Here's a VH1 segment on Jeffrey Epstein from 2007

Good morning. Here's a VH1 segment on Jeffrey Epstein from 2007.

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— Eoin Higgins (@eoinhiggins.bsky.social) September 9, 2025 at 6:04 AM

Here's part 2 of the VH1 Epstein segment

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— Eoin Higgins (@eoinhiggins.bsky.social) September 9, 2025 at 6:04 AM

New contribution to this piece from @malachybrowne and myself: the Epstein novelty check photo was indeed taken at Mar-a-Lago.https://t.co/5cQjd3X0NS
The palm trees in the background are near a small hut by a tennis court (taken down in ~2005-6).
Compare with a 1997 photo here: pic.twitter.com/8fZ2JWj8so

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) September 9, 2025

House Oversight Chairman James Comer says he will take Trump “at his word” that letter to Epstein with his name and signature are not his.

His panel won’t probe the issue.

“I don't think the Oversight Committee is going to invest in looking up something that was 22 years ago” pic.twitter.com/6iagmJvQKi

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 9, 2025

ABBY PHILLIPS: "The deputy attorney general met with Ghislaine and she shortly there after moved to a mininum security prison, why?

PRO TRUMP ATTORNEY WHO REPRESENTED MAXWELL:

stumbles uhh... "there's always a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/pt1etCca3d

— Will Ragland (@citizenwillis) September 9, 2025

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— Robert Smith (@bondhack.ft.com) September 9, 2025 at 1:02 AM

Wes Streeting has defended Lord Peter Mandelson’s relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein after it was revealed the Labour peer called the convicted paedophile his 'best pal'

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— The National (@scotnational.bsky.social) September 9, 2025 at 2:25 AM

("Britain’s US ambassador ... appeared to call Epstein ‘best pal’")

Oh no not this, I am going to have to take off my Bill Clinton Hat and return all of my Bill Clinton Coin and stop reading my Bill Clinton Bible

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— Jill Filipovic (@jillfilipovic.bsky.social) September 8, 2025 at 6:21 PM

Fabulous podcast by Pablo Torre about what sounds like blatant corruption in the NBA, plus speculation for how the Clippers might try to get away with it

Happy Birthday, Kawhi!🥳

For every comment/retweet, @Aspiration will plant one tree for Kawhi's birthday! pic.twitter.com/dHOS8sgyWT

— LA Clippers (@LAClippers) June 29, 2023

The latest episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is around 90 minutes long, and features terrific storytelling about what seems like a nesting doll of corruption and criminality in politics, sports, and greenwashing.


Here's a thoughtful response from Dame Lillard's manager (he's posted additional thoughts):

For instance if the patch sponsor of the Knicks signs Jalen Brunson to an endorsement deal, they don’t want to keep paying him in the instance he gets traded to a team that they don’t sponsor…

— Nate Jones (@JonesOnTheNBA) September 3, 2025

Of course, I’ve never seen an instance of a player not actually being asked to activate. But Kawhi can say that’s not on him. That’s on Aspiration for not making the asks. Didn’t see any emails saying don’t ask Kawhi to activate this partnership.

— Nate Jones (@JonesOnTheNBA) September 3, 2025

Unless there’s evidence that Aspiration employees were told do not activate Kawhi or don’t make asks, then no. He signed his deal with a team sponsor (common practice for a team star). They didn’t utilize him…that’s on them. https://t.co/Cfq9JNsTQb

— Nate Jones (@JonesOnTheNBA) September 3, 2025

Lastly, I’ve seen people compare this to the Joe Smith situation. The difference is KG’s former agent burned the entire thing down b/c he was pissed about KG firing him for Andy Miller. You’ll need that person or correspondence proving the deal was a sham

— Nate Jones (@JonesOnTheNBA) September 3, 2025

A 2019 tweet for some background:

Kawhi's uncle, Dennis Robertson, reportedly asked the Raptors, Lakers and Clippers for part ownership of the team, a private plane, house and guaranteed amount of endorsement money, per @sam_amick.

The NBA investigated and found no evidence the Clippers granted those requests. pic.twitter.com/l7R2NARpr4

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) December 23, 2019

And coincidentally, a new article I saw today (she's tweeted additional examples):

a commentator describes how many rules are 'fake', which means that if you follow them you get punished: pic.twitter.com/xdKSUinh2C

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) September 3, 2025

Finally, is this tee available yet?

