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☆ GOP Rep. Andy Ogles claimed to fight international sex crimes and be an economic expert. Like George Santos, his real resume tells another story.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-17 | by ( Katherine Long | Bryan Metzger | Jack Newsham | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +14 min

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) claims he's a real estate magnate, policy expert, and sex crime investigator. Ogles' business experience seems to be limited to owning two restaurants, a short-lived travel agency, and becoming licensed as an insurance agent. Ogles' supposed experience rescuing sex trafficking victims helped propel him into national headlines in his first week in Congress. During one debate during his campaign, Ogles described himself as "a former member of law enforcement" who worked "in international sex crimes, specifically child trafficking." Fighting international sex crimes and traffickingWhen discussing his support for a more militarized border with Mexico, Ogles has repeatedly referenced his involvement in combating human trafficking and working to fight international sex crimes.

☆ George Soros called Donald Trump a 'pitiful figure' who is hemorrhaging support and whose 'narcissism has turned into a disease'
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-17 | by ( Joshua Zitser | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Billionaire George Soros slammed Donald Trump during a speech on Thursday. He called Trump a "pitiful figure" who is driven by narcissism and is losing GOP support. Soros expects Ron DeSantis to beat him in 2024, but said Trump could run as a third-party candidate. In turn, Trump has proliferated conspiracy theories about him. The billionaire has become a bogeyman for the right, with bizarre conspiracy theories accusing him of secretly controlling the global economy.

☆ Jason Miller returns as Trump advisor for campaign struggling to generate much excitement compared to 2016
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-10 | by ( Joshua Zitser | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Jason Miller will advise Donald Trump on the strategy of his 2024 presidential bid. He previously left the Trump campaign to become CEO of the right-wing social media platform Gettr. Miller is joining a team that is struggling to generate the same excitement as past campaigns. "It was always a matter of when and not if I returned to help re-elect President Trump in 2024," Miller said in a statement, per Politico. Former Trump White House press aide Sarah Matthews described the campaign launch in a tweet as "low-energy" and "uninspiring."

☆ The Koch Network Dumps Trump
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-09 | by ( William A. Galston | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

William A. Galston writes the weekly Politics & Ideas column in the Wall Street Journal. He holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy. Mr. Galston is the author of 10 books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics. A winner of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

☆ Billionaire Charles Koch-Backed Group Will Push GOP to Move Past Donald Trump
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-05 | by ( Alex Leary | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

WASHINGTON—A group funded by billionaire Charles Koch will work to support a Republican presidential nominee other than Donald Trump, concluding in a strategy memo that “we need to turn the page on the past.”The organization, Americans for Prosperity, has stayed out of the last two presidential cycles but has concluded it needs to engage now as Mr. Trump mounts his third consecutive White House run. The memo released Sunday doesn’t mention the former president by name but is unambiguous in its purpose.

☆ Koch-backed group AFP ready to back new Republican candidate
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-05 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

The group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), has not previously supported candidates in presidential elections but said in the memo the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who "represents a new chapter." "The Republican Party is nominating bad candidates who are advocating for things that go against core American principles. This means the country is in a downward spiral, with both parties reinforcing the bad behavior of theother." Former president Trump is so far the only announced Republican candidate, although former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is expected to kick off her campaign for the nomination this month. Reporting by Rahat Sandhu in Bengaluru; Editing by David HolmesOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Koch network looking to back a new GOP presidential nominee in 2024 and 'turn the page' on Trump
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-05 | by ( John L. Dorman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

The donor network created by Charles Koch seeks to boost its role in the GOP presidential primaries. The message is seen as a veiled swipe at Trump, who is running for the GOP nomination in 2024. However, the network has largely stayed out of presidential primaries after identifying five approved candidates in 2015, all of whom ultimately fell to Trump the next year. While the Koch network disagreed with Trump on his implementation of trade tariffs during his White House tenure, it did work with the administration on criminal justice reform efforts. Nikki Haley of South Carolina is expected to enter the race on February 15, but at the moment, Trump remains the only major declared candidate seeking the GOP presidential nomination.

