President Trump’s former campaign chairman/confessed felon Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller by lying to investigators, is no longer a cooperating witness, and will thus be sentenced to prison imminently. The implications of this development are unclear, and may turn on how much useful, accurate information Manafort provided, but they could be enormous. Just a few weeks ago, Trump’s criminal-defense lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, claimed that Manafort and Trump maintained a joint-defense agreement, which means they were not prohibited from exchanging information after Manafort entered his plea agreement.
General Motors announced that it will cut 15 percent of its blue collar and salaried U.S. jobs—more than 14,000 jobs— and will halt production at five North American plants while shifting more production to China and Mexico. GM received a record windfall from Trump’s corporate tax cut bill—money we were promised would trickle down to American workers. Any day now.
The European Union has agreed to Brexit terms set forth by British Prime Minister Theresa May—pending approval from the British parliament. A vote will take place in December, but many members of May’s own party have said they will not back it, and the opposition Labour party has promised to vote it down. President Trump repaid May for her early kindness to him by humiliating her: “Sounds like a great deal for the E.U.”
A Chinese scientist has created the world’s first gene-edited babies, defying an unofficial ban on editing embryos intended for human pregnancy. He claims to have used gene-editing technology called Crispr to edit DNA during in-vitro fertilization, and, as a result, twin girls were born several weeks ago with a gene removed in the hopes of making them resistant to infection with HIV.
Ahead of tomorrow’s Senate run-off election in Mississippi, a bunch of companies are asking Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) to refund their campaign donations after reporters unearthed tons of evidence that Hyde-Smith is a racist and Confederate sympathizer. Google is among those companies, but, for some reason, attempted to keep its request a secret. (They were feeling lucky?)
According to new data, violence by right-wing extremists and white supremacists has been on the rise in the U.S. One third of domestic terrorism incidents between 2010 and 2017 were carried out by right-wing terrorists.
Trump campaign foreign policy adviser/attempted colluder George Papadopoulos reported to a federal prison in Wisconsin to begin his sentence. See you on Twitter in two weeks, George!
Happy Cyber Monday. If you don’t need your purchases ASAP (think: holiday gifts that you won’t wrap in the next two days, whatever shit you were inevitably suckered into buying on Amazon, non-Crooked merch), don’t select impossibly fast shipping options—even if they’re free. You’ll help the environment!
NASA Mars InSight lander successfully landed on Mars, where it will try to make a sonogram of the planet’s interior. Did not know Mars was expecting, congrats.
Trump floated the idea of starting state-run TV because he’s unhappy with CNN. Fox News called Tiffany to commiserate on being ignored.
