Claire McCaskill‏ Verified account @clairecmc

This is so bad. We have just gotten list of amendments to be included in bill NOT from our R colleagues, but from lobbyists downtown. None of us have seen this list, but lobbyists have it. Need I say more? Disgusting. And we probably will not even be given time to read them.

2:29 PM - 1 Dec 2017

Visitors to Walmart's website could purchase a shirt calling for violence against journalists, up until the retail giant took the shirt down on Thursday.

“Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required," the back of the shirt available on their website read, a reference to hanging journalists.

The shirt was only removed from Walmart’s website after The Radio Television Digital News Association sent a letter to the retailer about the shirt, according to the group.

The shirt made headlines last year when a Trump supporter was spotted wearing it at a Trump rally in Minnesota days before the 2016 election.

Russell Simmons, a prolific music and TV producer and co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, was accused of sexual assault and harassment by model Keri Claussen Khalighi in a Nov. 19 article in the Los Angeles Times. Simmons then denied the incident in a letter published Nov. 22 by The Hollywood Reporter. The letter prompted Jenny Lumet, an award-winning screenwriter (Rachel Getting Married, The Mummy), the daughter of filmmaker Sidney Lumet, and granddaughter of singer/activist Lena Horne, to pen a response detailing her own experience with Simmons.

On Nov. 22, 2017, Russell Simmons wrote:

“I have never committed any acts of aggression or violence in my life. I would never knowingly cause fear or harm to anyone.”

Dear Russell:

I met you around 1987, through Rick Rubin, who has always been kind to me. Rick knew my sister through N.Y.U. and asked me, at the upstairs bar in a nightclub called the Palladium, to be in a movie you were producing that Rick was directing, starring RUN DMC. It was, frankly, a lousy movie and I was terrible in it.

Over the next three or four years, I would see you out and about, at a nightclub called Nell’s, mostly. I don’t recall you and I ever just going out to dinner, or having a one-to-one experience; we were always in groups, and we had many, many mutual friends. You were charming and funny and charismatic and self-deprecating. Not being in the music business made it possible for me to relax around you. And you were a fan of my grandmother, respected her, and told me so. You seemed sincere.

When you think of the words “high-profile tech event”, chances are you have a pretty clear idea of what that might look like. Glitzy product announcements, probably; warehouse-tall HD screens presenting groundbreaking pieces of technology or paradigm-shifting ways to communicate. On the less hyperbolic end of the scale, you might assume that most attendees would be fully clothed.

That’s not always the case, however, as the debacle that was the Digital Entrepreneur Awards (DEA) neatly illustrates. No high-tech displays or feats of ingenuity here: instead, guests were greeted by corset-wearing showgirls and regaled with offensive jokes from Love Island voiceover star Iain Stirling. Apple keynote this was not.

A team from the University of Bradford has even handed back the prize it was awarded for most innovative use of video. The director of external affairs at the university, Mark Garratt, told the Times that attending the event was like “going back to the days of Bernard Manning”. Digital comms agency Lab – DEA’s agency of the year – described the event as “like seeing toxic waste being dumped on a beautiful beach”.

A friend of mine was also there. “The show basically revolved around ‘jokes’ about wives giving blowjobs to their husbands,” she told me. “They had an opportunity to challenge the stereotypes of working in tech and they failed. They failed massively.”