Month: November 2019

The investigation into Rudy Giuliani and his associates by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) is heating up, according to a set of new reports — and new details suggest prosecutors are looking into matters near the heart of the Ukraine scandal.

The new reports cite subpoenas sent out to various associates of President Trump’s personal attorney by SDNY. The subpoenas reveal that prosecutors are looking into Giuliani’s business and finances, that they’re exploring his contacts with former top Ukrainian officials, and that they’re investigating a host of potential crimes.

Back in October, …

Insect adultery was the start of an animation revolution.

In this episode of Vox Almanac, I explore the delightfully strange beginning of stop motion animation. In a stop motion movie, an animator arranges an object, takes a picture, slightly adjusts the positioning, and then does it all over again. When the pictures are played in succession, it looks like motion. Though people have been experimenting with stop motion since the beginning of film, the new art really took off when an insect collector named Wladyslaw Starewicz wanted to see his beetles move.

His 1912 film, The Cameraman’s Revenge, was …

Welcome to Money Talks, a series in which we interview people about their relationships with money, their relationships with each other, and how those relationships inform one another.

Megan and Logan Wolf, both 34, have been married for 11 years and live in the Bay Area with their two children — and four dogs. Logan works in law enforcement and Megan stays at home to manage the household. Logan lovingly says the two of them juggling it all is like “managing a small business.”

When they moved from the Bay Area to Tucson, Arizona, in 2010, their household started to …

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Trump official resigns in dispute over Navy SEAL

• Defense Secretary Mark Esper asked for Navy Secretary Richard Spencer’s resignation on Sunday. Esper said he’d lost confidence in Spencer over a deal he allegedly struck that would have seen Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher face military discipline while also ensuring President Donald Trump received the outcome he desired in Gallagher’s case. [AP News /

A former Google employee who helped organize a petition against Google working with US immigration agencies has been fired from the company in what some are viewing as an attack on worker activism within the search giant’s rank and file.

Rebecca Rivers, a former Google software engineer, announced on her personal Twitter account that her employment had been terminated. According to Bloomberg, Google announced today that it fired four employees for what it called “clear and repeated violations” of its data-security policies, in a note sent to its staff and confirmed by a spokesperson for the company.

The move …

The impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump will soon move to its next phase.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) announced in a letter Monday that work had begun on a report summarizing the inquiry’s findings so far — a report that, he said, would be “transmitted to the Judiciary Committee soon after Congress returns from the Thanksgiving recess.”

It is the Judiciary Committee under Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), then, that will review Schiff’s findings and decide whether to draw up articles of impeachment against the president. If they do so, and vote to approve them, impeachment would be …

Trans children have been in the national spotlight in recent weeks, with the governor of Texas stepping in to try to stop a mother from allowing her child to transition. And on Wednesday, South Carolina legislators joined in with a bill that would ban a variety of medical treatments for trans children.

The bill, called the Youth Gender Reassignment Prevention Act, prohibits doctors from performing any “gender reassignment medical treatment” on a person under 18. Proposed by state Rep. Stewart Jones, a Republican, the bill isn’t just about surgery, which is uncommon for patients under 18 in any case. It …

A top former Facebook executive is going to oversee what’s likely to be an unprecedented ad campaign on Facebook for Mike Bloomberg, the new Democratic presidential candidate.

Gary Briggs, who until last year was Facebook’s chief marketing officer, has joined Bloomberg’s campaign as its digital director, a senior role in one of the most unusually run presidential campaigns to date. Bloomberg is on pace to vastly outspend his Democratic rivals on TV ads, and his campaign is expected to do the same on digital. That means Briggs will oversee a digital program that will likely shatter records for …

This article contains spoilers for the sixth episode of HBO’s Watchmen.

Watchmen’s sixth episode, “This Extraordinary Being,” is one of the most explosive episodes of television this year, and it’s all wrapped around one nuclear revelation: Will Reeves, a.k.a. Angela’s grandfather, a.k.a. the mysterious man in the wheelchair, is the superhero known as Hooded Justice.

Thanks to a bottle of magic memory pills, Angela goes through the pain, joy, and sorrow of living through her grandfather’s life experiences. This allows her to not only see him don his costume and become Hooded Justice, but also understand that he was …

The interior minister of Bolivia’s interim government has called for Evo Morales, Bolivia’s former leftist president who has lived in exile in Mexico for nearly two weeks, to be imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Citing unverified audio recordings of Morales allegedly directing supporters to economically “strangle” Bolivian cities with roadblocks, Interior Minister Arturo Murillo accused the former president of “terrorism and sedition,” and said “any terrorist should spend the rest of their life in prison” in an interview with the Guardian published Sunday.

Experts on Bolivian politics describe Murillo’s claim as a worrying publicity stunt that illustrates how …