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As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said herself, quoting scripture on the House floor Thursday: “For everything there is a season — a time for every purpose under heaven.”For Pelosi, the season to be leader of House Democrats has passed. She’ll continue to represent San Francisco while serving as an invaluable source of guidance and resolve for the next generation of House Democratic leaders. At 82, Pelosi is a historic figure, of course: the first female House speaker and one of the strongest speakers, if not the strongest, that America has ever seen. Yet as a minority in a GOP-run House, Democrats won’t be able to rack up accomplishments like they did in the last two years. There were calls for Pelosi to step aside in 2010 when Democrats lost 60 House seats — a true wipeout.

☆ FTX flop evokes history’s great financial swindles
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-18 | by ( Edward Chancellor | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +7 min

As Walter Bagehot wrote in “Lombard Street” in 1873, “The good times too of high price almost always engender much fraud. As cryptocurrencies declined in value, FTX provided a line of credit to BlockFi, a stricken crypto-lender. He talked about Three Arrows Capital, the failed crypto hedge fund, as engaged in “punting”. His firm launched a product based on a basket of crypto assets that it called Shitcoin Index Perpetual Futures, with the unsubtle ticker SHIT-PERP. He commissioned an advertisement, aired during the Super Bowl, in which the comedian Larry David casts doubt on the viability of FTX.

☆ Sam Bankman-Fried's $16 billion fortune evaporated in less than a week
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-11 | by ( Allison Morrow | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +1 min

New York CNN Business —Sam Bankman-Fried woke up on Monday still a billionaire, even as his cryptocurrency empire was beginning to unravel. Based on net worth calculations by Bloomberg, Bankman-Fried was worth about $16 billion at the start of the week. The 30-year-old entrepreneur’s net worth, which was largely tied up in digital assets, peaked at around $26 billion this spring. He told Reuters in July that he and FTX still had a “few billion” on hand to shore up other firms and help stabilize the industry. Bankman-Fried owns about 70% of FTX’s US business, which the index now estimates to be essentially worthless.

How Putin and Friends Stalled Climate Progress A handful of powerful world leaders rallied around Russia and undercut global cooperation. Mr. Putin has gained from this as the increasingly autocratic Mr. Xi finds common cause with the Kremlin. “Much depends on whether authoritarian leaders perceive climate action to be in their self-interest.”Though their actions help Mr. Putin, their track records on climate are mixed. Mr. Xi called Mr. Putin his “best friend.”He was returning the favor from a year earlier, when Mr. Putin hosted Mr. Xi at the Grand Kremlin Palace and awarded him one of Russia’s highest medals for foreign dignitaries. At a news conference with Mr. Putin, Mr. Bolsonaro thanked his “dear friend,” saying that Mr. Putin had offered him support when other world leaders were criticizing his Amazon policy.

☆ The Phone Call That Shifted Mikaela Shiffrin’s Thinking About Her Lost Olympics
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-20 | by ( Rachel Bachman | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Mikaela Shiffrin’s phone rang just as an airplane was about to take her to paradise. It was last May, at the end of a ski season that included a disastrous Beijing Winter Olympics for Shiffrin, one of history’s top women’s alpine racers. The plane was set to fly her and her boyfriend to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico—and mentally, at least, farther away from those Games.

CNN —Louise Fletcher, the actress who won an Academy Award for playing the villainous Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died Friday in France, according to her agent David Shaul. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” starred Jack Nicholson as a new patient at a mental institution, where Mildred Ratched – played by Fletcher – reigns as an authoritarian, controlling nurse. In her Oscar speech, Fletcher sweetly thanked her “Cuckoo’s Nest” colleagues and then, using sign language, acknowledged her deaf parents watching at home. Louise Fletcher Wins Best Actress: 1976 Oscars“I want to say thank you for teaching me to have a dream. The film swept the top five Oscars for 1975 – for Best Picture, director Milos Forman, adapted screenplay, actor Nicholson and actress Fletcher.

The Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File found just 69 confirmed, unprovoked shark attacks on people and 36 confirmed bites worldwide in 2023. Joseph Prezioso/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesYou should avoid estuaries, said Richard Peirce, an author, shark expert and former chair of the UK-based Shark Trust and Shark Conservation Society. Avoid dusk and dawnSwimming early in the morning or late at night can be lovely, but it’s also the time when a shark attack is most likely. If a shark is nearbyA great white shark swims off Guadalupe Island in Baja California, Mexico. Cut off the anglesA white shark swims across a sand bar off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in August 2021.

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