Wednesday, 8 May 2024

William Barr, Facebook, Scrabble: Your Thursday Evening Briefing

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Good evening. Here’s the latest.

1. “That’s a crime.”

That’s what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said about Attorney General William Barr’s testimony in April, when he said was unaware that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had protested Mr. Barr’s portrayal of his report’s conclusions. She said that testimony was false.

The statement came after House Democrats threatened to hold Mr. Barr in contempt of Congress after he failed to appear at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee. The attorney general also ignored a subpoena deadline to hand over Mr. Mueller’s unredacted report.

Democrats are hoping to secure testimony from Mr. Mueller himself on May 15.

Separately, the F.B.I. used an investigator posing as a researcher to meet with a Trump campaign aide in 2016. The decision showed the level of the alarm in the bureau as officials uncovered the scope of Russia’s election interference.

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2. In other news out of Washington:

President Trump said he would not nominate Stephen Moore for the Federal Reserve after all. Several Republicans had raised concerns over Mr. Moore’s views of women. It is the second time in recent weeks that one of Mr. Trump’s Fed picks was forced to withdraw.

The Trump administration is also set to detail its weakening of offshore-drilling safety rules put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, above.

And on Capitol Hill, the House passed legislation that would block President Trump from leaving the Paris Agreement, the first major global warming bill to win congressional approval in a decade. But it stands virtually no chance of approval in the Republican-controlled Senate.

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3. How do you make room for all 21 Democratic candidates on one debate stage? You don’t.

The Democratic National Committee has capped the first debate at 20 candidates. Now that Senator Michael Bennet, above, has announced his candidacy for president, someone is likely to be left out. Here’s how the candidates qualify for a debate.

We also look at Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, which has hired big in Iowa. At 50 paid staff members on the ground, it is far more than any other Democratic candidate’s and reflects a bet that an early, large staff will give her an advantage over her rivals.

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4. Facebook is cracking down on hate speech.

The social media platform barred seven controversial personalities from its services, including Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, and Louis Farrakhan, the outspoken black nationalist minister. Above, Facebook’s operations center in Menlo Park, Calif.

The company said they were barred from using Facebook and Instagram under Facebook’s policies against “dangerous individuals and organizations.”

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5. A Boston jury found executives of Insys Therapeutics guilty of racketeering. They were accused of bribing doctors to prescribe an addictive painkiller.

After deliberating for 15 days, the federal jury convicted the company’s founder, the one-time billionaire John Kapoor, of all charges in the case. Mr. Kapoor, pictured above in March, is one of the most senior pharmaceutical executives to be prosecuted on felony charges in the opioids epidemic.

Prosecutors had detailed how Insys’ marketing plan, which included paying doctors for sham educational talks, sought to spur sales of its painkiller.

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6. Parents of newborns have another worry to add to their list: measles.

The nationwide measles outbreak, now in 22 states, has upended family routines. The vaccine is not usually given to children until they are a year old, so some new parents are avoiding public places and anti-vaccine friends.

“There are just some places that we don’t go,” said Lucretia Sims, above, with her 7-month-old son, Ayden.

Separately, the Caribbean nation of St. Lucia quarantined a cruise ship reportedly owned by the Church of Scientology over a case of measles on board. And a bill to end religious exemptions for vaccinations has stalled in New York, an epicenter of the outbreak.

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7. Wages are finally rising — 10 years after the recession.

Lagging pay in the lengthy recovery defied logic, and then wage growth suddenly picked up. Average hourly earnings have been up for eight straight months, fueled in part by minimum-wage increases in cities and states across the country and a tightening labor market.

We look at why it took so long and which workers are benefiting.

For people without a college degree, finding work that offers decent pay can be a challenge. The solution may require a change in scenery. To Toledo, Ohio, for instance, above. Here’s where all the good jobs are.

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8. Before the #MeToo movement, Woody Allen’s memoir would probably have set off a bidding war. Today, publishers aren’t interested.

Executives at several houses said they passed on the material, saying working with him now would be “toxic” because of controversies surrounding Mr. Allen, pictured above in 2016. Mr. Allen’s agent declined to comment.

Our book critic looked at the wave of #MeToo novels, writing that they are reminders of the kind of touchy ethical explorations fiction makes possible.

And how has #MeToo affected the stage? Our critic at large says that in some modern Broadway adaptations, women fare better than in the originals, but it’s usually the men who need changing.

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9. Can an art collective become the Disney of the experience economy?

That’s what the founders of Meow Wolf are betting on. What began as a group of unknown anarchic collective artists in Santa Fe, N.M., turned into a multimillion-dollar dream factory anchoring an “immersive bazaar” in Las Vegas. It’s part of The Times Magazine’s money issue out this weekend.

For a different kind of experience: It’s a big weekend for art fairs in New York, with Frieze New York and Tefaf taking center stage. They can be a bit pricey, so here are some alternatives to the main fairs.

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10. Finally, “OK” for 6 points.

The international Scrabble dictionary is gaining 2,800 words, including “mansplain,” “bae” and the much-debated “OK.” While the four-letter spelling “okay” was already approved, the shorter version had not been included because of debate about whether it was an abbreviation.

“I’d say 95 percent of the people in the community agreed with the decision,” said the co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association, “but the 5 percent of people who disagreed were disproportionately loud.”

Have a playful evening.

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