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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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^ that is the new NYT headline. They add this: Pedro Castillo announced the move just before Congress voted to impeach him. Much of his government resigned to protest what political leaders said was a coup attempt.
@Reuters, December 7, 4:27 AM EST
BERLIN, Dec 7 (Reuters) - German authorities on Wednesday detained 25 members and supporters of a far-right group that the prosecutor's office said were preparing a violent overthrow of the state, with some members suspected of plotting an armed attack on the parliament.
One active soldier and several reservists are among those being investigated, a spokesperson for the military intelligence service told Reuters. The active soldier is a member of the Special Forces Command, it said. A former parliamentary lawmaker from the far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD) who serves as a judge in Berlin was also among those detained, along with a former member of a German royal family.
Investigators suspect individual members of the group had concrete plans to storm the Bundestag lower house of parliament in Berlin with a small armed group, the prosecutor's office said [....]
By Matt LeClerq & Jenny Rudolph @ Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Dec. 6
Fort Worth-based Bell Textron Inc. has been awarded a development contract potentially worth billions of dollars for the U.S. Army’s next generation of helicopter to replace its fleet of Black Hawks.Textron announced the award Monday for what’s called the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA program. The award is based on Bell’s V-280 Valor tiltrotor that was developed and tested as part of the program that began in 2013 [....]
By David Feliba @ WashingtonPost.com, Dec. 6
BUENOS AIRES — Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a prominent and polarizing figure in Latin America who served two terms as president of Argentina, was convicted Tuesday on corruption charges, sentenced to six years in prison and given a lifetime ban from holding public office.
A panel of three judges found the 69-year-old Peronista, perhaps the nation’s most influential politician of the past two decades, guilty of fraud during her tenure as president for directing millions of dollars in taxpayer money to a family friend. She was acquitted of charges that she headed an illicit organization that engineered bribes and overpricing tied to roadwork projects in Patagonia.
Kircher has denied wrongdoing and is expected to appeal. She has called the court a “firing squad” engaged in political persecution that’s aimed at keeping her from running for a third term as president next year. As vice president and a senator, she enjoys immunity from incarceration and the ban from running for public office until her appeals are exhausted, which will likely take years [....]
article is not 'breaking' as it's from Nov. 30, but still very much going on -
Op-ed by Tim Miller @ TheBulwark.com, Dec. 3 on Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi’s First Amendment follies.
While normal humans who denied Republicans their red wave were enjoying an epic sports weekend, an insular community of MAGA activists and online contrarians led by the world’s richest man (for now) were getting riled up about a cache of leaked emails revealing that the former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago.
Now if you are one of the normals—someone who would never think about posting another person’s penis on your social media account; has no desire to see politicians’ kids’ penises when scrolling social media; doesn’t understand why there are other people out there who care one way or another about the moderation policies surrounding stolen penis photos; or can’t even figure out what it is that I’m talking about—then this might seem like a gratuitous matter for an article. Sadly, it is not.
Because among Republican members of Congress, leading conservative media commentators, contrarian substackers, conservative tech bros, and friends of Donald Trump, the ability to post Hunter Biden’s cock shots on Twitter is the number-one issue in America this weekend. They believe that if they are not allowed to post porno, our constitutional republic may be in jeopardy.
I truly, truly wish I were joking.
Here’s a synopsis for the blessedly uninitiated: [....]
By Madison Goldbeck @ tmj4.com, Nov. 30
MILWAUKEE — A 10-year-old boy who shot and killed his 44-year-old mother last week in Milwaukee is being charged with first-degree homicide as an adult.
According to a criminal complaint, the boy was allegedly mad at his mom for waking him up early and not letting him have something on Amazon [....]
By Evan Halper @ WashingtonPost.com, Nov. 30 (and their current headline story)
The average price of gas is back to where it was before Russia invaded Ukraine. It is putting real money back in Americans’ wallets.
A new trio, including Representatives Katherine Clark of Massachusetts as No. 2 and Pete Aguilar of California as No. 3 will take the reins in January, replacing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her team.
By Annie Karni & Emily Cochrane @ NYTimes.com, Nov. 30
WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Wednesday elected new leaders to take the mantle from the three octogenarians who have led them for two decades, ushering in a long-awaited generational change that, for the first time in the history of either party or chamber in Congress, installed a trio of top leaders that includes no white men.
In a display of unity after midterm elections in which they lost the House but had a stronger than expected showing, Democrats skipped a vote and by acclamation elected Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York to be minority leader, making him the first Black person to hold the top spot. Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts was elected as whip, the lead vote counter for House Democrats, and Representative Pete Aguilar of California as the chairman of the party caucus, in charge of messaging.
Mr. Jeffries, 52, Ms. Clark, 59 and Mr. Aguilar, 43, who for years have positioned themselves as an unofficial joint slate of candidates and have patiently waited their turn, ran unopposed [....]
This Nov. 16 WSJ article is behind a paywall but nevermind what the economists in it say, as all the Twitter thread repliers are probably just as good or better at answering the question! So I link to the Twitter fhread and I recommend reading the replies there instead!
By Adam Liptak @ NYTimes.com, Nov. 28
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, which has become increasingly skeptical of federal prosecutions of public corruption in state government, seemed poised on Monday to hand prosecutors two more defeats.
The justices heard arguments in a pair of cases involving defendants convicted of fraud during former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration in New York. One concerned Joseph Percoco, a former aide to Mr. Cuomo convicted of taking illicit payments to benefit a Syracuse-area developer.
The other involved Louis Ciminelli, the owner of a Buffalo construction firm convicted of fraud in a bid-rigging scandal in connection with Buffalo Billion, a development project championed by Mr. Cuomo.
The question in the first case, Percoco v. United States, No. 21-1158, was whether Mr. Percoco could be prosecuted under a federal law that makes it a crime to deprive the government of “honest services” for conduct that took place after he resigned his government position to run the governor’s 2014 re-election campaign [....]
Mayor Eric Adams directed the police and emergency medical workers to hospitalize people they deemed too mentally ill to care for themselves, even if they posed no threat to others
By Andy Newman & Emma G. Fitzsimmons @ NYTimes.com, Nov. 29
[....] The effort will involve hospitalizing people involuntarily, even if they do not pose an immediate risk of harm to others.
“The common misunderstanding persists that we cannot provide involuntary assistance unless the person is violent,” Mr. Adams said. “This myth must be put to rest. Going forward, we will make every effort to assist those who are suffering from mental illness and whose illness is endangering them by preventing them from meeting their basic human needs.”
The city said it would roll out training immediately to police officers, Emergency Medical Services staff and other medical personnel to “ensure compassionate care.” But the city’s new directive on the policy acknowledges that “case law does not provide extensive guidance regarding removals for mental health evaluations based on short interactions in the field.” [....]