Gonna sell this for $28 million pic.twitter.com/fkeLRNQ1yt

— J.E. Skeets (@jeskeets) September 3, 2025

"The Philippine president and Congress have begun looking into possibly massive corruption in flood control projects"

AP:

In July, back-to-back typhoons and seasonal monsoon downpours set off massive floods that affected millions of people, displaced more than 300,000 others, damaged nearly 3,000 houses and left extensive infrastructure and agricultural losses

...

The Senate’s powerful blue ribbon committee resumed on Monday a separate inquiry, where senators grilled a private contractor who has denied any wrongdoing but faced intense questioning over her family’s fleet of at least 28 luxury cars and SUVs.

Manila Times:

SOCIAL media is abuzz over the ostentatious display of wealth by children of certain politicians and contractors.

LA's leadership puts a stop to more housing while simultaneously launching a raid on a massive homeless encampment

#BREAKING: Scuffle breaks out during homeless encampment sweep in the San Fernando Valley. https://t.co/Ac3bfx4cX1 pic.twitter.com/oDzDWdsKrf

— KTLA (@KTLA) July 31, 2025

BREAKING TV-11 Encampment sweep in #VanNuys @Stu_Mundel reporting in #SkyFox pic.twitter.com/u6LCid2FDp

— DJTru (@DJTru) July 31, 2025

Duplexes!

After outcry, L.A. restricts duplexes in Pacific Palisades - Los Angeles Times https://t.co/v13d0rsaIn

— Hector Becerra (@hbecerraLATimes) July 31, 2025

The area was already destroyed!: 

Palisades residents have raised alarms about SB 9, worrying that their historically single-family-home community would be transformed by the additional density allowed under the law and become more dangerous in the event of future fires

these people are despicable and infuriating and have abjectly failed at what is by far their most important responsibility because they are simply not morally or politically serious in any way https://t.co/2QpnHgtRUw

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) July 31, 2025

the procedure is precisely to see what people are using to actually rebuild, and then have a panic about it and close that loophole

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) July 31, 2025

Also today:

New newsletter: Antitrust critics of Abundance claim homebuilding oligopolies are holding back supply and driving up prices.

I did something simple. I called up their sources.

Everyone I spoke to told me the same thing: Their claims are bullshit.https://t.co/EGHno84TBl

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) July 31, 2025

The case in Abundance—that zoning and other rules have constrained housing development for decades— is based on an enormous amount of empirical research.

The antitrust folks' argument is built on assertions in legal journals that reference assertions in blog posts that reference… pic.twitter.com/23KClMXIP6

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) July 31, 2025

Rolling Stone has a lenghty excerpt from the upcoming book "The Fort Bragg Cartel"

Grim details about ex-cops and soldiers, and active cops and soldiers selling drugs and weapons:

One day in 2018, a pair of FBI agents showed up at Huff’s warehouse in High Point, an unexpected visit that shot a bolt of fear through his heart because he had $700,000 in drug money stashed in a washing machine in plain view. But it turned out that the agents only wanted to talk to him about one of his warehouse employees, [], a bearded Black man from Fayetteville who had converted to Islam. 

A 2023 article about the hiring of the NFLPA leader who just resigned in disgrace

Jim Trotter for The Athletic:

[He] may well be the person to take the union wherever it wants to go, but the players will have no one to blame but themselves if he fails. Through apathy and/or blind trust, they allowed union president [] to drive a selection process unlike any that had ever preceded it. 

...

Whatever the reason, it helps explains how you get a selection process like we just witnessed. As far back as March, players were privately expressing concerns to me about what was taking place. The expectation then was that a vote would take place that month at the union meeting in Hawaii. When it didn’t happen, some players essentially checked out and left the process to [the union president] and the executive committee — which makes the scheduling of this week’s vote more curious.

[The union president] spent eight seasons as an NFL offensive lineman. He knows the players get only one time each year to be completely off the books, that from early June to mid-July they schedule family vacations and international travel. So why would he hold a vote at a time when he knows turnout is likely to be low?

ESPN has a new article suggesting he resigned shortly after they started asking him about billing strip club visits to the union. 

Pablo Torre's latest podcast is a remarkable discussion about the NFL Player's Association seemingly sabotaging itself with ineptness and self-dealing

He and Mike Florio of PFT heard about a secret document that concerned possible collusion among NFL owners to prevent guaranteed contracts in the wake of Watson's deal. The two reporters understood why the NFL might want to keep the document secret, but why would the NFLPA? So they made a bet as to who could uncover it, and Torre won.

Compelling listening, and stay tuned til the end to hear which ESPN personality and former NFLPA president refused to comment.

Here's Florio's follow-up today discussing whether Justin Herbert might want to sue the league and the PA.

