in 1973, Donald Trump and his tyrant Klansman father cooked up a super-racist scheme to prevent black people from renting apartments in their ugly buildings. they got caught.

all through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Donald Trump would phone reporters, pretending to be his own public relations agent, and brag about how much sex Donald Trump was getting. he wouldn’t even bother to disguise his own stupid voice. he got caught.

in the mid-1990s, Donald Trump followed E. Jean Carroll into a dressing room in the Bergdorf Goodman department store and sexually assaulted her. he got caught.

in 2005, Donald Trump opened Trump University. he promised to teach people how to become rich in the real estate business. what he actually did was separate the gullible from their money. he got caught.

DONALD TRUMP ARRIVED at Erie Insurance Arena in Erie, Pennsylvania for another rally on Saturday, a city that helped deliver his victory in 2016 and a critical swing state for 2024, while he faces new charges from the Department of Justice and the possibility of him being indicted for a third time looms. But during his speech, seemingly everyone else was a criminal conspiring against him and he, who is himself under criminal investigation, is the one who will save America.

Trump played the victim — his apparent favorite stance of late, brushing off the indictments and charges against him. He brought up President Joe Biden (“crooked Joe Biden,” “a dumb son of a bitch,” and “the most corrupt president in American history” were a few of the ways Trump referred to the leader of the free world) and lamented that he was being persecuted while the “Biden crime family” was not. Claiming that the U.S. no longer has a free and fair press and that “fake news is all you get,” he alleged, “They refuse to discuss the Biden crime family, but enjoy covering false indictments of Donald Trump, who has done nothing wrong.”

As Trump was repeating unverified claims that “disease-ridden” “people from mental institutions, from insane asylums” are pouring into the U.S. — citing a psychiatrist from an unnamed South American country who supposedly claimed they’ve “emptied out” their mentally ill people into the United States — he blamed Biden. “We have somebody that’s not at the top of his game, never was at the top of a game. Never was,” Trump said. “We have a guy who’s a dumb son of a bitch to allow this to happen… Every dollar spent attacking me by Republicans is $1 given straight to the Biden campaign if he makes it.”

Trump also questioned the timing of the “unjustified charges” against him. “They waited two and a half, almost three years so that they could bring them right in the middle of my presidential election, because it’s election interference,” he claimed, calling special counsel Jack Smith a “deranged lunatic” and ripped on his looks: “It’s like Central Casting,” he quipped. Beyond attacking people, he also ripped on cities, including Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Chicago. “They’re all bad, run by Democrats all bad — every one of them is horrible,” he said, citing crime and complaining about how Atlanta’s DA focused on the investigation into Trump’s alleged involvement in 2020 election interference versus crime rates.

THE CALLS TO producer David Holmes’ Belfast home studio arrived sporadically, sometimes a week or a mere few days in advance. “Are you around?” Sinéad O’Connor would say. “Do you have time?” If Holmes did, O’Connor would then take the nearly three-hour drive from her home in Bray, the Irish coastal town where she was then living, to continue work on what would be the last album of her life.

On July 11, just two weeks before she was found unresponsive in her new home in London, O’Connor announced that she would “soon be finishing my album.” The record, No Veteran Dies Alone, had been in the works for about five years and would have been O’Connor’s first since 2014’s I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss. According to Holmes, the eight-song album — which he describes as “emotional and really personal” — was one track away from completion when O’Connor died.

Holmes, the renowned Irish DJ and producer who has scored films (the Ocean’s Eleven remake and its sequels among them) and made pioneering EDM albums like Let’s Get Killed, first met O’Connor briefly at an awards show in the late Nineties. But they finally had a chance to speak at a 60th birthday party for the Pogues’ Shane McGowan around 2017. “She was walking to where I was standing, and I introduced myself,” Holmes says. “She didn’t know anything about me, really. But I said I wanted to make a record about healing since I’ve had my own issues with mental health, and music was always a comfort. And as a producer, I always felt that Sinéad hadn’t even scratched the surface of what was possible with her voice.”

The two first worked together on a cover of gospel great Mahalia Jackson’s “Trouble of the World,” which O’Connor released in 2020 in response to George Floyd’s death. Holmes had an immediate taste of O’Connor’s intense devotion to her craft when he heard a knock on the door of his home in Belfast at 9 a.m. O’Connor told him that she was so psyched about the track that she had left her home in the middle of the night to work on it with him: “She said, ‘I couldn’t sleep, and it was 3 a.m. and I drove up.’ She must have been sitting in my driveway for a couple of hours.”

...

You’ve now been in Congress for just over six months. What is your overall impression of how the place functions?
There’s a fixation on a lot of dumb shit. Bad performance art is really what it gets down to. The debt ceiling — there should have been no drama with any of that. The fact that we’re playing with something like that is antithetical to the stability of our democracy. It really is. Everything is turning into a culture war. Not everything has to be a think piece, you know.