Jan 30 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Monday shot down Johnson & Johnson's (JNJ.N) attempt to offload tens of thousands of lawsuits over its talc products into bankruptcy court. The appeals court ruling revives those lawsuits. Monday's decision by the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia dismissed the bankruptcy filed by the J&J subsidiary in 2021. The appeals court decision could force companies considering the strategy to more carefully consider its risks, two legal experts said. The Texas two-step has garnered criticism from Democratic lawmakers in Washington, and inspired proposed legislation that would severely restrict the practice.

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☆ U.S. startup Outrider raises $73 mln to scale up autonomous yard trucks
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-19 | by ( Nick Carey | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Jan 19 (Reuters) - U.S. self-driving truck firm Outrider said on Thursday it has raised $73 million in funding to scale up its autonomous trucks operating in distribution yards for customers in e-commerce, manufacturing and other industries. It also includes fresh funding from American venture capital fund New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and the venture capital arm of industrial conglomerate Koch Industries. Outrider says its self-driving yard truck "hitches to and unhitches from trailers, robotically connects and disconnects trailer brake lines, backs semi-trailers with precision, interacts safely with loading docks, and keeps track of trailer locations throughout the yard." The company says its customers represent more than 20% of all yard trucks operating in North America, and have invested in joint product testing and pilot operations since 2019. Yard trucks are designed to move trailers and cargo containers in distribution yards.

Koch unit Georgia-Pacific used a corporate bankruptcy maneuver known as the Texas two-step, forming a new Texas subsidiary, Bestwall, that took on the company's asbestos liability. The latest court documents, filed on Wednesday, provide new detail about how Koch has benefited from the case. Koch has received more than $5 billion since Bestwall filed for bankruptcy in 2017. Representatives for New Georgia-Pacific and Koch Industries did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. New Georgia-Pacific's shareholder equity is forecast to be about $27.8 billion after accounting for the Koch dividends, according to the Wednesday court filing.

☆ How Anti-Abortion Activists Bought Access to the Supreme Court
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-07 | by ( Katherine Long | Jack Newsham | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +29 min

In exchange for as little as a few thousand dollars in contributions to the nonprofit, these people received easy access to events where Supreme Court justices would be. Supreme Court Historical society trustee Jay Sekulow, center, represented President Trump during the latter's impeachment trial in 2020. Anti-abortion advocates cheer in front of the Supreme Court after the decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores was announced in 2014. Alito did not respond to a request for comment on his involvement in the Supreme Court Historical Society. Supreme Court justices, though, aren't even required to stay within those weak guardrails because no code of ethics governs justices' behavior.

☆ Colorado funeral home operators sentenced for selling body parts without permission
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-05 | by ( Https | Media-Cldnry.S-Nbcnews.Com Image Upload Newscms Phil-Helsel-Circle-Byline-Template.Jpg | Phil Helsel | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +2 min

Two Colorado funeral home operators who sold body parts or bodies in a scheme a prosecutor called “horrific” were sentenced to prison Tuesday, officials said. They operated Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, a city of around 20,000 in western Colorado, and stole and sold body parts or bodies from 2010 to 2018, prosecutors said. The bodies or body parts of hundreds of people were stolen, the U.S. attorney’s office said. Prosecutors said that in addition to stealing bodies and body parts, they sold remains of those who had infectious diseases but falsely certified them as disease-free. When entire bodies were sold, cremated remains were returned to families that weren’t those of their loved ones.

Jan 4 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) is in advanced talks to invest in Gatik, a California-based autonomous driving startup, as part of its cloud partnership with the company, two people familiar with the discussions told Reuters. Microsoft plans to invest over $10 million in a financing round that values Gatik at more than $700 million, the sources added. As part of the deal, Gatik will use Microsoft's cloud and edge computing platform Azure in developing autonomous delivery technology for trucks. Like other big tech companies, Microsoft has recently been putting funds into self-driving technology. In November, Ford and Volkswagen shut down their self-driving technology unit, Argo AI, saying that creating self-driving "robotaxis" would be "harder than putting a man on the moon."