This is a great list: "52 things I learned in 2024"

 Via Twist Street, I wanted to click on nearly every link on this list but here are my four favorites:

1. In the 1980's in San Francisco, 

there was a racket at one point where gangs would slash seats with knives so they’d have to be re-upholstered, generating overtime pay for BART workers and extra orders for materials suppliers. Specific patterns would be cut in so they’d know who to pay for the 'favor,’"

2. There's a cafe in Tokyo staffed by robots remotely operated by disabled people:

"Avatar Robot Cafe DAWN ver.β” is a permanent experimental cafe operated by OryLab Inc, where people who have difficulty going out for various reasons remotely operate our avatar robots OriHime and OriHime-D from their homes and hospitals, to provide service

3. Russia has experimented with drones trailing several kilometers of fiber optic cable to defeat radio jamming.

4. For the first time since 2015, Casio produced a new flagship calculator: 

the S100 exudes an air of luxury unlike any calculator before it. The hairline-finished machined aluminum body's exquisite appearance invites being held. A diamond cut is applied to the outer edge, creating an elegant highlight. Everything from the visibility of the gorgeous LCD screen to the satisfying haptic feedback of each button press has been refined to the smallest detail.

Here's what Jeff Bezos says about Trump visiting Blue Origin the same day of the announcement that the WaPo would not make a presidential endorsement

The background is that, if accurate, the loss of subscribers is stunning:

NEWS: More than 200,000 subscribers have canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post after the revelation that owner Jeff Bezos blocked an endorsement of VP Harris.
That's about 8 percent of WaPo's subscriber base - a staggering sum
MOREhttps://t.co/nCJhJrmlq0

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) October 28, 2024

Far less dramatic than the WaPo number, but I’m told in the week since we reported that the LA Times would not endorse, over 7,000 LAT subscribers canceled and specifically cited editorial content as the reason. The total number of cancelations is significantly higher, I’m told.

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) October 28, 2024

Presumably because the type of people who pay for a LA Times or Washington Post subscription need to know which of these worlds the paper has decided to exist in:

Really, it's amazing. It's like there's an impermeable wall between them. pic.twitter.com/DeWAqNTBtR

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) October 28, 2024

Here is the part of Bezos's new statement that stood out to me:

By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

No details are provided as to the nature of that meeting (let alone explain why keeping the nature of that meeting secret is helpful for improving society's trust in the Washington Post). 

Extraordinarily strange anecdote in this article about the propaganda war over women's boxing in the 2024 Olympics

Here's the headline:

The Putin-backed strongman who threw the Paris Games into chaos

Banned from the Games, Russia wanted to upend the Olympics. Enter [a Russian power broker] and the boxing ‘gender controversy.’

And here's how the article starts:

With the future of international boxing hanging in the balance, as it so often is, the 2006 election of its top official featured the usual chaos: bribes, shouting matches and shows of physical intimidation in the lobby of an upscale Dominican hotel.

But the body flying down an elevator shaft was a new twist.

[The] president of USA Boxing at the time, was on his way to his room when something heavy slammed the top of the crowded elevator.

“We all thought the elevator was going to crash,” [the USA Boxing president] said of his fellow boxing delegates, who were there to select the next president of the International Amateur Boxing Association, the sport’s global governing body. Authorities found a man’s battered corpse in the elevator shaft. It was the boxing delegate from Mali.

[The USA Boxing president], who later became the association’s executive director, said the dead delegate was found with thousands of dollars of mysterious origin. Mali embassy officials didn’t rule out foul play, the Associated Press reported at the time, but nobody was charged in the death. A spokesman for the Santo Domingo police recently declined to comment.

Multiple boxing officials who were in Santo Domingo for the vote said the suspicion among their peers was that the Mali man had solicited bribes from both sides — and one of them didn’t appreciate it.

Allegations that there were years of warnings that the San Diego Unified School Superintendent had engaged in multiple acts of sexual misconduct

NBC has a long article on the blame game.

The following month, the district received another letter, this one signed by a group of anonymous school principals. They accused [the superintendent] of sexually harassing women he supervised and exchanging sex for promotions and job security.

The district neither investigated nor shared the hotline report, nor the principals’ letter, with the school board. 

...

“[The superintendent] served this district for 30 years … and it was important to the board to recognize that service,” [the Board president] told us. “And we also needed to communicate that he was no longer fit to serve, and that it was no longer in the best interest of the district to move forward with him as superintendent. Both of those things were true to the board.”

