Special counsel Bob Mueller has teamed up with the IRS. According to sources familiar with his investigation into alleged Russian election interference, his probe has enlisted the help of agents from the IRS’ Criminal Investigations unit.
In this, too, she is typical. The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students. The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.
But now he is back in the game, leading a small band of lenders making subprime loans once more. Or "nonprime", as they prefer to call it these days. The sector is on course to produce about $10bn this year — a tiny slice of America's $1.6tn overall home-loan market but one that's growing rapidly.
Officials in Houston are just beginning to grapple with the health and environmental risks that lurk in the waters dumped by Hurricane Harvey, a stew of toxic chemicals, sewage, debris and waste that still floods much of the city.
Flooded sewers are stoking fears of cholera, typhoid and other infectious diseases. Runoff from the city’s sprawling petroleum and chemicals complex contains any number of hazardous compounds. Lead, arsenic and other toxic and carcinogenic elements may be leaching from some two dozen Superfund sites in the Houston area.
As Brexit talks continue, the national rail companies of France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands are snapping up contracts spanning London commuter routes to long-distance expresses as private British firms struggle to compete with the lower cost of capital available to their state-owned rivals.
Yes, it’s true, the town of Southampton, New York, with its 55,000 year-round residents -- and its deserved reputation as a summer playground for the rich and famous -- now has its very own counterterrorism squad. Its members were first sighted in April, when cops wearing bulletproof vests and carrying fully loaded AR-15s showed up at the Bridgehampton Half Marathon, where they spent most of their time milling around the finish line.
As Americans are opening their wallets and donating to relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, one of the most prominent charities is the American Red Cross.
But donors might be surprised to learn the Red Cross won't, or can't say, what percentage of their dollars will go directly to helping the victims of the storm.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is working with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on its investigation into Paul Manafort and his financial transactions, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The cooperation is the latest indication that the federal probe into President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman is intensifying. It also could potentially provide Mueller with additional leverage to get Manafort to cooperate in the larger investigation into Trump’s campaign, as Trump does not have pardon power over state crimes.
sorry, marge, the mob has spoken pic.twitter.com/2k4ilUABFX
— Cooper Fleishman (@_Cooper) August 30, 2017
Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Ms. Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a larger corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Mr. Schmidt serves as executive chairman.
Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis late Tuesday announced that transgender troops will be allowed to continue serving in the military pending the results of a study by experts.
#Breaking We're witnessing looting right now at a large supermarket in the NE part of Houston & police have just discovered a body nearby
— Tom Llamas (@TomLlamasABC) August 29, 2017
Jeffrey Herbst, president and chief executive of the Newseum, stepped down suddenly on Monday as the museum’s board announced a full-blown review of its long-troubled finances.Nothing wrong with a journalism museum, but there was always an element of self-congratulatory hubris about Newseum. I haven't been - maybe it's awesome - but there was something off about setting up a shrine to yourselves at that moment. You did bad, journalists. And that's even without getting to the most important thing - local journalism has been devastated.
The review could result in the sale of the landmark building on Pennsylvania Avenue, according to a statement from the Freedom Forum, the creator and primary benefactor of the Newseum.
Explosive allegations about Donald Trump made by online writers with large followings among Trump critics were based on bogus information from a hoaxer who falsely claimed to work in law enforcement.
John, let me tell you why they didn't bring me any tariffs,” Trump said. “I know there are some people in the room right now that are upset. I know there are some globalists in the room right now. And they don't want them, John, they don't want the tariffs. But I'm telling you, I want tariffs.”
New ECMWF shows #Harvey moving back over the Gulf on Mon, restrengthening, then making a 2nd landfall near #Houston on Wed. Unthinkable. pic.twitter.com/gabP36Rto1
— Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) August 27, 2017
Jim Burns, a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, told The Intercept that “U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints in the path of Hurricane Harvey in Texas will close as state highways close.” So in other words, as long as the highways are functional for evacuation, the Border Patrol will operate checkpoints.
Burns added that Border Patrol checkpoints outside the path of the hurricane would remain operational.
New Jersey’s long-awaited American Dream Meadowlands development will deliver billions in tax revenue for the Garden State over the next two decades, according to Gov. Chris Christie.
After making landfall, Harvey is expected to stall over Texas, and could dump more than 35 inches of rain onto some areas, overwhelming bayous and flooding streets.
