There's a good argument to be made that I need to find some new hobbies. https://t.co/5PMtWyvbjR
— John Arnold (@JohnArnoldFndtn) October 21, 2018
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
A day after The Daily Beast revealed that Avenatti and his former companies owe millions in unpaid taxes and judgments, a judge orders the lawyer to pay $4.85M to former colleague.
By Kate Briquelet & Carmen Tsa @ DailyBeast.com, Oct. 22
Michael Avenatti must pay $4.85 million to a former colleague who claims the lawyer stiffed him out of millions in profits, a Los Angeles judge ruled Monday.
The decision comes as Avenatti floats his name as a contender to oppose Donald Trump in 2020, and makes appearances at Democratic events ahead of the midterm elections—including in New Hampshire, where he was slated to speak Monday. The attorney launched a political action committee, Fight PAC, to bolster his efforts.
But as The Daily Beast reported, Avenatti and his current and former companies owe millions in unpaid taxes and judgments—including the $4.85 million settlement to the former employee, Jason Frank. The lawyer’s tangled finances will likely come under scrutiny if he does officially announce his candidacy [....]
President Trump has settled on a strategy of fear — laced with falsehoods and racially-tinged rhetoric — to help lift his party to victory in the coming midterms, part of a broader effort to energize Republican voters with two weeks left until the Nov. 6 elections. Trump’s messaging — on display in his regular campaign rallies, tweets and press statements — largely avoids much talk of his achievements and instead offers an apocalyptic vision of the country...
While we were watching soggy diplomatic pouches leaving a certain embassy in Istanbul, Team Trump started the Nuclear Arms Race again.
"I think we really need to discontinue our arms sales to Saudi Arabia and have a long and serious discussion about whether or not they want to be an ally or they want to be an enemy," Unfortunately, when Rand Paul gets "serious" about anythng, it means it will never happen.
With its subscription service, the company has created an unusual hybrid of fast fashion and luxury. Will it stop you from buying new clothes?
By Alexandra Schwartz @ NewYorker.com, for Oct. 22 print issue
[....] In 2016, Hyman and Fleiss launched Rent the Runway Unlimited, a subscription service that initially aimed to help professional women dress for work, and has since expanded to cover most of their daily fashion concerns. For a hundred and fifty-nine dollars a month, a customer can keep up to four items at a time, rotating out any piece as often as she likes [....] By the end of this year, Rent the Runway will offer fifteen thousand styles by more than five hundred designers, with a total inventory of eight hundred thousand units, stored in what Hyman calls “the closet in the cloud.” [.....]
“Lots of forces are disrupting the fashion world right now,” Cindi Leive, the former editor of Glamour, told me. “There’s the over-all demolition of every old rule you can think of about how people should dress. The concept of work dressing versus casual dressing is gone in a lot of fields. So is the idea of dressing for day versus night, or of what makes a January outfit versus a July outfit, or of what’s appropriate for a twenty-year-old versus for a fifty-year-old.” With its subscription service, Rent the Runway has created an unusual hybrid of fast fashion and luxury, offering speed, variety, and that dopamine hit that comes from buying something new plus the seductive tingle of leaving the house in something expensive. Customers are encouraged to play with their style without guilt. If a piece doesn’t work out, it goes not to a landfill but to another user, and another, and another [....]
With just hours to go before Saturday’s parliamentary elections in Afghanistan, the UN has been expressing concern at the uptick in deadly political violence in the country, whilst encouraging Afghans to exercise their right to vote.
In a statement released on Friday, the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) called for the elections to be held in a safe and secure environment, at a time when Taliban extremists have indicated their intention to attack schools used as polling stations. UNAMA urged the militants not to threaten civilians or attack them simply for exercising their right to vote.
Responding to the killing of senior Afghan government officials in Kandahar on Thursday, for which the Taliban reportedly claimed responsibility, the Mission’s statement condemned the attack which has “contributed to a feeling of uncertainty and insecurity at a moment when many Afghan citizens were preparing to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives.”
Following the killings, voting in Kandahar will be postponed for one week.
UNAMA declared that schools, voters and civilians working in polling stations cannot be regarded as military targets, and that international humanitarian law “explicitly prohibits attacks against civilians and acts or threats of violence aimed at terrorizing the civilian population.” [....]
Here's the thing: it's really going on, this is not something the Trumpies are just making up out of whole cloth: