This assures inflation WILL continue as many more pay this than for say car or home insurance
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
This assures inflation WILL continue as many more pay this than for say car or home insurance
By Anne E. Marimow & Emma Brown @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug.31
[....] In his required annual financial report, Thomas said he opted to fly on the private plane of his friend and benefactor, Harlan Crow, for one of the trips on the advice of his security detail. The justices faced heightened security risks, Thomas noted, after the May, 2022 leak of the court’s majority opinion to eliminate the nationwide right to abortion and overturn Roe v. Wade.
Thomas also acknowledged prior mistakes and omissions in past reports, involving bank accounts, a life insurance policy and the name of his wife’s real estate company.
The 2022 filings from Thomas and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. were made public Thursday, months later than those of their colleagues at the high court, because the two justices had requested 90-day extensions. The annual reports have drawn increased attention in recent years [....]
The contest was seen as a test of efforts by Republicans nationwide to curb voters’ use of ballot initiatives. The result was a victory for abortion-rights supporters trying to stop the Republican-controlled state legislature from severely restricting the procedure
By Michael Wines @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 8
Ohio voters rejected a bid on Tuesday to make it harder to amend the State Constitution, according to The Associated Press, a significant victory for abortion-rights supporters trying to stop the Republican-controlled State Legislature from severely restricting the procedure.
The abortion question turned what would normally be a sleepy summer election in an off year into a highly visible dogfight that took on national importance and drew an unprecedented number of Ohio voters for an August election.
Late results showed the measure losing by 13 percentage points, 56.5 percent to 43.5 percent. The roughly 2.8 million votes cast dwarfed the 1.66 million ballots counted in the state’s 2022 primary elections, in which races for governor, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House were up for grabs [....]
On the "Tankie" contingent
The Times unraveled a financial network that stretches from Chicago to Shanghai and uses American nonprofits to push Chinese talking points worldwide.
By Mara Hvistendahl, David A. Fahrenthold, Lynsey Chutel and Ishaan Jhaveri @ NYTimes.com, Aug.5
Mara Hvistendahl is an investigative reporter focused on China. David A. Fahrenthold investigates nonprofits from Washington. Lynsey Chutel reported from South Africa and Ishaan Jhaveri from New York.
The protest in London’s bustling Chinatown brought together a variety of activist groups to oppose a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. So it was peculiar when a street brawl broke out among mostly ethnic Chinese demonstrators.
Witnesses said the fight, in November 2021, started when men aligned with the event’s organizers, including a group called No Cold War, attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.
On the surface, No Cold War is a loose collective run mostly by American and British activists who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice.
In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.
What is less known, and is hidden amid a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies, is that Mr. Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.
From a think tank in Massachusetts to an event space in Manhattan, from a political party in South Africa to news organizations in India and Brazil, The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars to groups linked to Mr. Singham that mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points [....]
So Mom has the connections, Maggie has the "clean" reputation, white-washing each story to give it the spin it needs while never tarnishing her reputation, girl of the people, hard-working journo - never mind her cherry background and the unsavory characters she does favors for. And it's all pretty clean - just insert this word here, that phrase there, to distract from the larger issues, illegal and corrupt. A whole story about a crime that never mentons the actual crime, so people can go away from the Old Gray Lady, the Paper of Record, thinking they got a judicious rundown, not realizing they got hit by PR sponsered and accepted by the NYT. Not just "Trump Whisperer" - whisperer for much of New York's unscrupulous hoi-polloi. I guess Rubenstein's pleased for one. The woman's a chip off the old block, and keeps chipping.
The city’s mega-office landlords are panicking, pivoting, and shedding what’s worthless.One opens his books.
By Andrew Rice @ Curbed.com, July 17
[....] The distress of the office market creates a rare opportunity to create the one real-estate commodity everyone agrees the city needs: housing. The civic logic is compelling. “New York City is facing an existential crisis,” Rechler said [....]
[...] The conversion proposition is appealing to policy-makers, including the mayor and the governor. Last year, their “New” New York Panel recommended revising building regulations and zoning to make it easier to turn offices into apartments. “That was the most low-hanging of low-hanging fruit,” says Andrew Kimball, the head of the city’s Economic Development Corporation. “That did not happen.” Governor Hochul incorporated the panel’s recommendations into her housing plan, which died in the State Assembly partly because some Democrats wanted concessions on eviction laws that were radioactive to the real-estate industry.
Some progressives have argued that conversion programs should mandate the inclusion of affordable housing. But Van Nieuwerburgh says that is impossible without large government subsidies. Even setting numbers aside, he estimates that only around 30 percent of Manhattan buildings have “hope for convertibility.” The huge buildings with column-free trading floors for financial firms, which were so lucrative to build in the 1980s and ’90s, are now extremely complicated to convert into apartments because they have so much interior space without windows. If a landlord has office tenants, time-consuming negotiations with holdouts may be required. (At the Real Deal event in June, Blau, the Related CEO, estimated that 30 percent of tenants “will never fucking leave.”)
Even when a building does pencil out on paper, every step in the process is a challenge. One sunny day in May, I walked over to the Centre Street courthouse to watch the auction of the landmarked and vacant Flatiron Building.[....]