Republican congressional leaders don’t expect to release a joint tax plan with the White House next month, and they’ll rely instead on House and Senate tax-writing committees to solve the big tax questions that remain unanswered, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Intel studies how to make people accept self-driving cars
The researchers also learned that there's a huge flaw in the autonomous ride-hailing future. What happens when the car needs to pick up a child, senior citizen or someone with a disability who needs help getting in and out the vehicle? That's something that needs to be dealt with now before it becomes an issue.
The San Francisco-based company said it lost $645 million in the second quarter, 9 percent less than the $708 million loss in the first quarter and 35 percent less than the $991 million loss in the fourth quarter of last year. For all of 2016, Uber lost about $3 billion.
These became the first structured tests in the self-driving program. It turns out that the hard part is not really the what-if-a-zombie-is-eating-a-person-in-the-road scenarios people dream up, but proceeding confidently and reliably like a human driver within the endless variation of normal traffic.
The relationship between President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has disintegrated to the point that they have not spoken to each other in weeks, and Mr. McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be able to salvage his administration after a series of summer crises.
What was once an uneasy governing alliance has curdled into a feud of mutual resentment and sometimes outright hostility, complicated by the position of Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine L. Chao, in Mr. Trump’s cabinet, according to more than a dozen people briefed on their imperiled partnership. Angry phone calls and private badmouthing have devolved into open conflict, with the president threatening to oppose Republican senators who cross him, and Mr. McConnell mobilizing to their defense.
Tonight is a new President Trump: Acknowledging a flip-flop and talking about gravity of office, history & substance.
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) August 22, 2017
Good #AfghanStrategy & excellent speech by @POTUS laying it out to the nation.
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 22, 2017
Overwork and constant travel have also been driving a recent exodus from the Secret Service ranks, yet without congressional intervention to provide additional funding, Alles will not even be able to pay agents for the work they have already done.
"Republicans in Congress, the highest of intelligence officials, the highest of military officers in our country, leaders of the business community -- all of whom have dealt with the White House, and many of them dealt personally with Donald Trump -- have come to believe that he is unfit for the presidency," Bernstein told CNN's Brian Stelter on Sunday.That's a big story! Probably bigger than "oh boo hoo nobody will ever talk off the record with Carl Bernstein again."
He said those people are "raising the very question of his stability and his mental fitness."
"You have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill": The most common response centers on the urgent importance of having smart, sane people around Trump to fight his worst impulses. If they weren't there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall.
"General Mattis needs us": Many talk about their reluctance to bolt on their friends and colleagues who are fighting the good fight to force better Trump behavior/decisions. They rightly point out that together, they have learned how to ignore Trump's rhetoric and, at times, collectively steer him to more conventional policy responses.
"Trump's not as evil as portrayed": All of them talk up the president as more reasonable off Twitter and TV than on it. This gives them hope (though almost all increasingly say it's fleeting hope) he will listen to his better angels, or at least the pleas of Ivanka.
Cernovich made the claims that he’d release a series of “scoops” if Bannon is officially pushed out of the White House on an eleven-minute, self-recorded Periscope Thursday night.
“If they get rid of Bannon, you know what’s gonna happen? The motherlode. If Bannon is removed, there are gonna be divorces, because I know about the mistresses, the sugar babies, the drugs, the pill popping, the orgies. I know everything,” said Cernovich.
“If they go after Bannon, the mother of all stories is gonna drop, and we’re just gonna destroy marriages, relationships—it’s gonna get personal.”
President Trump has told senior aides that he has decided to remove Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled White House chief strategist who helped Mr. Trump win the 2016 election, according to two administration officials briefed on the discussion.
The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time.
Steve Bannon just told me he resigned from the White House two weeks ago @POTUS #Bannon
— Sara A. Carter (@SaraCarterDC) August 18, 2017
SEATTLE — Seattle’s mayor wants Fremont’s privately owned Lenin statue taken down, likening it to Confederate monuments as a symbol of “hate, racism and violence.”
A day after a small group led by conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec called for the statue’s removal, Mayor Ed Murray agreed it should be taken from its spot in the Seattle neighborhood.
#RobertELee is a lot like #ErwinRommel a glorious yet failed warrior, untarnished by the sins of his brothers
— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) August 17, 2017
President Donald Trump will not move forward with a planned Advisory Council on Infrastructure, a person familiar with the matter said Thursday.
