ford, Elon Musk, and the dark path to extremism

James Risen writes: Elon Musk is on his way to becoming the next Henry Ford. That is not a compliment. In his early entrepreneurial years, Ford was a revolutionary: an innovative genius who transformed the way Americans traveled, worked, and lived. Ford effectively created the modern assembly line, driving down manufacturing costs, raising productivity, and making it possible to sell cars at low prices. Ford’s inexpensive and durable Model T, introduced in 1908, brought automobiles within the reach of average…

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NY Attorney General’s Office ‘looking into’ allegations against Rep.-elect George Santos

NY Attorney General’s Office ‘looking into’ allegations against Rep.-elect George Santos

NBC News reports: The New York Attorney General’s Office said it is “looking into a number of issues” surrounding Congressman-elect George Santos, who was the subject of a bombshell New York Times investigation that questions whether the incoming Republican lawmaker fabricated much of his biography, including his education, work history and financial dealings. The office, however, did not confirm whether it had opened an official investigation into Santos and declined to comment further on the matter. A lawyer for Santos,…

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As a climate change-induced drought wears on, wildlife, livestock and people face deadly consequences

As a climate change-induced drought wears on, wildlife, livestock and people face deadly consequences

Georgina Gustin writes: A wildebeest has toppled into a ditch at the edge of a dusty track, its shoe-box-shaped head twisted upward, a single gaping chomp out of its flank. Isack Marembe and Kisham Makui study the animal’s body and everything around it, doing a roadside postmortem. “A hyena,” Marembe says. But the culprit wasn’t a hyena. The hyena just happened to pass by and take a bite from the dead wildebeest’s side. The killer was—it is—an enduring drought driven…

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How Volodymyr Zelensky became savior of Ukraine

How Volodymyr Zelensky became savior of Ukraine

  Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Traveling the 4,880 miles from Kyiv to Washington may be a shorter distance than Zelensky has journeyed from just another faltering Ukrainian leader to Time magazine’s Person of the Year. In December 2021, his domestic approval rating was 31%, an anemic figure but by no means uncharacteristic for a Ukrainian incumbent during peacetime. Olga Rudenko, editor of the Kyiv Independent, wrote in the New York Times on Feb. 21 that three days before…

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Russians hunt down and murder influential Ukrainians to neutralize resistance

Russians hunt down and murder influential Ukrainians to neutralize resistance

The Associated Press reports: Three days after the first Russian bombs struck Ukraine, Andrii Kuprash, the head of a village north of Kyiv, walked into a forest near his home and began to dig. He didn’t stop until he had carved out a shallow pit, big enough for a man like him. It was his just-in-case, a place to lie low if he needed. He covered it with branches and went back home. A week later, Kuprash got a call…

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Informant warned FBI weeks before Jan. 6 that the far-right saw Trump tweet as ‘a call to arms’

Informant warned FBI weeks before Jan. 6 that the far-right saw Trump tweet as ‘a call to arms’

NBC News reports: On Dec. 19, 2020, the day that then-President Donald Trump sent a tweet summoning his supporters to a “wild” protest in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, one of the FBI’s own confidential sources warned the bureau that the far-right considered Trump’s message “a call to arms,” according to an email reviewed by NBC News. That tip to the FBI, from a source who is still used by the bureau and spoke on the condition of anonymity,…

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In testimony under oath, Hannity and other Fox employees said they doubted Trump’s fraud claims

In testimony under oath, Hannity and other Fox employees said they doubted Trump’s fraud claims

The New York Times reports: On Nov. 30, 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on his prime-time Fox News program. As she had in many other interviews around that time — on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media — Ms. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spun wild conspiracy theories about what she said was “corruption all across the country, in countless districts,” in a plot to steal re-election from the president, Donald J. Trump. At the center of this imagined…

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