☆ Former Colorado funeral home owner sentenced to 20 yrs for selling body parts
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-04 | by ( John Shiffman | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

Jan 3 (Reuters) - A former Colorado funeral home owner was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on Tuesday for defrauding relatives of the dead by dissecting 560 corpses and selling body parts without permission. Sheoperated a funeral home, Sunset Mesa, and a body parts entity,Donor Services, from the same building in Montrose, Colorado. "Hess and Koch used their funeral home at times toessentially steal bodies and body parts using fraudulent andforged donor forms," prosecutor Tim Neff said in a court filing. The federal case was triggered by a 2016-2018 Reuters investigative series about the sale of body parts in the UnitedStates, a virtually unregulated industry. But selling body parts such as heads, arms and spines –which is what Hess did – for use in research or education is notregulated by federal law.

☆ 2022 was the year the Overconfidence Man fell back to earth
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-29 | by ( Maureen Tkacik | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +22 min

Naturally, Elon Musk, the platonic ideal of the peculiar self-aggrandizing, self-parodying personality type that thrived during the Trump years and peaked during the pandemic, tops this list. By 2022, the media had pronounced him variously the next Warren Buffett, J.P. Morgan and Charles Koch. "bye bye @trussliz Congrats to lettuce", tweeted Putin's one-time stand-in Dmitry Medvedev, to which Elon Musk could not resist replying, "pretty good troll tbh." Elon Musk speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition in March 2020. Elon MuskIt's weird to recall now that Elon Musk once seemed like, graded on the billionaire curve anyway, a net positive for a cursed American society.

☆ Privacy and crypto will likely lead tech policy under split Congress as hope for passing ambitious antitrust reforms dwindles
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-27 | by ( Lauren Feiner | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +9 min

After what started as a hopeful year for tech policy, the 117th Congress is about to close out its term with many key efforts tabled. That's the case with privacy legislation, where a bill proposed this year gained bipartisan support, passing out of a House committee with a near-unanimous vote. The pair blamed the bills' failure to advance on intense lobbying efforts by the tech industry against them. One prominent bipartisan bill in the Senate would put the CFTC in charge. "But the importance of tech policy issues will still be strong."

☆ New York Democrats Help GOP to a Congressional Majority
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-26 | by ( Tunku Varadarajan | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The Republican Party has eked out a slender House majority, likely 222-213, four members more than are needed for control. The GOP should direct its gratitude to Misha Tseytlin , a soft-spoken Chicago lawyer who helped engineer the margin of victory in an unlikely place—New York state. Kathy Hochul approved a gerrymandered electoral map drawn by Albany Democrats that could have handed them victory in as many as 22 of the Empire State’s 26 districts. Mr. Tseytlin, 41, filed suit the same day, arguing that the map violated a 2014 constitutional amendment against gerrymandering that had been championed by, among others, the late former New York City Mayor Ed Koch , a Democrat. The state Senate at the time was under Republican control, the Assembly was Democratic, and Democrat Andrew Cuomo was governor.

☆ If DeSantis doesn't get his 2024 decision timing right, he risks peaking too soon like Scott Walker or wasting his big moment like Chris Christie
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-23 | by ( Kimberly Leonard | Brent D. Griffiths | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

But as he faces a decision over whether to run for president in 2024, DeSantis shares far more similarities with two other ex-GOP frontrunners: Former Govs. Like DeSantis, Walker and Christie once seemed like inevitable frontrunners for the White House. Walker seized the moment, while Christie let his moment pass. "That's a huge difference in my opinion in terms of that moment," DuHaime said. "There was a moment for Christie in 2012 and there is a moment for Ron DeSantis in 2024.

☆ German panel recommends COVID shot only for at-risk youngsters
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-17 | by ( Ludwig Burger | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

The recommendation also covers a version of Moderna's (MRNA.O) Spikevax vaccine for the age group but that product is in short supply in Germany at the moment, the expert panel said. European regulators in October authorised a low-dose version of Pfizer-BioNTech's first-generation vaccine for children from six months to four years, when given as a three-dose series. "When there are parents that absolutely want the vaccine for their healthy children, there are no legal reason for physicians to deny them that," said STIKO's Terhardt. STIKO also reaffirmed a recommendation it issued in May for five- to 11-year-olds, saying one COVID-19 shot was enough for healthy youngsters in that age group because most of them had already had an infection. Only slightly more than 22% of five- to 11-year-old children in Germany have so far received at least one COVID shot.