The council, which was still being formed, would have advised Trump on his plan to spend as much as $1 trillion upgrading roads, bridges and other public works.
About 1.6 billion kronor ($200 million) of coins will soon be worthless in Sweden. A charity is now urging people to dig these out from between sofa cushions, kitchen jars or wherever they’re hidden to create Sweden’s biggest piggy bank for needy kids.
“The race-identity politics of the left wants to say it’s all racist,” Mr. Bannon added. “Just give me more. Tear down more statues. Say the revolution is coming. I can’t get enough of it.”
No word in the Trump lexicon is as tread-worn as “unprecedented.” But members of the president’s staff, stunned and disheartened, said they never expected to hear such a voluble articulation of opinions that the president had long expressed in private.
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
— wint (@dril) June 2, 2014
Liberty Property Trust has been quietly assembling a series of properties at 19th and Arch streets in Center City for what many speculate could be the site of the third skyscraper for Comcast Corp.
Liberty is pursuing what could eventually amount to a block bound by 19th, Arch, Cherry and 20th streets. The location is cater-corner to where Liberty (NYSE: LPT) is developing the Comcast Innovation & Technology Center and is a stone's throw from the Comcast Center. Another tower in that area would establish an expanded urban campus for the cable giant and continue to push the city's Central Business District deeper into Logan Square.
Privately, many chief executives say they are fuming, outraged by the president. (This after many of them campaigned to get on Mr. Trump’s committees.) But many are too scared to say anything publicly that could make them or their company a target of Mr. Trump’s wrath.
When I asked senior WH official why Trump didn't condemn Cville Nazis, he said: "What about the leftist mob. Just as violent if not more so"
— Gabriel Sherman (@gabrielsherman) August 13, 2017
Reminder: As Gov. of California, Ronald Reagan outlawed *all* public carry of guns (open or concealed) because Black Panthers were doing it.
— Eric Kleefeld (@EricKleefeld) August 13, 2017
Nicholas Burns, the State Department's third-ranking official under Republican President George W. Bush, called Trump's comments "grotesque."
"If he was joking, he should know better," said Burns, now a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "If he wasn't, it's unprecedented. A president has never defended the expulsion of our diplomats."
The State Department has "horrified and rattled" by Trump’s remarks, said a veteran U.S. diplomat who has served in Russia, speaking on condition of anonymity.
i'm curious. Do people think Trump knows that Mitch McConnell's wife serves in his cabinet?
— Daniel Gross (@grossdm) August 10, 2017
Per WH sources: Trump improvised 'fire and fury' -- paper he looked was an opioid fact sheet. Kelly 'surprised' not shocked... more tk
— Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) August 9, 2017
The cars themselves are modified Chevrolet Bolt EVs equipped with sensors and self-driving computers and software, and each also has a safety driver in place behind the wheel for testing and as required by law. Still, Cruise says those drivers have had to take over manual control of vehicles engaged in Cruise Anywhere service only on a few occasions, with the vast majority of the driving done autonomously.
FBI agents raided the Alexandria home of President Trump’s former campaign chairman late last month, using a search warrant to seize documents and other materials, according to people familiar with the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Federal agents appeared at Paul Manafort’s home without advance warning in the predawn hours of July 26, the day after he met voluntarily with the staff for the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Two weeks ago, when I spoke to Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director—the same conversation in which he pilloried several colleagues, threatened to fire his entire staff, and claimed to have called the F.B.I. to investigate the White House chief of staff—he offered some cryptic thoughts about Vice-President Mike Pence. “Why do you think Nick’s there, bro?” Scaramucci asked me, referring to Nick Ayers, Pence’s recently installed chief of staff. “Are you stupid?” He continued, “Why is Nick there? Nick’s there to protect the Vice-President because the Vice-President can’t believe what the fuck is going on.” Given everything else Scaramucci told me that day, I left this exchange out of my original article about the conversation. But, in light of the news this week about Pence’s political machinations, the remarks seem worth revisiting.
Twice a day since the beginning of the Trump administration, a special folder is prepared for the president. The first document is prepared around 9:30 AM and the follow-up around 4:30 PM. Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer both wanted the privilege of delivering the 20- to 25-page packet to President Trump personally, White House sources say.
These sensitive papers, described to VICE News by three current and former White House officials, are not top-secret intelligence or updates on legislative initiatives. Instead, the folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.
