Billionaire Harlan Crow bought property from Clarence Thomas. The justice didn’t disclose the deal

Billionaire Harlan Crow bought property from Clarence Thomas. The justice didn’t disclose the deal

ProPublica reports: In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives. The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the…

Read More Read More

The Fox Tapes

The Fox Tapes

  The Daily Beast reports: On Wednesday night, MSNBC aired explosive audio recordings of former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump campaign officials telling Fox News after the 2020 election that there was no evidence Dominion voting machines flipped votes for President Joe Biden. The existence of the tapes, recorded by former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, was first revealed in an amended legal complaint by Grossberg earlier this week. Grossberg is suing Fox News for harassment and discrimination, accusing…

Read More Read More

‘I’m all for climate change’: Axel Springer CEO faces heat over leaked messages

‘I’m all for climate change’: Axel Springer CEO faces heat over leaked messages

The Guardian reports: The German CEO of Europe’s largest media publisher tried to use his flagship tabloid, Bild, to influence the outcome of Germany’s last election and fed the newspaper his personal views attacking climate change activism, Covid measures and the former chancellor Angela Merkel, leaked messages suggest. The internal chats, emails and text messages published by the German weekly Die Zeit on Wednesday clash with the public presentation of Axel Springer SE’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, who recently said…

Read More Read More

EPA lays out rules to accelerate sales of electric cars and trucks

EPA lays out rules to accelerate sales of electric cars and trucks

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration on Wednesday proposed the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations to date, two plans designed to ensure two-thirds of new passenger cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032. The new rules would require nothing short of a revolution in the U.S. auto industry, a moment in some ways as significant as the June morning in 1896 when Henry Ford took his “horseless carriage”…

Read More Read More

Meet the young Democrats waging war on MAGA from behind enemy lines

Meet the young Democrats waging war on MAGA from behind enemy lines

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman write: Catalyzing events in U.S. history have a tendency to shape generations of public officials. In the 1920s, Prohibition and the GOP’s depression economics gave rise to the New Deal Democrats. Racial and cultural repression in the mid-20th century spawned classes of lawmakers fighting for the “rights revolution.” In the 1970s, the Vietnam War and Watergate inspired the antiwar “Watergate babies” to run for Congress. It might be happening again: The reactionary turn underway in…

Read More Read More

Vladimir Kara-Murza’s last statement to Russian court: A reckoning will come

Vladimir Kara-Murza’s last statement to Russian court: A reckoning will come

At the closing session of his trial in Moscow, Vladimir Kara-Murza delivered these remarks: Members of the court: I was sure, after two decades spent in Russian politics, after all that I have seen and experienced, that nothing can surprise me anymore. I must admit that I was wrong. I’ve been surprised by the extent to which my trial, in its secrecy and its contempt for legal norms, has surpassed even the “trials” of Soviet dissidents in the 1960s and ’70s….

Read More Read More

Inside Rupert Murdoch’s succession drama

Inside Rupert Murdoch’s succession drama

Gabriel Sherman writes: On the afternoon of July 2, 2022, Rupert Murdoch’s black Range Rover pulled up to a 12th-century stone church in Westwell, a storybook Cotswolds village 75 miles west of London. The then 91-year-old Fox Corporation chairman traveled to the Oxfordshire countryside to attend his 21-year-old granddaughter Charlotte Freud’s wedding. Invitations instructed the 70 guests to wear “formal theatrical” attire. Murdoch emerged from his SUV looking like Tom Wolfe in a white suit, red suede shoes, and red…

Read More Read More

Judge imposes sanction on Fox for withholding evidence in defamation case

Judge imposes sanction on Fox for withholding evidence in defamation case

The New York Times reports: The judge overseeing Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News said on Wednesday that he was imposing a sanction on the network and would very likely start an investigation into whether Fox’s legal team had deliberately withheld evidence, scolding the lawyers for not being “straightforward” with him. The rebuke came after lawyers for Dominion, which is suing for defamation, revealed a number of instances in which Fox’s lawyers had not turned over evidence in a…

Read More Read More

NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’

NPR quits Twitter after being falsely labeled as ‘state-affiliated media’

NPR reports: NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries. The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard. When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn,…

Read More Read More

Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

Primitive Asgard cells show life on the brink of complexity

Joshua Sokol writes: An oak tree. The symbiotic fungus intertwined with its roots. A cardinal chirping from one of its branches. Our best clue yet to their shared ancestor might have arrived in electron microscope images that were unveiled in December. “Look!” said the microbiologist Christa Schleper, beaming as she held a printed, high-resolution image in front of her webcam at the University of Vienna. “Isn’t it beautiful?” The cells in the micrograph were 500 nanometer-wide orbs surrounded by a…

Read More Read More

From Discord to 4chan: The improbable journey of a U.S. intelligence leak

From Discord to 4chan: The improbable journey of a U.S. intelligence leak

Bellingcat reports: In recent days, the US Justice Department and Pentagon have begun investigating an apparent online leak of sensitive documents, including some that were marked “Top Secret”. A portion of the documents, which have since been widely covered by the news media, focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while others detailed analysis of potential UK policies on the South China Sea and the activities of a Houthi figure in Yemen. The existence of the documents was first reported by…

Read More Read More

The leaked documents on the Ukraine war are chilling

The leaked documents on the Ukraine war are chilling

David Ignatius writes: Intelligence is always about what philosophers call epistemology — the study of how we know what we know. But let’s try to focus on facts, by examining some baseline themes in the documents that accord with information from other sources. By restricting ourselves to this subset of information supported by collateral evidence, we can make out some basic themes. First, Ukraine is facing a severe shortage of air defense weapons that could cost it the war. We…

Read More Read More

New details on intelligence leak show it circulated for weeks before raising alarm

New details on intelligence leak show it circulated for weeks before raising alarm

The Wall Street Journal reports: In total, just over 50 documents with Secret and Top Secret classification markings have surfaced so far, and have been viewed by the Journal and a variety of independent intelligence analysts. A critical question is who had access, and when, to the hundreds of others that were posted in the original group between January and March, and how significant are the secrets that these files contain. The U.S. intelligence community is expected to take measures…

Read More Read More

Egypt secretly planned to supply rockets to Russia, leaked U.S. document say

Egypt secretly planned to supply rockets to Russia, leaked U.S. document say

The Washington Post reports: President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi of Egypt, one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East and a major recipient of U.S. aid, recently ordered subordinates to produce up to 40,000 rockets to be covertly shipped to Russia, according to a leaked U.S. intelligence document. Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine. A portion of a top secret document, dated Feb. 17, summarizes purported conversations between Sisi…

Read More Read More