☆ Vegan canapes and fat donations: How Sam Bankman-Fried won Washington before he lost everything
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-16 | by ( Https | Media-Cldnry.S-Nbcnews.Com Image Upload Newscms Alex-Seitz-Wald-Circle-Byline-Template.Jpg | Alex Seitz-Wald | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +13 min

Everybody was trying to get in,” said one source close to the Bankman-Frieds’ political operation who requested anonymity to speak candidly. Attempts to contact Sam Bankman-Fried for this article were unsuccessful. Sam Bankman-Fried’s mentor and the spiritual leader of Effective Altruism has disowned him. Sam Bankman-Fried is a Democrat, and he spent at least $40 million supporting the party. Some of the biggest recipients of Bankman-Fried’s money did not respond to NBC News when asked about donations they received.

☆ Boks shuffle pack ahead of Italy test as Wiese returns
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-15 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

Nov 15 (Reuters) - South Africa coach Jacques Nienaber has made several changes to his pack with the return of number eight Jasper Wiese and a new lock pairing for the autumn international test against Italy in Genoa on Saturday. He replaces Kwagga Smith, while Salmaan Moerat and Marvin Orie make up the second row with Eben Etzebeth rested on the bench and Franco Mostert moving to flank in place of Pieter-Steph du Toit. "It’s also good to have Jasper back against the physical Italian pack, and we know that Kwagga will spark something different when he takes the field. "Evan (Roos) also gets a chance off the bench and his skills will work well with Kwagga’s in the loose trio." Italy have had some past joy against the Springboks, beating them for the first time 20-18 in Florence six years ago.

☆ Koch Teams With Startup to Build Giant Battery Factory in Georgia
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-11 | by ( Stephen Wilmot | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Norwegian startup Freyr Battery and energy conglomerate Koch Industries Inc. are accelerating their plan to build a multibillion-dollar battery plant that will be among the largest to tap incentives in President Biden’s climate, tax and spending plan, Freyr said. Koch’s chief executive long opposed environmental regulation and subsidies while funding groups that questioned climate change. The company and Freyr will likely invest more than $2.6 billion in two phases for the Georgia plant, which will supply batteries primarily for the U.S. power grid.

☆ DuPont beats profit estimates, launches $5 bln share buyback plan
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-08 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

Nov 8 (Reuters) - DuPont de Nemours (DD.N) beat Wall Street expectations for third-quarter profit as strong demand for electronics and other industrial products helped it offset cost pressures, sending its shares up nearly 3% in premarket trading. The industrial materials maker also announced a new $5 billion share repurchase program and said it plans to retire $2.5 billion in long-term debt, but kept its full-year sales forecast unchanged. Sustained demand helped the company shore up third-quarter revenue of $3.3 billion, up nearly 4% from last year. Its adjusted earnings of 82 cents per share in the three months ended Sept. 30, came above analysts' average expectation of 79 cents per share. Meanwhile, net income fell to $376 million, or 73 cents per share, from $404 million, or 75 cents per share, a year earlier.

☆ Student debt could be canceled as early as October 23, and GOP states are scrambling to stop it
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-21 | by ( Ayelet Sheffey | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by GOP-led states seeking to block student-debt relief. But the states filed an appeal, requesting the relief be paused by October 22 at 9:00 AM. On Thursday night, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by six Republican-led states who wanted to block student-debt relief, arguing it would hurt their states' tax revenues, among other things. The Cato Institute, a Koch-backed libertarian think-tank, most recently filed a lawsuit that argued debt relief would undermine recruiting through a loan forgiveness program for public servants. A judge is also expected to hold a hearing next week for a lawsuit filed by the Job Creators Network, as well.

☆ Biden's student-loan forgiveness can move forward for now after a federal judge just threw out one of the most serious GOP lawsuits against the debt relief
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-21 | by ( Ayelet Sheffey | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

It was regarded as one of the most serious challenges to the loan forgiveness plan. The GOP-led states could still appeal the case, but for now, Biden's debt relief can move forward. The suit was regarded as one of the most serious cases challenging the debt relief plan. Autrey said that the plaintiffs failed to show concrete harm the debt relief would cause them and will no longer consider the case. "It is unconscionable that your company — as one of the largest student loan companies in the world—would be involved in overtly political efforts to rob millions of their right to student loan debt relief," Bush wrote.

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