If one dead American service member won him this much praise, just imagine how much they’ll respect him when he kills a couple hundred—or a couple thousand!
Now that Trump has learned that there is a direct relationship between a president’s body count and how “presidential” the mainstream political press considers him to be, the whole world is fucked.
We are moving rapidly down the road toward the age of self-driving cars. But as the cars change, the roads will have to change with them, and it will likely mean some adjustments, such as different signage and narrower lanes.
The Pentagon is considering a plan that allows the U.S. military to conduct airstrikes on ISIS in the Philippines, two defense officials told NBC News.
Tina Lam and Michael Cheng snatched up Presidio Terrace — the block-long, private oval street lined by 35 megamillion-dollar mansions — for $90,000 and change in a city-run auction stemming from an unpaid tax bill. They outlasted several other bidders.
Now they’re looking to cash in — maybe by charging the residents of those mansions to park on their own private street.
Those residents value their privacy — and their exclusivity. Past homeowners have included Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her financier husband, Richard Blum; House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi; and the late Mayor Joseph Alioto. A guard is stationed round the clock at the stone-gate entrance to the street to keep the curious away.
Young men in the 1940s liberated Europe from Nazism and the Pacific from the Japanese Empire. Today, too many stay home playing video games. https://t.co/e7FTe0O20P
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 7, 2017
The Center: We are very pragmatic and sensible and know how to win elections.
The Left: You lost them all.
The Center: but Russia. Also, what have you won?
The Left: ...
NEW YORK — Phish announced its 13-show run in New York with a video in January that showed giant doughnuts rolling through the city.
That got Felicia D’Ambrosio’s phone buzzing, with calls from friends hoping that might mean a role for the Phish superfan and co-owner of a Philadelphia doughnut and fried chicken shop that had made doughnuts dedicated to the band in the past.
“Well, no, I don’t want to work on Phish tour,” thought D’Ambrosio, who has been to more than 100 shows.
Then came the request. From the band.
Time to make the doughnuts.
DALLAS (KXAN) — There’s a lot riding on the future of six tiny Texas icons at the Dallas Zoo.
Texas horned lizards — also known as horny toads — are disappearing across the state, the zoo says, with populations vanishing from East and Central Texas.
Martin Shkreli, who gained national notoriety two years ago for jacking up the price of an AIDS drug, was convicted of securities fraud Friday for mismanaging two investment funds.
The Secret Service has vacated its command post inside Trump Tower in Manhattan following a dispute between the government and President Trump’s company over the terms of a lease for the space, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
“Leaking the transcript of a presidential call to a foreign leader is unprecedented, shocking, and dangerous,” argued The Atlantic’s David Frum. “It is vitally important that a president be able to speak confidentially—and perhaps even more important that foreign leaders understand that they can reply in confidence.”
National leaders should indeed need to be able to trust that their discussions with one another will remain secure. But we are far from the point where foreign leaders assume transcripts of their calls with Trump, let alone future presidents, will end up on the front pages. Many have been quick to assume that this leak will have a chilling effect on U.S. relations with other countries, without stopping to ponder the likelihood that some foreign leaders might be relieved to learn that factions within the U.S. government are taking extraordinary steps to weaken this particular president.
If there are norms worth fretting over here, they aren’t the ones that govern whistleblowing, but the ones that should govern what U.S. political leaders do when the president is too incompetent to serve. It is because of their cowardice—their refusal to uphold norms they were elected and appointed to guard—that these transcripts leaked in the first place.
Washington (CNN)Federal investigators exploring whether Donald Trump's campaign colluded with Russian spies have seized on Trump and his associates' financial ties to Russia as one of the most fertile avenues for moving their probe forward, according to people familiar with the investigation.
The web of financial ties could offer a more concrete path toward potential prosecution than the broader and murkier questions of collusion in the 2016 campaign, these sources said.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury in Washington to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections, a sign that his inquiry is growing in intensity and entering a new phase, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The grand jury, which began its work in recent weeks, is a sign that Mr. Mueller’s inquiry is ramping up and that it will likely continue for months. Mr. Mueller is investigating Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election and whether President Donald Trump’s campaign or associates colluded with the Kremlin as part of that effort.
People have suggested posting a picture/model number. The number has faded. I am pretty sure this was the standard mouse they sold for years.. until they didn't.
Can't take over the world without it.
