Новости за 12.01.2024

A New York state judge on Friday ordered Donald Trump to pay The New York Times almost $400,000 in legal fees for a lawsuit he brought against the paper in 2021.

Representative Jamie Raskin demanded Friday that Donald Trump return the nearly $8 million he was paid by foreign governments while he was president.

Joe Biden announced Friday that federal student debt will be wiped out for millions of people, despite previous conservative attempts to stop him.

As if Donald Trump’s big-league lead in the polls wasn’t enough of a reason to stop paying attention to Iowa and its first-in-the-nation caucus now, anyone unfortunate enough to still be paying attention was treated to this week’s undercard debate between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. The sniping, stammering, and eye-rolling was all kids’ table stuff, without even the whinging smarm of Vivek Ramaswamy as Ted Cruz’s tech-bro younger brother.

Sometime this month, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron will decide how much Donald Trump should pay in penalties in the fraud case brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. Engoron has already ruled that Trump did commit fraud, so now it’s just a matter of the money. Engoron has been decidedly unimpressed by Trump’s lawyers’ arguments throughout the proceeding, so it seems reasonable to think Engoron will come close to, match, or maybe even exceed James’s request of $370 million. Читать дальше...

“Time is running out” is a strange sentence. It’s always true (shush, physicists—I mean from the human perspective), and yet it’s always anxiety-inducing. It’s perfectly calibrated to make the human brain tune out whatever comes next. Time’s running out for me to do it? Great, don’t tell me what it is! I don’t want to know! I’ve practically missed the chance already!

Even if your flight doesn’t catch fire, lose a door at 16,000 feet, or ruin your holiday plans, flying sucks. It’s famously not great for the planet: Aviation accounts for around 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. But it’s arguably an even bigger assault on the senses, thanks to an unholy pairing of greedy corporations with a bloated security state whose shared goal would appear to be humiliating everyone involved. (Those companies’ actual goal, rationally speaking, is to turn a profit;... Читать дальше...

GOP Representative Elise Stefanik no doubt thought it was shrewd to describe the rioters who attacked the Capitol as “January 6 hostages.” This sort of talk hits a sweet trifecta for a GOP leader with seemingly limitless ambition. It reassures the right-wing media that the GOP leadership is fully behind Donald Trump. It fires up the MAGA base’s small-dollar donors. And it infuriates the libs, which excites the right-wing media and MAGA voters all over again.

It’s June 2023, and the Republican speaker of the House is struggling to appease the hard-line members of his conference, who are angry that he reached a bipartisan deal on government spending levels. A faction of conservatives sink a procedural vote in a rebuke to party leadership.