Montana says it quickly fixed an error that omitted Kamala Harris from electronic ballots provided to overseas and military voters

Montana Free Press:

The error was first reported by the Daily Inter Lake, which included an account by a Montana voter living in the United Kingdom who said Harris’ name was absent from his ballot when he accessed it through the Electronic Absentee System. In an email exchange with Montana Free Press Monday, Jacobsen’s office confirmed the report referenced in the article of a ballot “not displaying properly” through the system.

(A brief write-up by the AP confirming the story.)

Students of a California bible college "claim they were confined, surveilled and made to do unpaid labor"

An LAT article trying to make sense of a convoluted, sprawling investigation:

For years, the university and the teachings of its founder have drawn students from around the world, mostly from east Asia, seeking an academic experience rooted in Christianity. The promise of a U.S. student visa and a scholarship combined to make an unbeatable opportunity. But instead of feeling the sense of freedom they hoped to encounter in America, students described an environment where they were under near-constant surveillance and stripped of their independence.

The estranged husband of Russia's richest woman was charged with murder

AFP:

Vladislav Bakalchuk and a group of men came to the offices of e-commerce giant Wildberries -- Russia's largest online retailer -- on Wednesday for what he said were peaceful negotiations that turned violent.

Tatyana Bakalchuk, his estranged wife and the company's billionaire CEO, said he broke into the building with armed men and opened fire, in what she called a botched attempt to seize the company by force.

...

The incident came weeks after Wildberries finalised a controversial merger deal that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally approved but that Vladislav denounced as a "huge mistake".

Wikipedia:

On 13 January 2024 a fire broke out at the company's warehouse in the village of Shushary near St. Petersburg (coordinates: 59°47′01″N 30°26′44″E), whose area was 70 thousand m². Extinguishing of the fire lasted 30 hours. According to preliminary estimates, the amount of damage from the fire was approximately 11 billion rubles. The warehouse had operated without permission from the Russian State Construction Supervision Inspectorate (Gosstroynadzor) and had never been visited by the fire inspectorate.

...

Her husband Vladislav Bakalchuk (the couple is in the process of getting divorced) calls the deal a hostile takeover and claims that Tatyana is being manipulated. Vladislav was unexpectedly supported by the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. He also called the deal a hostile takeover

(This is supposedly footage of the very public and chaotic shooting)

"LAPD union leader faces complaints that his security company hires and underpays problem cops"

LATimes (the article is chiefly about employees alleging various wrongdoing by the company such as wrongfully denying pay, and overbilling clients). 

"How a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients"

The real-life version of the next season of AMC's The Terror:

[One of America’s largest chains of psychiatric hospitals], which charges $2,200 a day for some patients, at times deploys an array of strategies to persuade insurers to cover longer stays, employees said. [The hospital chain] has exaggerated patients’ symptoms. It has tweaked medication dosages, then claimed patients needed to stay longer because of the adjustment. And it has argued that patients are not well enough to leave because they did not finish a meal.

Unless the patients or their families hire lawyers, [the hospital] often holds them until their insurance runs out.

California is contemplating a law that would give special alcohol-buying privileges to members of Ballmer stadium's private luxury suites

LAT:

It is illegal to serve alcohol in California between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., and bartenders who do could be charged with a misdemeanor.

...

The bill, which was approved with little debate on the Senate floor Tuesday and now heads to the Assembly, would allow alcohol to be served until 4 a.m. to dues-paying members of private suites inside of Intuit Dome, the $2-billion, 17,700-seat new home of the Los Angeles Clippers

...

the legislation has drawn criticism as an unfair abuse of financial and political power.

Chinese company accused of stealing thousands of bodies to use the bones for dental grafts

What's on Weibo:

Due to the high demand for bone implant materials and limited supply, it is an incredibly lucrative industry.

,,,

The case has allegedly been transferred to the Taiyuan Procuratorate for review and potential prosecution

...

On Friday, the news topic on Chinese social media was tightly controlled

Every time Starbucks pressures you to buy an olive oil-infused drink, think of this

Semafor:

Surrounded by centuries-old olive oil trees just outside the small Sicilian town of Partanna, Howard Schultz made a bold prediction: “People are going to add a tablespoon of Partanna extra-virgin olive oil into their drink,” the then-CEO of Starbucks said last year. “I’m sure of it.”

The drink, called an Oleato, isn’t just Schultz’s brainchild. It’s also a side investment.

Starbucks buys all of its olive oil from that plantation in Partanna, whose controlling family sold a 19% stake to Schultz in 2023, according to US and Italian corporate filings and people familiar with the matter. Starbucks paid the company, now named Partanna after its Sicilian hometown, $26.5 million between October 2022 and September 2023.

"FBI raids Oakland mayor's home, several other locations in political corruption probe"

The articles speculate it's connected to this.