Does all of that political posturing make you cynical about Washington?
Everyone here is cynical, of course. But we can fight for things that are meaningful. That we should have no hungry. Hanger. Hangry. Hanger. Hangry. [Chuckles.] Fox News will go crazy if that makes your story.

We’re fighting for women’s reproductive freedom, making sure we have resources and support our unions. I’m going to fight for what’s really important.

You’ve introduced legislation to expand access to contraception, with more than a dozen Democratic co-sponsors. Is there any Republican support for that in the Senate?
It’s going to be very hard. Somebody needs to tell Republicans, like in a memo, ‘You won on abortion. You won. Why not have a serious conversation about birth control? That’s less abortions and unwanted children.’ I wish we could have an honest conversation with conservatives and Republicans that birth control is the answer for both sides. But there wouldn’t be 60 votes in the Senate for that. I still really want to keep pushing it. I want to have that conversation.

A BRITISH JUDGE ruled Thursday that Prince Harry’s snooping lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Group Newspapers can go to trial, albeit without one of its most damning allegations.

Like his ongoing lawsuit against the Mirror Group’s tabloids — for which Prince Harry testified against in June — the Duke of Sussex had also sued The Sun and the now-defunct News Of The World, accusing the newspapers of hacking his phone over a decade ago. In his ruling Thursday, Justice Timothy Fancourt said that Harry’s lawsuit can proceed to trial, but without the phone hacking charge, since that happened outside the law’s six-year statute of limitations; Fancourt added that Harry was aware of the phone hacking allegations during the period within the statute.

- snip -

Harry’s legal team had argued that Buckingham Palace struck a “secret agreement” with NGN to prevent the Duke of Sussex from pursuing legal action against the media group, thus making the charges ultimately fall outside the statute of limitations. Fancourt rejected that theory. (When Prince Harry testified against the Mirror Group in June, he became the first royal in a century to take the stand.)

With the phone hacking thrown out, the crux of Prince Harry’s case against NGN — slated to begin January 2024 — will be on allegations of unlawful information gathering, like the tabloids’ employment of private eyes to specifically unearth dirt on Harry; Fancourt issued a similar ruling in Hugh Grant’s lawsuit against the British media, with the phone hacking charges dismissed from that case.

The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.

That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.

A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.

It was a surprise even to the researchers that their analysis showed a potential collapse coming so soon, one of them, Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics at the University of Copenhagen, said in an interview. Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.

Which is why it was also a surprise, Dr. Ditlevsen said, that she and her co-author were able to pin down the timing of a collapse at all. Scientists are bound to continue studying and debating the issue, but Dr. Ditlevsen said the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.

YAMHILL, Ore. — Before I make an argument about affirmative action, let me tell you how I was a beneficiary of it. I wasn’t a student of color, but I grew up on a farm and attended a small, rural high school where there wasn’t much math and nobody had ever applied to an Ivy League college. My grades and scores were strong but not extraordinary.

But I did have one thing going for me. Elite colleges were looking for farm kids from low-income areas to provide diversity. So a school that I had never visited, Harvard, took an enormous risk and accepted me, and I became a token country bumpkin to round out a class of polished overachievers. In time, Harvard gave me a wonderful education, transformed my life and set me on a path to becoming a columnist — which is why you’re stuck reading this. Yes, indeed: Providing paths to a better education can be life-changing.

So how do we do that for others? I wish the Supreme Court had ruled differently on affirmative action for race, but unfortunately it blocked that path for diversity. My fear is that we will all throw up our hands and sit around blaming the court, rather than actually working to overhaul a disgracefully unequal education system. In fact, there are still ways to broaden educational opportunity. But they may require us liberals to look in the mirror and acknowledge the role of our own institutions in perpetuating inequality.

Elite universities are bastions of left-of-center ideas, yet advantage four groups that are already privileged: children of graduates, recruited athletes for sports like rowing and fencing, children of faculty members and children of large donors.

two days ago, I wrote about Florida’s despicable decision to teach its children about the “positive aspects” of slavery.

there was nothing funny to say about this moral travesty, but I did allow myself one slight ha-ha at the end. I wrote: in Germany, schoolchildren are taught about the Holocaust. it’s mandatory. and they don’t sugar-coat it with stupid fairy tales. they don’t try to pretend that Jews learned useful skills like how to hide in an attic.

it’s a ludicrous notion, but guess fucking what: yesterday, on the Fox News program The Five, Greg Gutfeld went there, saying that Jews survived extermination camps by being “useful.” Greg, sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. nobody survived an extermination camp by being useful. do you know who started this bullshit lie? the Nazis.

this is the front gate of the Auschwitz extermination camp. the sign above the gate reads “Arbeit Macht Frei.” that’s German for “work will make you free.”

it’s a lie. not one person imprisoned at Auschwitz — or any Nazi extermination camp — worked their way to freedom.